With every receding year, there’s only one bad guy in the Pacific war.
This week marks the anniversaries of the atomic strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II. The strikes killed 150-250,000, and the war killed 50-60 million, about a third of whom were killed by imperialist Japan’s aggression in the Pacific. A recent news release from the World Council of Churches urged: “No more Hiroshimas. No more Nagasakis.”
Absolutely. But also no more aggression, no more genocide, and no more appeasement or fuzzy thinking that denies the reality of regimes that murder and oppress. The WCC news release, on the other hand, focuses exclusively on nuclear weapons. It cites 40,000 Koreans who lived in Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time without noting the Koreans were only there as slave laborers for Imperial Japan. It’s probably safe to say that very few in Korea after this week in 1945 were any other than relieved that their slavemaster was finally defeated.
The WCC bewails that today North Korea and the USA are “still brandishing nuclear weapons, missiles and bombers over the Korean peninsula,” without morally distinguishing between U.S. purposes and the motives of Stalinist North Korea. Instead, the WCC laments the “failure on both sides to learn from Hiroshima and from war itself.”
Actually, it’s the WCC and other religious voices that share its utopian perspective that seem to have learned little from the last century’s calamities, with WWII chief among them. That war, the most avoidable conflict in history according to Winston Churchill, was facilitated partly by utopian and pacifist religious voices of the 1930s that dreamily denied the horrific reality of Nazism and Japanese aggression, while still advocating disarmament and endless accommodation of aggression by the West. The great Methodist missionary E. Stanley Jones, for example, urged Australia to give the Japanese New Guinea as an inducement for Japanese withdrawal from China. He did not consult the people of New Guinea, who for a season were later brutally conquered by the Japanese, until expelled by Douglas MacArthur.
The WCC news release also faults “massive US military deployments in East Asia and the Pacific” and “US arms sales to China’s neighbors,” amid “disputes over tiny islands,” while only reluctantly citing a “military buildup in China.” It regrets Japan’s possibly pursuing rearmament and even nuclear weapons. That China and North Korea are the causes for these responses, and the U.S. military presence the chief reason for relative regional stability, as well as the primary brake on Japan’s developing nukes, is seemingly not considered by the WCC.
In a similar vein, evangelical pacifist activist Shane Claiborne recently advertised the cause of religious people commemorating the atomic strikes in 1945 by performing civil disobedience this week in Washington, D.C. Their statement called for a U.S. apology to Japan, an end to drones, closing Guantanamo, and global U.S. military withdrawal, “in the name of all victims of our warmaking empire, from Iraq and Afghanistan to Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere,” that “the swords of our time are transformed into plowshares.”
Beating swords into plowshares is the hope for all believers in the Scriptures and the messianic promises. But in orthodox faith these promises of complete peace and absence of aggression are fulfilled only when God’s Kingdom is consummated, not through human exertions, which only can attain an approximate peace, at least for a season.
This week is an appropriate time to recall both the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, even more so, the exponentially larger horrors of war and atrocities that the U.S. atomic strikes ended. One of the best books on those strikes is The Most Controversial Decision by Wilson Miscamble, an Australian Catholic priest who teaches at Notre Dame. He writes that the ruling Japanese militarists in 1945 believed that the slaughter of invading their nation would compel the U.S. to sue for peace. Only the nuclear attacks enabled the Emperor to counter that such an invasion was no longer a factor and Japan must surrender. Meanwhile, about 250,000 people, mostly Asian, were dying monthly so long as the war continued. Asia was a “charnel house of atrocities” in which 200-300,000 Asians a month had been killed by the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. An estimated 17-20 million Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Indonesians, Burmese, and other Asians were killed by the Japanese during the war. (Japan’s aggression against China and occupation of Korea began well before Pearl Harbor.)
Miscamble suggests that at Hiroshima/Nagasaki anniversaries, “one might hope for less moralizing condemnation of Truman’s decision until the critics specify at least a less immoral and yet still feasible course of action to end the terrible war.” Or “they simply might pray, if they be so inclined, that leaders in our own time and in the future are never forced by horrible circumstances to make such decisions.”
Such prayers for peace should modestly remember that complete peace for our currently fallen world will only be delivered by the Prince of Peace, at a time of His choosing.
This article originally appeared on The American Spectator and was reposted with permission.
Comment by Jeffrey Taylor on August 9, 2013 at 12:15 pm
I am a United Methodist minister in Texas. My father joined the submarine service in 1940-1946. He served this nation in the Pacific theater valiantly. Thank God for Mark Tooley’s piece. He does what naive utopian progressives fail to comprehend. He places WWII and the use of the bomb in their historical context. Another issue that historical illiterates take on is the Japanese interment. I’m afraid with the passing of my father’s generation has come a whole new American pre-WWII mindset. I guess it’s true. We rarely learn from history.
