#453: To Honor the Dead: Pursue Peace—or Perpetual War?

I could not avoid a strong sense of irony during the week leading into Memorial Day 2016.

Last week saw President Obama’s appearance at Hiroshima, a report on US-Russia-China nuclear talks, a trade opening to Vietnam, and my personal viewing of two movies about bombing: “Children of Nagasaki” and “Eye in the Sky.”

The observation of Memorial Day itself remains full of irony, inasmuch as the original practice of the holiday promised a different message.  At first “Decoration Day” aimed only to honor the fallen Union Soldiers of the Civil War, but the actual observances soon included decorating graves of Confederate soldiers as well, even though many southern states kept a separate holiday for this purpose. Then, after World War I, the focus enlarged again to include all fallen America soldiers in any war.

The irony is that, while this history acknowledged the dead on both sides of the Civil War, no other war gets the same recognition. The assumption is that the Civil War is unique because, even though they fought for two separate countries under two different flags, the dead on both sides were Americans. In short, only American lives matter on Memorial Day. “Enemy” lives from other wars do not--nor do civilian lives (the so-called “collateral damage") that typically outnumber military deaths in modern war.

"Collateral" remains

Had Memorial Day’s focus enlarged further to remember all war dead, it might have become our national day for reflecting on the tragic loss of tens of millions of lives in wars world-wide since the Civil War. Instead, it has become a patriotic celebration in which we remember only the service of soldiers, and only US soldiers. The focus is less on the tragedy of war and more on glorifying the sacrifice of our warriors. Instead of citizens wearing poppy pins or black armbands to remember war’s fallen, we see ballplayers wearing camouflage on their baseball caps.

 But the chief irony came from President Obama himself, when he spoke at Hiroshima and called the atom bombing symbolic of the risks contained in humanity’s technological leap forward:

In the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction; how the very spark that marks us as a species -- our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will -- those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction…
The wars of the modern age teach this truth.  Hiroshima teaches this truth.  Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us.  The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution, as well. 

I find this statement true, and important, but also ironic, for two reasons. 

First, because its message is nearly identical to the message delivered by Vatican Council II (1962-1965). Surveying the signs of the times to reset a vision for the future of the Catholic Church in the world, the Council called for wisdom sources to keep pace with modern technological power, to harness that power for good:

The modern world shows itself at once powerful and weak, capable of the noblest deeds or the foulest; before it lies the path to freedom or to slavery, to progress or retreat, to brotherhood or hatred…

Man judges rightly that by his intellect he surpasses the material universe, for he shares in the light of the divine mind. By relentlessly employing his talents through the ages he has indeed made progress…especially in his probing of the material world and in subjecting it to himself. Still he has always searched for more penetrating truths, and finds them...

The intellectual nature of the human person is perfected by wisdom and needs to be…

Our era needs such wisdom more than bygone ages if the discoveries made by man are to be further humanized. For the future of the world stands in peril unless wiser men are forthcoming.

So Obama’s point is well made, but more than 50 years later, and one can argue that those 50 years technological power has remained largely unchecked by wisdom, without much concern about steering that power in the right direction.

This problem is particularly acute if we talk about the role of the United States: are we helping wisdom to keep pace by promoting peace, or aiding runaway power in the form of perpetual war? Thus the second irony: the president’s good message risks contradicting many of his own administration’s policies

For example, the latest “START” deal to limit nuclear may do quite the opposite, as the New York Times recently reported:

The United States, Russia and China are now aggressively pursuing a new generation of smaller, less destructive nuclear weapons. The buildups threaten to revive a Cold War-era arms race and unsettle the balance of destructive force among nations that has kept the nuclear peace for more than a half-century.

In fact, the US is expected to "revitalize" its nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years at the cost of up to $1 trillion!

Moreover, the Times reported last week that a new Pentagon census of the US nuclear arsenal reveals that “Mr. Obama has reduced the size of the nation’s nuclear stockpile at a far slower rate than did any of his three immediate predecessors, including George Bush and George W. Bush.”

