It seems to me that the gross immorality lies in the moral equation implicit in the portion of Penraker's critique of The Fog of War that you quote: that because the enemy commits barbarities against us or others, we are justified in committing barbarities against the enemy.

It takes but a moment's reflection to realize that this is a prescription for a downward spiral that has no bottom. This equation is, in fact, one of the pillars of the gate of Hell.

It is also deeply un-Christian.

"You have heard that it was said, `You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." (Matthew 5:43-48)

Or, as Robert Barclay put it in 1678:

"Whoever can reconcile this, 'Resist not evil', with 'Resist violence by force', again, 'Give also thy other cheek', with 'Strike again'; also, 'Love thine enemies', with 'Spoil them, make a prey of them, pursue them with fire and the sword', or, 'Pray for those that persecute you, and those that calumniate you', with 'Persecute them by fines, imprisonments and death itself', whoever, I say, can find a means to reconcile these things may be supposed also to have found a way to reconcile God with the Devil, Christ with Antichrist, Light with Darkness, and good with evil. But if this be impossible, as indeed it is impossible, so will also the other be impossible, and men do but deceive both themselves and others, while they boldly adventure to establish such absurd and impossible things."

Since Penraker is not tackling the question of whether anything was justified, your comment, though interesting, is not pertinent.

The topic here is the intentional distortion of the historical record. And in fact no one can fruitfully or fairly start to discuss the question of what actions might have been justified during the war, unless we can see clearly what the historical situation was. Which is precisely why the record is being doctored.

Your comment is also one that tends to lead us away from truth, because you frame the question as it were already agreed upon that Allied attacks on Japan were justified purely on grounds of revenge and "an eye for an eye."

This is not true, though there were surely people who thought that way. But the allied leaders, at least from what I've read, justified our attacks on the grounds that the slaughter was ongoing, and anything that shortened the war would save huge numbers of lives. And they were all glad to end the barbarities at the earliest possible moment.

For instance, members of the Truman Administration, when asked how they justified Hiroshima, often replied with one word---Okinawa. That is, that the butchery of that battle (far worse for the Japanese than for us), if scaled up to the size of the Home Islands and Manchuria, would surely have meant the loss of tens of millions of lives. The bombing was justified because it brought a merciful end to an unparalleled slaughter.

And, far from being a "downward spiral that has no bottom," they accomplished the ending of global war, the end of wars between developed nations, and to a large extent the end of all wars between nation-states. (Most "wars" now are internal conflicts within failed states.) If you were a real pacifist you would have some good things to say about these events.

Now, one can debate some of these points. But there can be no honest debate without an honest look at the facts. And that is precisely what the "Fog of War" authors, and many other leftists, don't want...

Also, everything Jesus said was in the context of a nation seething with revolutionary discontent, with frequent uprisings that ended in brutal reprisals. A nation he could see was heading towards utter destruction, as actually happened a generation later.

Imagine Jesus preaching today in Gaza, or Belfast. Preaching "love your enemies." Or "carry the soldier's pack an extra mile." Would anyone think he was suggesting that people should be doormats? Or enablers of evils that could be successfully remedied? No way. They would know that he was talking about their specific struggle, and telling them to break loose from a pattern of action that was doing no good, and leading to possible calamity.

Love is not flattery, Dave. Love is not letting your enemy do whatever he wants. You can pray for your enemy while fighting him. Is letting your enemy kill you and your countrymen showing "love"? Do you think your enemy can't climb that safe, high horse you're on and show you how much he appreciates your "love"? Do you think you'll get a hug and a pat on the back?

If you really want to show how much you "love" the enemy, show them some respect -- by believing them when they say how much they hate you and want to kill you. Don't patronize them like little children, telling them "oh, you don't mean that, you're just mad because my leaders have been mean to you! Here's a lollipop." That is, in effect, what pacifists and those who parrot the pacifist line have been doing. This, not fighting back, is what is enraging our current enemy.