Comment by Gabe on August 10, 2013 at 12:20 am
Amen, Jeffrey. My grandfather was posted to Australia during the war after being drafted to fix the bombers. Only God knows if he would have been pushed into direct action should the U.S. have decided to do a bloody conventional invasion of Japan.
Pacifist activists like Claiborne are complete jokes. They love to make moral equivalencies that do not truly exist.
Comment by Greg Paley on August 11, 2013 at 7:58 am
You guys really need to have a staff meeting and decide on a new name for people like Shane Claiborne. “Evangelical”? Nah. For anyone so disconnected with reality that he wants the US to apologize to Japan, there are lots of labels that come to mind, but “evangelical” is not one of them. This guy is so demented, if he’d been on the Titanic he would’ve apologized to the iceberg.
Comment by Jeffrey Taylor on August 11, 2013 at 7:45 pm
In my opinion the contemporary attitudes concerning WWII stem not from theological preference, but historical illiteracy. This skewed understanding of history has its roots in the 60’s when the Vietnam War provoked progressives to re-examine foreign policy and label Americans as war hungry imperialists. The mantra has somehow ensconced itself in the academy including many Christian universities. I have found attitudes among younger evangelicals are rapidly changing and moving away from what our WWII generation taught us about the war. Once the late great historian Stephen Ambrose was asked about Pearl Harbor, to which he replied, “God help us if we forget.” We’re forgetting.
Comment by Marco Bell on August 12, 2013 at 8:49 am
There is NOTHING wrong with Peace, Love and Understanding. America’s foreign policy decisions have been more destructive, than constructive, and if you’re awaiting the second coming just to have peace, then there is something seriously wrong with your psychology.
Why is it that some Americans can’t apologize for being wrong? …Oh, that’s right…God is on OUR side! How could we possibly be wrong?
Comment by Greg Paley on August 12, 2013 at 11:32 am
Deep thought there, man. Whatever’s wrong on the globe, America did it. Apparently the left has a selective memory: they remember Hiroshima, never heard of Pearl Harbor. Lots of Americans died at Pearl Harbor. Didn’t they matter to God?
Btw, the Second Coming has always been a core article of Christianity, very much grounded in the New Testament. You don’t have to believe it, of course, but if your church discards that belief, it hardly qualifies as a Christian church.
Comment by Roger W. on August 12, 2013 at 2:40 pm
The Israelites raised an Ebenezzer after crossing the Jordan river into the promised land. An Ebenezzer is a pile of stones as a memorial of what they had just accomplished for future generations. Our pulpits, schools, and society clubs, etc. do not reflect on our past history as a Nation and how God has intervened on our behalf to grant us a land of milk and honey. Americans are low information people on our past secular and religious foundings. Thank you, Mark Tooley for reminding us of our heritage. Jesus gave us a parable of sowers and reapers, Jesus said ” I sent you to reap where you didn’t sow; others did the work but you reaped the harvest.” Our forefathers sowed the seed of freedom, we reaped their peace harvest – – – yet what are we sowing for the next generation, secular and religiously?
Comment by cynthia curran on August 17, 2013 at 12:28 am
This week is an appropriate time to recall both the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, even more so, the exponentially larger horrors of war and atrocities that the U.S. atomic strikes ended. One of the best books on those strikes is The Most Controversial Decision by Wilson Miscamble, an Australian Catholic priest who teaches at Notre Dame. He writes that the ruling Japanese militarists in 1945 believed that the slaughter of invading their nation would compel the U.S. to sue for peace. Only the nuclear attacks enabled the Emperor to counter that such an invasion was no longer a factor and Japan must surrender. Meanwhile, about 250,000 people, mostly Asian, were dying monthly so long as the war continued. Asia was a “charnel house of atrocities” in which 200-300,000 Asians a month had been killed by the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. An estimated 17-20 million Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Indonesians, Burmese, and other Asians were killed by the Japanese during the war. (Japan’s aggression against China and occupation of Korea began well before Pearl Harbor.)
Those stats sound high but its true, the Japanese had lots of sex slaves of other Asians even today Michelle Malkin a Filipino conservative voiced some support of the Japanese internment here because what they did in the Philippines.
Comment by cynthia curran on August 17, 2013 at 12:31 am
The mantra has somehow ensconced itself in the academy including many Christian universities. I have found attitudes among younger evangelicals are rapidly changing and moving away from what our WWII generation taught us about the war. Once the late great historian Stephen Ambrose was asked about Pearl Harbor, to which he replied, “God help us if we forget.” We’re forgetting.
Well, there are two forces, the usual left and the paleo-con movement on the right that are against defense because of the Iraq War being a messed and costly. Same goes for the Afghanistan war.