Also last week, the process of normalizing relations with Vietnam took a similar turn. President Obama announced that the US is lifting its decades-long embargo on military arms sales to Vietnam, saying: “The decision to lift the ban…was based on our desire to complete what has been a lengthy process of moving toward normalization with Vietnam.”

 This strikes me as a devil’s bargain: achieving further reconciliation with our former enemy at the cost of feeding the proliferation of arms in Southeast Asia.  But this of course promotes and extends America’s longtime role as the #1 arms dealer in the world.

None of these events mark America as a country dedicated to promoting peace.  Rather, they seem to reflect a belief in either the necessity or even the virtue of perpetual warfare.  At best this means that America is resigned to violent responses to violence around the world rather than leading us in a different direction.  At worst it means that we embrace the grip of violence because it is profitable for us.  As Pope Francis explained to schoolchildren visiting the Vatican last spring: "Many powerful people don't want peace because they live off war."

During Obama’s visit to Hiroshima, the media rehashed the old debate about the wisdom of dropping atomic bombs on Japanese cities. Most mainstream media admitted that the decision remains controversial, yet implied a near-consensus that the bombings saved lives by avoiding an invasion. 

There is of course no way to resolve the dispute because there’s no way to prove an alternative history that never occurred.  But these facts are true: (1) both General MacArthur and General Eisenhower declared the bomb unnecessary; (2) the Japanese with the high command was prepared to surrender if the emperor’s role was preserved; (3) the US instead insisted on “unconditional surrender,” which was a deal breaker; (4) after surrender, the emperor was protected anyhow. Arguably, then, an invasion was not necessary, except for American stubbornness. (See: http://swaincrosscurrents.blogspot.com/2015/08/ivespent-last-week-reflecting-on-70-th.html )

But the debate about Hiroshima and Nagasaki will continue because of two distinct moral views about the use of violence.  In one view (championed by the majority of characters in the new movie “Eye in the Sky”), killing, even at the cost of innocent lives, can be justified on the speculation that such killing will save more lives.  The other view (the minority view in the movie) is that the ends do not justify the means, that one must not kill innocents even in the hope of saving other lives. 

In the first view, it is numbers that count: “The greatest good for the greatest number.” In the second view, it is intention and virtue that counts: “Do no harm,” even if one risks great sacrifice.  In the movie, these two views clash over the life of a single innocent girl.  But in real life, these two views may be the difference between policies of perpetual warfare and policies that move, however achingly, toward peace.

One “survivor” of the Nagasaki bombings (who later died of radiation sickness) wrote in 1946 about the experience of his family. His story, in its homespun, almost dull way, reflects the kind of fervent commitment to peace that has kept Japan free of nuclear weapons and strictly limited its military spending.

 But his memoirs did not appear for 20 years after World War II because the American “occupational censors” would not allow their publication. And the movie version of his “Children of Nagasaki” could not be made for 20 more years, finally appearing in 1983.  The irony here: the movie’s delay enabled the director, like the original writer a dedicated Catholic, to include footage of John-Paul II visiting Hiroshima to proclaim Catholicism’s anti-nuclear principles.

The censorship of this story, like last week’s opposition to any US apology for the bombings, reflects how the world’s most powerful nation continues to avoid acknowledging its part in the global devastation that marked most of the 20th century.  And we continue to pretend that we are not responsible for massive killings in the 21st century.

And so as Memorial Day arrives, we wave our flags and salute our soldiers and remember their service and sacrifice and feel proud of our nation.  We see little mention of the 140,000 who died at Hiroshima, the 80,000 who died in Nagasaki, the uncounted thousands who died of radiation sickness in the years that followed, the 3 million Vietnamese who died during the Vietnam War, or the 200,000 Iraqis who died following the American invasion.

We think of ourselves as the home of the free and the brave--and no doubt that is true.  But neither freedom nor bravery guarantees virtue.  And if we seek a future of peace rather than perpetual warfare, we will need a nation famous not just for its freedom, not just for its bravery, but for its goodness and moral courage.