"...you frame the question as it were already agreed upon that Allied attacks on Japan were justified purely on grounds of revenge and 'an eye for an eye.'"

No, I don't. That, quite revealingly, is how you see my response, but that's not what I said. It doesn't matter what reason you have for strategic bombing, for instance, it's still barbarous, no matter how effective or ineffective it may be. That's the logic of war: that the "good side" does things that are just as barbarous as the "evil side."

And, actually, I can see Jesus preaching in Belfast or Gaza, and preaching exactly the same things. You quite obviously don't understand his message (especially the "carry the pack an extra mile", which is a kind of spiritual and psychological ju-jitsu), and you seem to have to little faith to believe that what he said is good for all time and in all places. Saying that Christ's words are only good in the context of 1st Century Palestine and similar situations is a cop out for those enslaved by violence, for those unwilling to listen to his radical message. He is not calling us to be doormats, he is calling us to loving resistance to evil--to pick up our cross and follow him. The kingdom can be reached no other way--its doors are forever closed to violence.

Andrea, I don't think praying for one's enemy while fighting him has any meaning. It's empty words and empty thoughts. And I'm not patronizing anyone. I have no doubt of the hate we face. It's just that, listening to Christ, I know that violence is not the solution, for it only perpetuates the rule of the prince of this world: the myth of redemptive violence that is foremost of the Powers the New Testament writers warn us about.

Dave, I'm guessing this is a long-ago solved problem for pacifism, but I don't know the answer - would Christ have told Churchill not to fight Nazi Germany? Were we wrong to fight Japan? May a police officer use deadly force? Or even non-lethal force? Should the Union have attacked the Confederacy? In other words, how on earth does a nation struggle against evil without resorting to violence on occasion? How does a society police itself without resorting to force?

Hugs, I guess. Or maybe we should just sing a hymn. "It's empty words and empty thoughts." Well, thanks, Mr. Trowbridge, for letting me know what you really think of me. By the way, does Jesus come to you for advice often?

I've deleted some comments I posted. Brilliant, to be sure, but more scrappy than I really feel right now...

I read them before they were deleted, and yeah, I was wondering if you missed your morning coffee or something...they were a bit more caustic than I imagine you intended...

It's attacks on this country---more decent and caring than any other---that send me over the edge.

I'm sorry I missed those intemperate comments. They must have been entertaining.

Jesus was not a pacifist. He reacted violently towards the money-changers in the Temple. He cursed the fig tree and caused it to wither and die. The portrayal of Jesus as Florence Henderson with a beard is silly and mistaken.

I'm a huge fan of NT Wright, for many reasons. He thinks the action in the Temple was planned ahead by Jesus, and intended for symbolic effect (the Hebrew prophets did that sort of thing a lot). Not an explosion of rage, not intended to have a practical impact on Temple operations.

But he would agree with you that Jesus was not a pacifist.

I don't read the Temple incident as an act of rage, either. It was an act of intentional provocation and violence - but not bad temper. He cursed the fig tree immediately before or after, depending which Gospel you read.

Both incidents occur at the end of his ministry. They were clearly intended for symbolic impact at the time, and forever after. They need to be taken together as a warning.

Both have clear precedents during his ministry. In the parable of the fig tree, a caretaker begs the master to give him a year to cultivate and nurture a barren fig tree. If it doesn't bear fruit, then it will be destroyed. In a sense, the later cursing incident finishes the parable.

Jesus' action in the Temple suggests the less-quoted second part of the admonition "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's..." The Temple action may even have been the proximate cause of Jesus' arrest and execution.

Unlike Mohammed, Jesus was not a warlord. He still taught us that some things are worth fighting for.

Of course Jesus wasn't a pacifist. Jesus was God.

John and Dave,

One of the reasons many histories of the Second World War are murky about the "endgame" in the Pacific in 1945 is that key material-- the work of our codebreakers-- was not completely declassified until 1995.

