Category Archives: War

White Light, Black Rain: The Destruction Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki

America, Criminal Injustice, Foreign Policy, Just War, Military, War

Just to remind you what a monster one must be to say the following words: “the nuclear option is on the table.”

“On August 6th and 9th, 1945, two atomic bombs vaporized 210,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those who survived are called “hibakusha”—people exposed to the bomb—and there are an estimated 200,000 living today. Today, with the threat of —nuclear weapons of mass destruction frighteningly real—the world’s arsenal capable of repeating the destruction at Hiroshima 400,000 times over—Oscar® award-winning filmmaker Steven Okazaki revisits the bombings and shares the stories of the only people to have survived a nuclear attack.”

The teletwits of cable haven’t commemorated this mass murder. Photos are all important. Watch the “Video Promo.” I’ve attached a few links you can follow. I’m not going to attempt to describe the flesh of a young girl melted away, hanging in strips from her still-alive body.

Photographs Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki

A Photo-Essay on the Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Update #1: : There is no disputing that the intentional slaughter of 200,000 innocents was mass murder. What else? Mercy killing? Preemptive killing of innocents? It’s the coward’s way out. It’s un-Christian, un-Jewish, unethical; flouts every stricture of Just War and natural justice, you name it. To defend it is indefensible. There is, moreover, no way to say who and how many were “saved” by the bombing. That’s why it’s such a convenient course of action for the evil. It’s open-ended and vague. To do so, is to exclude oneself from humanity.

Update #2: Pearl Harbor is the magic word for the crowd that is always licking its chops for blood. In Pearl Harbor you have the Japanese attacking a military target—a naval base. They killed a few thousands of what to them were enemy combatants, i.e. Americans. That act, according to some monsters, provides the warrant the US needed to slaughter 200,000 mostly civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and destroy those cities. Truman had planned to drop a couple more “Little Boys” and “Fat Men,” as they were dubbed affectionately.

Part of the Just War doctrine, adhered to by a dwindling number of REAL Christians, is the concept of proportionality in war. One of the best dissections of the bankrupt case for this atrocity was made by historian Ralph Raico. While we’re at it, let’s see a consistent application of principles, please. To intentionally target civilians is to engage in the act of terrorism.

Sock it to those Civilians!

Update #3: On the topic of intentionally targeting innocent civilians with the most devastating weapon known to man we heard, unfortunately, mainly from people bereft of a developed theory of justice. Rather, in discussing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the emphasis was mostly on crude collectivism. However charitable I‘d like to be, I can’t even credit some of the individuals who wrote in with advancing a sophisticated utilitarianism. Mostly, it was, “We socked it to ‘em for our boys, yeah baby. We kicked some ass.” (The booties of babies and their mothers…)

There were others (unpublished of course) who—without any familiarity with my writings on Just War, including pre-emptive war, Israel, and Iraq—offered unsubstantiated deductions about my positions. For example: it was asserted by one bombast that I opposed the war in Iraq on the grounds that Saddam was better than the current chaos. No, that’s the position taken in retrospect, after the failure in Iraq, by some of the nation’s reigning philosopher kings.

If you intend to offer an opinion about it, read my perfectly validated case against that war. Once again, my position against that travesty, again—perfectly validated today—rested on principles of natural justice, Just War, and the reality shared by the “reality-based community,” not the pie-in the sky occupied by neoconservatives, who admitted to creating their own reality when it came to the danger from saddam, because they possessed the power to so do.

Don’t waste your time on a classically liberal blog if you haven’t acquainted yourself with the writing you propose to “refute” so stridently. Of course, even the fact that I was right about the war against Iraq has not persuaded warriors suspended in a Third Dimension that my philosophy was validated, not by chance, but by following objective reality and immutable principle. So, can I sell you shares in a Bed and Breakfast in Baghdad?

Update 4 (May 7, 2008): Recently revealed are these new photos of the American government’s war crimes (via LRC.com).

[All comments were lost in a server crash early in 2008]

On Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Old Right, Reason, The State, War

By now, my thinking on conspiracy theories should be known; they are the refuge of the weak-minded. Remember Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil? Reality is bad enough; there is no need to look beyond it. That is tantamount to conjecture and fantasy. As I said in the introduction to my book, the state presides over the disintegration of civil society, but it does so reflexively, rather than as a matter of collusion and conspiracy.

The premise for imputing conspiracies to garden variety government evils is this: government generally does what is good for us (NOT), so when it strays, we must look beyond the facts—for something far more sinister, as if government’s natural venality and quest for power were not enough to explain events. For example, why would one need to search for the “real reason” for an unjust, unscrupulous war, unless one believed government would never prosecute an unjust war. History belies that delusion.

Conspiracy is not congruent with a view of government as fundamentally antagonistic to the individual and to civil society, a position I hold. I see most of what the behemoth does nowadays as contrary to the good of the individual, and aimed reflexively at increasing its own power and size. Even if government embarked on a just war, it would find ways to prolong it, since this involves the consolidation of fiefdoms. Soldiers don’t benefit, but their superiors—those “generals” everyone reveres so—do. Our government, given its size, reach, and many usurpations, is a destructive and warring entity. It is natural for such an entity to pursue war for war’s sake. The constituent elements of the behemoth continuously work to increase their spheres of control. This is why we must curtail the state’s powers.