© Bernard F. Swain PhD 2016

#452: Must America Be the Modern Sparta?

As the editorial pages and the blogosphere filled up with appreciations for the life of Father Daniel Berrigan, SJ, who died last week in New York, my sadness was not for him but for our country. 

Berrigan, who was 94, had a full life devoted to the cause of peace, often choosing radical, even illegal actions in the name of gospel values.  But by 2016, more than 50 years after he began his crusade, America doesn’t seem to have made much progress toward peace. We peaceniks used to say, amid the struggle over Vietnam, “The enemy is not the enemy.  The real enemy is War.” And we still have not conquered war. 

In fact, a blog post that popped up on my Facebook page last week observed that the United States has been at war for 93% of its history.  That means 21 scattered years of peace in our entire national life! Find the details at http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article41086.htm  .

I remember how shocked I was to read, during my college days, that 1968 was the first year of the 20^th century that no British soldier died in combat.  I should not have been shocked, of course: I should have known that permanent warfare is the price of empire.  And sure enough, Britain went to war in Northern Ireland the very next year. 

By the age of 30 I was less naive.  In 1977 I told a fellow peacenik that I planned to look for work in Canada, just in case of war.  I’d done some rough math, and figured that, based on our past history, we could expect the next war by the time my one-year-old child reached draft age.  I was close enough: the first Gulf War came 14 years later. 

Still, that 93% is even bleaker, and it stuns me (even though three of the 21 peaceful years came just as my first child was born).  Think of what that figure of 93% means:

It means that no U.S. generation has lived ever lived their lives in peace. 

It means that every single U.S. president has been a wartime present

It means that no U.S. child has grown up in peace.

It means that no U.S. parent has raised their children free of war. 

Of course, even the tamest of our schoolbooks revealed how bloody U.S. history has been.  Our nation was born in the blood of Revolution in the 18 century, became an indissoluble union in the bloodbath of the Civil War in the 19^th century, and we spent most of the 20^th century fighting wars overseas.  And those modern wars have inflated our military’s scope beyond all our rivals and allies put together.  We remain the only nation to use nuclear weapons in war, and the only major nation to claim the right of a first nuclear strike.

The US military has expanded dramatically even in the last 15 years. We now maintain up to 800 military bases in 70 countries. We have up to 150,000 military personnel present in 153 foreign countries.  It used to be said that the sun never set on the British Empire, but today we can say that the sun never sets on the U.S. military.  Viewed strictly for our war making capability, we are the world’s only global empire.

Why so much war?  Since World War II, it is largely because our leaders have convinced enough of us that our “National Security” can be jeopardized by the puniest forces, by the vaguest, most remote threats.  So we went to war in Vietnam supposedly to prevent the “dominoes” from falling across Southeast Asia.  We fed weapons to the Taliban supposedly to thwart Soviet control of Afghanistan. We backed the Contras to unseat the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.  We invaded Grenada to stop the construction of an airfield.  We occupied Panama to unseat Noriega.  We attacked Saddam Hussein and bombed Iraq, invaded Haiti, invaded Afghanistan, invaded Iraq again to remove Saddam, waged war in Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, and now Syria.All those in the last 40 years, at the cost of millions of lives and countless refugees. 
Except for Vietnam itself, public protest has failed to alter US policy.  It is as though the American people really believe that the likes of Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, Manuel Noriega, and Daniel Ortega were threats to the most powerful--and most isolated--nation on earth.   
We might even argue that the paranoia has intensified since Vietnam.  50 years ago, “Weapons of Mass Destruction” meant the hundreds of real Soviet nuclear weapons aimed at us. By 2002, “WMD’s” meant some non-existent cache of aluminum pipes hidden in Baghdad.  And a healthy percentage of Americans still believe that Saddam was behind 9/11, and that our mission in Iraq had some connection to something called the “Global War On Terror.” Of course, it does connect now—since Saddam’s henchmen metastasized into ISIS after our invasion.  As one Facebook post put it: “All this started by invading a country to drive out the terrorists that weren’t actually there until we went in to drive them out.”