A good book on the end of the war in the Pacific is "Downfall" by Richard B. Frank, published in 1999. He goes into great detail about the thinking in both Washington and Tokyo about how to conduct the war in its closing phases, and shows why Operation Olympic (the invasion of Kyushu, scheduled for 15 November 1945) was cancelled in July 1945 due to Japanese defense bulid-ups in the area. (The Japanese could read maps as well as our people could.) That cancellation put the entire campaign to force the Japanese to surrender unconditionally in jeopardy.

Frank also explains why the above isn't generally known to historians and the public. It was due to the inability of the federal government to release the information derived from code-breaking. The information was released only in a piecemeal fashion in the decades after the war to hide a crucial fact-- our code-breakers were successful beyond their wildest dreams. Not only had they broken the Japanese military and civil codes, they had also broken the codes of about 30 other countries, some of them allies, most of them neutrals, and one of them a soon-to-be enemy (the Soviet Union). Releasing the "Magic" intelligence digests (based on the code-breaking) that Roosevelt, Truman, and other key figures read would have revealed to the world just how much of their "mail" we were reading. It would have caused us some embarrassment, but more importantly it would have tipped our hand to some soon-to-be nasties.

Ignorance of this key bit of information makes it easy to portray the United States as cruel and cold to have rebuffed the "peace feelers" it was receiving from various sources during the spring and summer of 1945. With the new data, it becomes clear that the feelers were rebuffed because we knew from our code-breaking that these feelers had no official backing whatsoever. The feelers were being put forth by well-meaning free-lancers who had no authority to do so.

This ignorance also makes it easy to portray the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as wanton cruelty, when in fact it was the only choice the United States had to prevent an even worse outcome. What follows is an edited version of an e-mail I sent a fellow member of an online forum, correcting his... um.... misunderstanding of history. (Alas, he was a recent product of our wonderful public schools.) It's a condensed version of Frank's portrayal of the problem facing the United States in the summer of 1945.

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As for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we really didn't have much choice.

First, we knew from our decoding of Japanese radio traffic that our invasions of Japan (Operation Olympic, 15 November 1945, to land in Kyushu, and Operation Coronet, 1 March 1946, to land in the general area of Tokyo Bay) would have been very bloody affairs, with as many as one million American troops killed and wounded, and perhaps ten million Japanese dead or wounded (out of a population of about 70 million). Think Okinawa, and then multiply by a factor of at least 20.

Second, in our campaigns against the Japanese, we had bypassed many Japanese garrisons in places like French Indo-China (now Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia), China, and the Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia). We had no desire to fight those troops (Okinawa and Iwo Jima were bad enough).

Third, our war against the Japanese Navy and the Japanese merchant marine was pretty much over-- both services' ships lay on the bottom of the Pacific. What this meant was that Japan was effectively blockaded from June 1945 onwards and faced starvation by the spring of 1946.

Fourth, the Army Air Corps' bombing campaign in the summer of 1945 began to bomb the Japanese railways. The cities had been pretty much reduced to rubble, except for cities reserved as special targets (for example, Hiroshima and Nagasaki) or were specifically forbidden to the bombing campaign (Kyoto, because of its historical and cultural significance). The bombing of the railways meant that what food there was in Japan would not be distributed very well (for example, rice from the south not getting to Tokyo and points north, or beef from Hokkaido not getting to Tokyo and points south).

Put this all together and you get a nasty conundrum:

1) You can go ahead and invade, take the ghastly casualties, and occupy Japan; or

2) You can tighten the noose on the Japanese by continuing the blockade and destroying the railways, and let the Japanese starve until the goverment collapses amid revolution, get a surrender from a provisional regime, and occupy Japan.

The problem with either option is that all you've done is occupy Japan. What about all those bypassed garrisons of Japanese troops in China and elsewhere whose only loyalty is to the Emperor? If there's no Emperor because the Throne has been overthrown in bloody conquest or revolution, are they going to obey an order to surrender from American authorities in a conquered Tokyo or a revolutionary regime that toppled the Throne? Not likely. Either option 1 or 2 would have meant still more months or years of bloody fighting until the last Japanese soldier either gave up or perished in one last "banzai" charge.

