FIEN: Hiroshima and Nagasaki
By Christine Carrie Fien on Aug. 7th, 2008 at 1:25pm 2 Comments
Something else: The end justifies the means, if the means are justifiable.
I'd never heard that second part before.
I thought about that last night when I was watching 
- as much as I could stomach anyway - HBO's documentary "White Light, Black Rain. The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
More than 200,000 people were vaporized - vaporized - when we dropped those bombs on August 6 and 9, 1945. A survivor talked about losing his entire family. The family had been devout members of a prestigious Catholic church at the time of the bombing. How can that, and the existence of God, both be true, he wondered.
A woman recalls searching for her mother. She found her, with her eyes blown out. She recognized the mother by the one gold tooth she had in her mouth. She called "Mommy." The body disintegrated before her eyes.
A man remembers his mother looking for him in a medical ward. She whispered in every patient's ear, asking if that patient was her son. She had to do that because many of the patients' faces had been blown away.
The end justifies the means, if the means are justifiable.
What makes us different - better - than those we call terrorists is that we don't target innocents, some people say. But we did it with the Native-Americans. We did it at My Lai. We did it in Baghdad. And we did it in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
HBO interviewed the men who dropped those bombs. They said they never lost a minute's sleep.
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Ted Christopher on August 10th, 2008
You have not begun to look at the larger context. You might read the letter I wrote on Nicholson Baker earlier this summer. You might also consider with the term "innocent" and the context of Baghdad.
This article is analogous to the recent letters on abortion. One dimensional, moral-plungering exercises.
Louis Richards on August 19th, 2008
Unfortunately, apologists usually 'cherry pick' their facts, just as Christine Carrie Fien has done. The truth is: Japan was also working on 'the Bomb'. In fact, in October 1940, Lt. General Takeo Yasuda, of the Japanese army, decided that such a weapon was feasible and practical; and the Japanese atomic program started in July 1941 under the guidance of Dr. Yoshio Nishina. Had we not dropped 'the bomb' on them, they most certainly would have dropped it on us. Does Ms. Fien believe it would have been better to lose 200,000 American lives in 1945? I certainly don't!