It seems we Americans are prepared to accept war on the flimsiest of excuses.  And the government has made this as easy as possible by (1) Eliminating the draft to short-circuit popular protest and (2) Paying for war on credit.  We don’t feel war touching our families or our wallets, because the cost of war falls on the poor who serve and on the future generations who will inherit our debt.

Moreover, our people seem to actually believe that such “threats” jeopardize our “freedom,” and we willingly sacrifice many of our liberties to protect "it."

This theme is, of course, as old as the nation itself:  “Live free or die”; “I regret that I have but one life to give…”; “Better dead than Red”; “The Domino theory” ; “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

Perhaps we need to face facts and ask ourselves (if only to honor the spirit of Dan Berrigan): “Are we Americans by nature a war-like people?”

As a school kid, I love ancient history, and was particularly fascinated by the typical textbook contrast between Athens and Sparta.  Athens, we learned, was the seat of Greece's noble culture: sculpture, theater and poetry, history, philosophy, learning.  Sparta, by contrast, was portrayed as a kind of barracks-state, its men constantly preparing for or waging war.  We gathered, from the stories, that these wars were fought for honor, for revenge, for security, for wealth--but anyhow war was Sparta's defining trait.

This stereotype about the two cities lives on.  After all, who ever heard of a football team called “The Fighting Athenians"? 

As I grew older, and I began commuting to high school in Boston, I learned of a traditional nickname for the city of Boston: “The Athens of America.” Actually, Samuel Adams proposed nearly the opposite in a 1764 letter. "Boston,” he wrote, “might become a Christian Sparta."

But in 1819, William Tudor (a leading literary figure and co-founder of America’s first railroad) wrote a letter describing the town as "perhaps the most perfect and certainly the best-regulated democracy that ever existed. There is something so impossible in the immortal fame of Athens, that the very name makes everything modern shrink from comparison; but since the days of that glorious city I know of none that has approached so near in some points, distant as it may still be from that illustrious model."

The phrase “Athens of America” stuck. And even if the nickname does not accurately describe Boston itself (and certainly it predates Boston’s becoming America’s pro sports capital!), it does describe why Bostonians are proud of their town. We like to think that our contribution to the richness of American culture (in the arts, education, politics, science, etc.) over nearly 400 years is all out of proportion to our size and power.

Why this digression?  Because, dear reader, as a native Bostonian I not only embrace this (admittedly romantic) image of my city, but I also hold the fervent desire that it be a model for my country.

Alas, it seems to be a hopeless longing.  Many people around the globe (not only the French!) may admire American movies, our jazz, our jeans, our energy and vitality and creativity.  But despite all that, our image for most others in the world is defined by our real presence in the world—a presence that has brought (and still brings) our troops to every continent and, tragically, has left behind the victims of Washington bullets.

Must I accept that we are Sparta? 

   © Bernard F. Swain PhD 2016

#435 70 Years Later--STILL Under A Cloud

I’ve spent the last week reflecting on the 70^th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki--amid breaking news about the Iran nuclear deal and the re-opening of Japan's first nuclear plant shut down after the 2011 meltdown. My reflections expanded beyond the scope of this blog, so I searched for my earlier thoughts. In 2005 I wrote this post observing the 60th anniversary. Most of it is still timely, so I finally chose to re-post it with some more recent thoughts in brackets.

Still Under a Cloud



The 2015 Observance

Today only charred and mangled bars remain to mark the spot where the kids poured out of the school that day and raced to climb the monkey bars that stood in the corner of the schoolyard. The children died when The Bomb fell on them that day, 60 years ago this week.

After one A-Bomb landed on Hiroshima and another fell, three days later, on Nagasaki, the Japanese took to calling the A-bomb “the original child bomb,” since there had never been anything like it before.  Indeed, in a split second those two bombs unleashed evil forces that eventually killed 250,000 human beings, mostly civilians. 