The clock was also ticking on the American side. The American people were getting war-weary, and had the war gone on into the summer of 1946, with huge casualty lists, there would have been a big push from the American people to end the war by negotiation, which is something we couldn't afford, not after what the Japanese had done not only to us (the Panay Incident, Pearl Harbor, Bataan, and so on) but to others as well (the Rape of Nanking in 1938, in which perhaps 300,000 people perished at sword- and gun-point, to name but one of countless Japanese atrocities in China since 1931).

So, the atomic bombs arrived just in time. They provided the necessary shock to the militarists to get them to heed the Emperor's wish for surrender. (The Emperor would have pushed harder earlier, but he was getting credible threats through the grapevine that some key military officials were considering forcing his abdication, and the elevation of some relative of his to the Throne, with a general as a regent or modern-day shogun.) And with the Emperor having spoken, and especially with his speech to the Japanese people on 15 August 1945 announcing the surrender, the military had no choice but to obey, and obey they did, amazingly enough. And millions lived who might have died otherwise.

Yes, the effects of the bombs were horrific. The alternatives to them might have been worse.
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And that last point is something the pacifist-minded historians overlook. Yes, the bombs were awful, but what would have happened had we not used them? They often don't tell you. Sometimes it's because they don't know; sometimes the question doesn't even occur to them; and sometimes they know the answer to the question, but suppress it because it doesn't fit their template of Amerikkka as the source of all evil in the world.

And if I may finish with a reminder to Dave.... admirable and honorable though you are, Dave, I've said it to you before, and I'll say it to you again: Those who refuse to wield a sword in their own defense may still die upon one.

You imagine that the example of non-violence set by you and your fellow Quakers would stop violence. In some situations you may be right. But in other situations you may be wrong, as your belief in non-violence assumes your assailant possesses both rationality and a conscience, as we Westerners understand the terms. If one reads about the mindset of the Japanese military in the 1930s and '40s, as a collective and as individuals, by Western standards more than a few were not 1) rational or 2) in possession of a conscience. They would have been quite content to slaughter you and your co-religionists by the thousands if it meant greater glory for the Emperor and the Empire.

Basically your choice would have been: 1) acquiesce in the destruction of Japan and her people; or 2) die on Japanese swords, and watch from the next world the destruction of Japan and her people.

Devout Quaker that you are, I think even you would prefer option #1. I can't imagine God wanting you to throw your life away (let alone approving of it) to no good purpose.

Ennyhoo, it's past midnight, and the alarm clock goes off at 5:30.... *oof*

Andrea, you were perhaps speaking lightly, but you've touched what I think is Ground Zero in the religious controversies of our time.

A myriad of "critical studies" and theological experiments and liberalizations and innovations all claim to just be searching for truth, wherever the heck it may lead, but yet somehow they all seem to end up in the exact same place, which is that Jesus was not God. More exactly, they want to escape the Incarnation, that he was both man and God.

(Today is fascinatingly similar to the Arian heresy of the 4th Century, when most of the bishops and elitists actually became Arians, but the common people and the Church as a whole remained Catholic.)

The main reason NT Wright has stunned me is that he is as good and careful a historian as ever I've read, yet he is willing to say that the historical evidence says that Jesus was resurected from the dead! (Encountering that gave me a hunch bordering on a certainty that most Biblical historians have never had the slightest intention of coming to any conclusion that might upset the Enlightment applecart, no matter the evidence.)

No, Andrea, Jesus doesn't come to me for advice. I go to him, albeit not as often as I should, nor am I as good at hearing his voice as I hope to become.

BTW, I hear a subtext in some of these comments that someone who argues as I do does not believe that Jesus was God. That's a subject of a far longer post than I will make here. I will only say that I yield to no one in my understanding of Jesus as a man who incarnated uniquely (monogeneis) the spirit and power of God.

