Lies My Liberal Teacher Told Me by Wilfred Reilly

Author:Wilfred Reilly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

Lie #7

“American Use of Nukes to End World War Two Was ‘Evil’ and ‘Unjustified’”

Another cliché which has become almost universal among Western scholars, general intellectuals, and activists is that the United States of America should feel considerable guilt about being “the only nation ever to use nuclear weapons in rage” and that we engaged in an unprecedented and probably indefensible act of evil by dropping Fat Man and Little Boy on Japanese Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Again: not so fast.

An important element in properly analyzing any historical moment is to view it in context and to truly step into the shoes of the people making difficult-to-impossible choices at that precise point in time. Historical hindsight is 20/20, but truly looking at the messy circumstances of the end of World War Two makes it impossible to justify modern armchair-generals’ analyses that smugly dismiss America as uncomplicatedly evil.

The existence and nature of the conventional narrative is—as usual in this book—not particularly contested. The primary discussion of the bombings on the Perspective debate site,1 widely accessed by high school and college students, simply assumes that they were an act of evil: it is headlined “The Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Plain Evil or a Necessary Evil?” After a few points are made for the Necessary Evil side, author Lee Mesika goes on to argue at length that the attack was plain evil. Mesika notes that the use of atomics “completely destroyed both Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” wiping out more than 90 percent of the buildings in both cities, either at once or via the firestorms that followed the initial nuclear explosions. Still more tragically, at least 250,000 people were killed by the strike—about half of them immediately and relatively humanely, but others felled months or years later by novel radiation-driven “types of illnesses and cancers.”

While any human death is tragic, or so it is conventional for humans to pretend, Mesika makes the additional point that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were acts of war that primarily harmed civilians, in violation of the contemporary ethical rule that “wars should be fought between armies.” In Hiroshima, at least 20,000 Japanese soldiers were killed by the dropping of Little Boy, but the usual estimate for civilian casualties is far higher and closer to 80,000. Even more remarkably, in Nagasaki, between 50,000 and 80,000 people were killed, but this toll included only “around 150 Japanese soldiers.” In contrast, at least 8,200 Korean semi-slaves, who were being forced to support the Japanese war effort by laboring inside the Mitsubishi munitions plant and other factories producing military matériel, were killed in Nagasaki. “Hiroshima and Nagasaki gave new meaning to collateral damage,” the Perspective article concludes: “The number of civilians killed seems unreasonably high in relation to the number of soldiers killed.”

Finally, if a bit at random, Mesika goes on to argue that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings did not avert the Cold War between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Citing the (somewhat fringe but interesting) historical

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