The events marking the 60^th anniversary of history’s only nuclear attacks are to be found everywhere this week. In Japan, a “global pilgrimage honoring civilian casualties of war” called “Stonewalk” will end when participants finish dragging a one ton memorial stone from Nagasaki to Hiroshima. And in Hiroshima, local officials will screen internet-delivered photos taken worldwide to commemorate the exact moment the first A-bomb dropped.

The Day After

In Europe, an international walk will finish the 250km distance from Ypres, Belgium (where chemical weapons were first used) past NATO headquarters in Brussels to the NATO nuclear base at Kleine Brogel.

In Canada, Toronto will mark the occasion with a daylong “Day for Peace” observance calling for the elimination of all nuclear weapons.

In America, Time Magazine has already devoted its cover story to the anniversary, including extensive interviews with some of the 85,000 “hibakusha” (witnesses to the bombs themselves) who remain alive today. In New York City, a 4000km “Bike for Peace” journey will finish after first passing through Vienna, Prague, Dresden, Berlin, Leipzig, Bonn, Paris, and then (after crossing the Atlantic by air) Montreal, Ottawa, and Washington, DC.

And a vigil sponsored by 1300 citizens’ organizations, including the Catholic Worker, Maryknoll of New York and DC and Pax Christi USA from five different states will be held at the Oak Ridge (Tennessee) nuclear weapons plant. The vigil will include a three-hour long reading of the names of the dead from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

In hindsight the A-Bomb was a classic case of a new and dangerous technology where no one asked the basic ethical question: “just because we can do this now, does that mean we should do it?” In fact the historical evidence is that the intention to use the bomb, at any cost, led to a parade of pretexts (much like Iraq half a century later).

Originally, of course, the Manhattan project began as a nuclear arms race to beat the Germans to the bomb. The Germans foiled that plan by surrendering first, so the U.S. turned its bombsites on Japan. When it became clear the Japanese surrender was near, the U.S. postponed the decisive Potsdam conference until the bomb was ready –and insisted that the Potsdam declaration include the demand for Japan’s “unconditional surrender.” This demand deadlocked the Japanese high command, postponing surrender until the bomb could be dropped. It was still a race however, since the Soviets were themselves about to declare war and invade Japan.

Once the bombs were dropped, Truman and others claimed they had prevented invasion and saved the lives of a million American soldiers.

[But US intelligence knew, from code-breaking and from the Russians, that Japan was already in the process of surrendering in July 1945. Both Supreme Allied Commanders, Douglas McArthur and Dwight Eisenhower, told President Harry Truman the bomb wasn’t needed. Later Ike publicly declared “it was not necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” The US chose to bomb Hiroshima anyway, rather than concede the single negotiating point that was holding up the Japanese: an assurance they could keep the emperor (Truman gave this assurance secretly through the Swiss anyway, but only after the bomb was dropped). Rather than allow the Japanese to surrender by accepting this single condition publicly, the US chose to slaughter more than 250,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.]

The Allied demand for “unconditional surrender” delayed the war’s end because the Japanese were reluctant to surrender the emperor himself. But at the war’s end, Japan was allowed to keep the emperor anyway. In other words, the U.S. could have achieved the same result without demanding “unconditional surrender” –and without either A-bombs or invasion.

[Debate about invasion statistics continues in 2015, all of it hypothetical. What is NOT debatable is this: the purpose for which the bomb was dropped was NOT to prevent invasion, but to enforce the demand for “unconditional surrender” (the invasion was being planned for the same purpose!). Thus the ethical test becomes: Were the conditions requested by the Japanese grave enough to justify the bomb—or even to justify an invasion?]

In this sense, “unconditional surrender” turned out to be the symbolic “WMD” of WWII: a pretext for attack that turned out not to matter at all. Had the US dropped that demand, the pretext for the bomb would be gone. The REAL WMDs, of course, were the bombs themselves (just as nuclear weapons remain the true WMDs today).