Propensity for conspiracy is yet another facet paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians share with the hard-left. I pointed out in “Deriding Dershowitz,” and elsewhere, that the far-out right has made common cause with the far left on quite a number of fronts. That’s a shame. You’ll find no such incongruities in my thinking. By way of example, my anti-war sentiments have never strayed into these murky precincts—don’t look for any war-for-oil-&-Israel kookiness here.

Presidential Politics: Immigration Vs. War

Politics, War

Citing a “National Academy of Sciences study,” Patrick Buchanan notes that “The average immigrant comes to this country much poorer and far less educated than Americans and consumes far more per capita in public services…each immigrant who comes with less than a high school education costs taxpayers $90,000 net over his or her lifetime.” Considering that immigration policy has been predicated mostly on family unification and on allowing millions upon millions of unskilled illegals to enter the country undisturbed, the assessment sounds about right.

When thousands of non-voting illegal aliens poured into the streets to demand their positive “rights,” their elected officials and El Presidente (Bush) came up with a bill that will grant the protesters their wish.

Adding to the “union” each year the equivalent of one New Jersey, powered by identity-politics, and consisting predominantly of tax consumers seeking to indenture taxpayers —how better to accelerate wealth distribution and the death of the republic?

As a libertarian who wrote her first op-ed in opposition to the invasion of Iraq in September 2002, I do not mean to diminish the centrality of this war in the presidential race. However, the neoconservative “idea” of preemptive wars or wars for democracy is as dead as a doornail. Can you imagine a candidate running on that plank? I didn’t think so. However, the notion of dissolving the people and electing another, to paraphrase Bertold Brecht—that’s very much alive in the minds of the political caste.

I’d say, then, that immigration is the central issue in the next elections.

Updated: If Americans Were More Like Israelis…

Bush, Israel, War

If Americans were more like Israelis, Bush’s popularity at the polls would be at…0 percent. That’s where Ehud Olmert’s approval rate is among Israelis, said CNN today. Olmert’s position at the polls had hovered between 2 and 3 percent, before bottoming out.

The anger is over the Second Lebanon War last year. Israelis are furious not only over the execution of the war, but over the fact that it had been prosecuted at all. Whereas large segments of the fantasy-based community in the US see great benefits to the destabilization of Iraq, or at least so they say—Israelis in overwhelming numbers believe leveling Lebanon was a horrible thing to do. Oddly enough, here at home, harpies for Bush continue to talk up the Second Lebanon War, even though Israelis have long since disowned it and the president who prosecuted it. “You’ve failed; go home” is the rallying cry across Israel.

The Winograd Report on that war, unparalleled in the US, has placed “the primary responsibility for these failures on the Prime Minister, the minister of defense and the (outgoing) Chief of Staff. All three made a decisive personal contribution to these decisions and the way in which they were made.” What simple, clear truths, the kind that evade us in the US.

The preamble to the Winograd Report states:

“We believe Israeli society has great strength and resilience, with a robust sense of the justice of its being and of its achievements.”

I have to agree—all the more so given that four years hence and most Americans still refuse to process what Bush wrought by invading Iraq and how corrupt that endeavor was.

Update: Bush vetoed the Iraq War Supplemental today. I think it’s his first veto in office. He blamed “members of the House and the Senate” for passing “a bill that substitutes the opinions of politicians for the judgment of our military commanders. Contrast that with the Israeli Winograd Report which accused Olmert of “acting in effect as a rubber stamp for the army.” Funny that. In Israel they think the people, represented (allegedly) by the government and parliament, ought to make decisions; in the US we think it’s the generals (who, face it, give dumb a new meaning, if to judge by their acumen thus far).

Update II: The footage of 100,000 Israelis—of the left, right and center; religious and irreligious—gathered at Rabin Square to call on the government to resign warms the cockles. Author Meir Shalev derided the government thus:

“We do not seek compensation, not even remorse for your sins of lack of judgment, your arrogance. You ran headfirst into battle with the gaiety of fresh recruits, without a plan or an objective. You squandered Israel’s power of deterrence, you squandered our chances of bringing back the captives and worst of all – you squandered the lives of soldiers and civilians.”

They mention civilians! What will it take for conservative in this country to mention the poor, dying people of Iraq, upon which we’ve unleashed death and destruction, and who will probably never know peace again.

Anyone who has lived in, or visited, Israel knows that it is a country of independent-minded, anti-authoritarian, critical and demanding people. What can I say? Jews! Anyone who conflates the common American neocon with the regular Israeli has never encountered that odd creature, the Sabra, that prickly pair.

The assorted Hebrew signs read: “Failures, Go Home!”, “Elections Now!” These are all very tame, but things are sure to heat up…if I know Israel.