It's interesting that the Greek word used in describing Jesus' action in the temple is the same used for his exorcisms: ekballein. And I consider it quite likely it was a bit of political theater. I'm currently working my way through Ched Myers "Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark's Story of Jesus" (and before anyone explodes, Myers is a committed Christian; this is not a work of "demythologization"); and it's fascinating to see how Mark's narrative works to subvert the centers of authority of 1st-century Palestine: Roman, scribal, temple, Pharaisical. The first sentence ("The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Messiah") is a strike directly against the authority of the emperor, since gospel (euaggelion, or "glad tidings") would have been understood as his readers/hearers as "a proclamation of victory by the emperor." In this sense, GW's "Mission Accomplished" stunt was a "gospel," and Mark is right off telling us that that sort of thing is not the "good news" we need to hear.

Frankly, I'm at a loss as to how anyone can say that Jesus was not a pacifist, unless one means to say that he was someone far more committed to active non-violence than the word connotes today. After all, he didn't say "blessed are the pacifists" but "blessed are the peacemakers."

Hale, you're absolutely right. "Those who refuse to wield a sword in their own defense may still die upon one." And Jesus died on the cross because he refused violence as a solution. (Talk about asymmetric warfare!) But I'm trying to live "in virtue of that power that takes away the occasion of all wars," the power that, if I listen to it, will free me from the causes of war and violence enumerated in James 4:

"What causes wars, and what causes fightings among you? Is it not your passions that are at war in your members? You desire and do not have; so you kill. And you covet and cannot obtain; so you fight and wage war. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions. Unfaithful creatures! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God."

And it is as friends of the world that we wage war, despite the clear call of the Gospel to wage peace.

Two comments about the examples from WWII. First, you cannot leave out fact that this war was a continuation of WWI, which was itself a continuation of previous wars and the covetousness that James speaks of. "The sins of the fathers" and so forth. Surgery may be necessary, but why wait until the cancer has metastasized? Better to address the causes of war when peace is still possible. So I can't say the US had any choice but to fight WWII; we, and all other nations, had been committed to violence and covetousness for so long that, by 12/7/41, no other course of action was possible for the nation (itself a fallen power), although, of course, any individual could refuse to fight, as some did. That is the logic and force of the myth of redemptive violence (which I think one of the foremost powers of "ho kosmos," the world or establishment John speaks of), under which all people groan, awaiting the birth of the New Creation, which is even now among us and within us.

Second, Hale, none of your careful exposition of why we did what we did in WWII matters for the purpose of my argument. Strategic bombing is a barbarous act, regardless of why it is done. The nuclear destruction of two Japanese cities was a barbarous act, no matter that it may have saved many, many lives. This is the tragedy and horror of war, that "good" people believe it necessary to do horrifying things. Can we believe that God wills such things? Can we envision Jesus in a B-29 over Hiroshima?

And if not, then what does that mean for us? Just what does the Gospel call us to?

Dave,

I think we're only going to succeed in talking past each other.....

"Strategic bombing", i.e., the bombing of civilian populations for the purpose of killing and wounding as many of those civilians as possible, and generally disrupting their lives, was a barbarous act. You'll get no argument from me. Ditto the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The problem is that, in 1945 (or in any war), you had (or have) only a choice between barbarities. The only godly thing to do is to choose that barbarity which will bring the war to a favorable conclusion as rapidly as possible. That way, the bloodshed ends sooner, and a world can (not necessarily will) come about that is more pleasing to God than the alternatives.

What you're asking for, Dave, is perfection. Alas, we live in the real world, and perfection ain't on offer. We have to make the best of a bad situation (however we got here), and (in the case of WWII) you don't make the best of it by letting totalitarians run wild.

Yes, the world's a fallen place. So what? We have to do the right thing, as God gives us light to see the right. And doing the right thing means getting off one's dead backside and doing something, not bemoaning the fallen state of the world and asking God to do something about it. We're God's instruments, but He can't do anything with us unless we act.