But President Truman was determined to intimidate the Soviets with American might, which meant the A-Bomb became the first shot in the cold war. And besides, Truman and many of his advisers shared the widespread popular desire to get revenge against Japan for the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

President Roosevelt had called that attack a “day that would live in infamy.” In recent years, Japan has apologized for that attack, and Japanese public opinion generally believes that Japan was wrong to go to war. The U.S. by contrast, has never apologized for taking revenge –and most Americans still feel the bombs were justified.

The history is debatable, but here’s the bottom line today: those days began a new age of terror we have not yet escaped. Sixty years later, people are still dying from those two bombs, and new children are still being born with defects caused by those bombs. The suffering goes on, sixty years after war’s end.

The Cold War has come and gone, but we do not have peace. Yet the US has kept most of its nuclear arsenal, and US policy still clings to threatening our ”first use” of nuclear weapons on our enemies.

[In fact, the US remains the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons, and the only major power that has refused to renounce their “first use” in the future.]

The Nukes remain—and they remain (as both John Kerry and George Bush agreed) the number one threat today. By maintaining its threat to use them, the US taunts adversaries and extremists to build their own nukes. So we have entered a “second nuclear arms race” where “second tier” nations and terrorists vie to join the US in the exclusive, one-member “Nuclear Attackers” club.

[The “Nuclear Club” has spread to China, India, Israel, and Pakistan – proliferating the promise of nuclear weapons before the eyes of all the world’s angry men. Which is precisely why the Iran deal is a hot political issue now. The US opened the nuclear Pandora’s Box]

Thus, and perhaps worst of all, a dangerous moral genie escaped the bottle at the end of World War II, when civilian populations became fair game for WMDs. It didn’t start with the A-bombs of course—US firebombs had already killed 900,000, mostly civilians, in Japanese cities—including 85,000 in Tokyo in a single night. But 250,000 killed by two split-second blasts brought violence against civilians to another level.

[As one participant said: the difference the Bomb made was not that it was so destructive--but that it was “so easy.”]

Today, every day, somewhere in the world, an average of 2174 people die from war. Nine out of ten are civilians—and half of them are children. It is a fine and patriotic thing to support our troops—but it is also a smokescreen obscuring the moral problem of modern war, because troops are no longer the main victims of war. Women and children are. It is governments, not armies, that make war policies—and now it is ordinary people, not troops, who suffer the most from them. Civilian deaths in Iraq, for example, outnumber US troop deaths nearly 100 to 1.

Many US Catholics remain unconcerned about our moral liability here, despite the clear teaching of the Church, which singled out war on civilians for the only condemnation issued by Vatican Council II:

“Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities or vast areas with their inhabitants is a crime against God and humanity, which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation.”

[Moreover, even at Vatican II---50 years ago this year—the cost to our planet and people was clearly named in prophetic language that Pope Francis is finally getting people to hear:]

The arms race in which an already considerable number of countries are engaged is not a safe way to preserve a steady peace, nor is the so-called balance resulting from this race a sure and authentic peace. Rather than being eliminated thereby, the causes of war are in danger of being gradually aggravated. While extravagant sums are being spent for the furnishing of ever new weapons, an adequate remedy cannot be provided for the multiple miseries afflicting the whole modern world. Disagreements between nations are not really and radically healed; on the contrary, they spread the infection to other parts of the earth. …Therefore, we say it again: the arms race is an utterly treacherous trap for humanity, and one which ensnares the poor to an intolerable degree. –Gaudium et Spes #80 ]

World War II ended the war of battlefields and trenches, and the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki linked war and terror forever. Now the military is merely a cog in the war machine—and civilians are its fuel. Today, it’s convenient to define “terrorism” as attacks on civilians—but it did not start on 9/11. It sprouted as Blitzkrieg, it grew into firebombing, and it finally blossomed as the mushroom cloud that still hangs over the world and infects the planet with terror.

 © Bernard F. Swain PhD 2005, 2015