Bomb context

[Gillies, Lindsay]

In discussing Hiroshima, Dresden, Tokyo, we must remember Dachau, 
Stalingrad, Pearl Harbor, and Nanking.  As one who still believes that Henry 
K. and his boss were war criminals if only re Cambodia, the current moral 
chest thumping about the bomb is curious to me.  War is hell.  Antietam 
(40,000 casualties in a day, all American, 80 years previous) should 
suffice.  If not that, then Verdun.

 But wars are started.  Hands may be equally bloody at the end, but this is 
not so at the beginning.  It is impossible to understand the meaning of the 
bombing of Dresden, Tokyo, or Hiroshima without understanding contemporary 
views.  These included the fundamental point that Germans invaded Poland and 
Japanese the US.  Of further importance in the Japanese case was the 
literally incredible ferocity of their army even in retreat.  Whatever the 
US mandarins knew about the likelyhood of Japanese surrender, at the very 
least they needed to manage a public opinion conditioned to expect a bloody 
fight to absolutely the last samurai.  And since this was actually a 
Japanese institution (broadly, the attractiveness of noble defeat over 
pragmatic surrender) it is not simply a media creation.  There was no 
"decision" to drop the bomb.  It was done in a heat of rage against forces 
that required the sacrifice to even more life than we knew at the time (10 
million Jews, Gypsies, etc., for example).

None of this changes the basic reality that whether German, Japanese, or 
American, millions of citizen's lives were destroyed without their control. 
 However, the impetus for these events was quite specific, and the guilt in 
whatever form correspondingly less than symetrical.  Its not as if we can't 
mediate on our murderous adventures in SE Asia, later in the story...