Moral reflections on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden – and Gaza.
The joint aerial bombing by the British and the United States of Dresden, Germany between February 12-15, 1945, killed up to 25,000 people. They were mostly civilians. The bombings had a devastating effect on Hitler’s Germany and played a key role in Germany’s surrender in the Second World War on May 8, 1945.
On August 6th and 9th of that same year, the United States of America detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The explosions killed between 129, 000 and 226,000 people. Less than a month later, the Japanese surrendered, thereby ending World War II and Japanese imperialism.
Unlike most trained ethicists, I have no agonistic hand-wringing moments regarding the scope and breadth of these acts of war against enemy combatants. The moral purpose of war is to totally vanquish the enemy. Attritional warfare is the military strategy that best achieves this goal. Military scholars often quibble over what constitutes attritional warfare; nevertheless, we may surmise that any war in which the agents attempt to win by consistently and mercilessly wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through loss of human life and military resources by any means, is an attritional war. Sometimes critics of attritional war will refer to them as wars of “mass destruction.”
One criterion that may be used to justify what may also be called “wars of total annihilation,” for which the bombings of Dresden, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would qualify, is the following: When the arc of the entire moral infrastructure of a nation, or its political combatants, is predicated on the destruction and annihilation of another nation or state and, further, when the citizens of such nations/states or regions or governing units support the infrastructure and its architects, a war of total annihilation can be ethically defended.
Hitler was elected chancellor while running on a rabid and invective antisemitic platform. The Holocaust did not catch the German people unaware. One may describe them—even those who never personally participated in the actual killings of Jews and others during the Holocaust—as killers by means of conviction. Strategically then, we make the claim that terrorists, and war adversaries who begin a war or onslaught against a people, have evicted themselves from the realm of rights. In violating the unassailable and inalienable rights of others they forfeit their own rights. The reciprocity involved in upholding rights claims and inviolable rights is violated by the offender. During war, therefore, offending combatants not only forfeit their rights, but their nations or states or governing bodies revert to a state of nature in which the citizens themselves, as complicit in the offenses exercised by their representatives, are bereft of any legitimate body politic (a government or legitimate state) to protect their rights. The offending state is no longer seen as a legitimate conferrer of justice. If citizens in states where offensive war actors are waging combat are left without a legitimately recognized infrastructure to uphold their “rights” (remember they voted for or lent moral support to an offensive state or governing body), we can say that they have placed their own agency and personhood in a state of war with the defensive warring state and its deputized combatants.
In ending Japanese imperialism and the genocidal impulses of Hitler and his German citizens, or killers by means of conviction, we strategically and morally eroded the distinction between citizens and the nation/state with which we were at war. Anything short of this strategic maneuver results in an altruistic war in which the self-interests of the citizens of the opposing side supersede the rights of, in this case, U.S. citizens. In reality, there are no inherent moral distinctions between the humanity of an enemy combatant and any American. In war, we strategically manufacture a difference to give the war its ethical upshot.
In a similar vein, if a home invader uses his 93-year-old grandmother as a shield while he brandishes a gun at you and your family, leaving you to think he is going to kill you all—you would be under zero ethical obligation to spare the life of his grandmother if you possessed a weapon and had an excellent opportunity to kill him. The moral responsibility for his grandmother’s life lies with him, not you. You have a prima facie duty to protect your life in that situation by any means and at whatever cost to the invader. In that moment your right to your life supersedes any moral obligation you might have to spare the grandmother’s life in the defense of yourself. You cannot be held responsible for a situation immorally imposed on you which then further requires you to compromise your life by any form of a threat put forward by the invader. Morality cannot demand of you that you sacrifice your life for the sake of the invaders’ grandmother’s life. Morality cannot demand that your moral conscience and goodness be usurped by an intruder who uses your goodness and conscience as weapons against you.
Since you have been placed in an untenable and immoral position by a rights violator, you must consider the human shield he uses which he expects you to consider as a legitimate barter for your life—as superfluous and extraneous when it comes to your first moral obligation in this instance: the preservation of yourself and your family’s life, and the annihilation of the invader along with any collateral protection he has improperly deployed in the illicit destruction of your life.
Israel may well have to morally reflect on the morality of an attritional war against Hamas as it makes incursions into Gaza. Does it carry out a protracted war on the ground and by air if that means putting thousands of Israel Defense Forces members at risk of losing their lives?
While I agree with this analysis social media didn’t exist when the Allies destroyed the noted German and Japanese cities. The current war will be “televised” in a way no war has ever been, in real time, from probably hundreds if not thousands of jihadist mobile phones, on every social media platform with countless video clips most assuredly going viral. Think of Mohammed Al Dura times thousands, maybe millions. And worse still most may actually be real this time. A PR nightmare.
And once again the US will likely pressure Israel to stop before the job is complete.
And if it refuses will the US cut off urgently needed materiel making it impossible to succeed?
Being on the right side of morality, even the law, may not be enough unless Israel can find alternative sources and methods that don’t involve the US. And even if that’s possible it’s hard to know if the US would punish Israel in potentially existential ways.
As heinous as the massacres of men, women, children and babies have been I worry the world’s moral memory will fade before Israel is able to do what it needs to do.
Hopefully it’s leaders will conclude it’s better for Israel to potentially be a pariah state than a failed one, in the worst possible way.
Ironically the world’s shortened attention span and desensitization to terrorist atrocities may also apply to the IDF’s unavoidable meting out of justice in which case sooner rather than later all will be viewed as a distant, largely forgotten memory. Especially if and when some of the southern border crossers begin doing to Americans what Hamas has done to Israel.
If that happens that would change everything in Israel’s favour.
Regardless of the consequences let us pray Israel is able to do everything it needs to do to achieve total victory like the Allies did against Germany and Japan.