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On Obama’s Hiroshima speech – and a sense of history

On Obama’s Hiroshima speech – and a sense of history

Last updated on: May 29, 2016 at 8:52 am by Jane the Actuary

On Obama’s Hiroshima speech – and a sense of history 2016-05-29T08:52:34-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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On Friday, May 27, President Obama, in Japan for the G-7 summit, made a trip to Hiroshima and spoke at a wreath-laying ceremony.

Here’s the speech transcript from the New York Times.

That speech has been roundly criticized by the right, for instance, in this commentary calling it “one of the most repulsive speeches in history,” by Ben Shapiro. Obama, we’re told, should have told the Japanese gathered there that it was their own damn fault for starting the war, that it was no worse than the destructive power of the firebombing that leveled all the other major cities, and that these bombings saved lives by ending the war; had it not been for the atom bomb, an invasion of the mainland would have cost untold numbers of lives — the figure commonly used is a million American soldiers and unknown numbers of Japanese, who were preparing to fight with only sticks for defense, military and civilians alike, due to a “never surrender” credo.

Now, there are longstanding issues in Japan around the unwillingness, among a significant segment of the population, to acknowledge that Japan was the aggressor, and the tendency to downplay Japan’s actions, both in education (e.g., the longstanding textbook controversies) and public life, so it’s of course not ideal that Obama might have given them some support. But at the same time, it was (especially for Obama) a brief set of remarks, so not exactly well suited to a nuanced articulation of the situation.

And it’s also true that there are revisionists in the United States who hold the view that the atom bomb didn’t save any lives at all, because Russia was just about to join the war and the Japanese would have seen the reality of their situation, and the notion that the Japanese were as a society so brainwashed that they, to a person, would have held to the “never surrender” credo is just as mistaken as the fear that the Germans would have done so. Truman, in this view, dropped the bomb because he didn’t want Russia to share in the victory, wanted to keep Japan under American control, and wanted to have an excuse to demonstrate America’s new power to the world.

There are others who don’t necessarily believe this view but who still think that the atom bomb’s destructive power is of such a different magnitude that Truman should have never unleashed it on the world, and should have ordered the invasion despite the loss of American lives it would doubtless incur.

Does Obama, in his remarks, suggest that Truman was wrong, that he was either mistaken in what would have happened without the bomb, or that he was evil and unleashed death on Japanese civilians due to his depravity? That’s what various pundits are saying (e.g., here at Breitbart), but I find the speech to vague to lend credence to that accusation.

In any case, that’s a “what difference, at this point, does that make?” sort of situation, to second-guess the decision; debates about the morality of the atom bomb ought to take place in the present, and, so far as I know, there’s general agreement that a first-strike nuclear attack would be unspeakably evil, but retaliatory attacks are a different matter altogether.

What I find unfortunate about the speech is that it lacks a meaningful sense of history. It’s odd, really — Obama acknowledges that war has been a part of the human experience since the dawn of time:

Artifacts tell us that violent conflict appeared with the very first man. Our early ancestors having learned to make blades from flint and spears from wood used these tools not just for hunting but against their own kind.

and he recognizes that the 100,000 who died at Hiroshima, and the similar numbers at Nagasaki, were only a small part of the death toll of World War II.

In the span of a few years, some 60 million people would die. Men, women, children, no different than us. Shot, beaten, marched, bombed, jailed, starved, gassed to death. There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war, memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism, graves and empty camps that echo of unspeakable depravity.

He further acknowledges that, since the end of World War II, there have been profound changes:

The United States and Japan have forged not only an alliance but a friendship that has won far more for our people than we could ever claim through war. The nations of Europe built a union that replaced battlefields with bonds of commerce and democracy. Oppressed people and nations won liberation. An international community established institutions and treaties that work to avoid war and aspire to restrict and roll back and ultimately eliminate the existence of nuclear weapons.

He might have acknowledged, as well, that it was (just) not the destructive power of the atom bomb that led to this desire to work for peace, and that the nations of Europe, following World War I and its destruction, itself on a scale previously unknown, had the same goals, and that the outcomes of that war were not just the punitive Treaty of Versailles but the League of Nations as well, however ineffective it proved to be in the end, and a desire for peace among the British and the French that led to the proclamation of “peace in our time” itself. (And remember that, however much World War I tends to be portrayed as a powderkeg of alliances that just, almost naturally, blew itself up, it is nonetheless the case that — sorry, Germany — the Central Powers were the aggressors, invading to the east and west.)

In short, our (comparatively) recent past is a remarkable point in time, in which attitudes about war have changed dramatically, and the civilized nations of the world have long given up the notion that war is a perfectly reasonable method of gaining territory and advantage for one’s country. The trouble, of course, is that not every country is indeed “civilized” — dictators and terrorists and authoritarian regimes the world over are still perfectly willing to do so, whether they proclaim “God is on our side” or are more open about their ambitions of conquest. And, among “civilized” countries, military intervention continues in the name of protecting the oppressed, and disputes about what’s right and what’s wrong are not simple black and white matters of morality but difficult questions about unintended consequences.

But Obama, in his speech, doesn’t seem to acknowledge that:

We must change our mind-set about war itself. To prevent conflict through diplomacy and strive to end conflicts after they’ve begun. To see our growing interdependence as a cause for peaceful cooperation and not violent competition. To define our nations not by our capacity to destroy but by what we build. And perhaps, above all, we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human race.

But we have already changed our mind-set about war itself. We already strive to prevent conflict through diplomacy. We do see interdependence as requiring cooperation. In this respect we are not at a turning point. But we must also understand that it’s no easy task, when there is evil in the world, and that no amount of peaceful wishes emanating from the United States or Japan, no number of paper cranes, will prevent, for instance, a North Korean nuclear build-up, and no understanding of us as “members of one human race” will prevent such countries as Iran, Russia, and China from building up their power and influence through threats and proxy war.

Is what’s going on here a matter of Obama wanting to see himself and his role, as exceptional (“Obama exceptionalism” instead of “American exceptionalism”), so that he’s unable to acknowledge the progress of the past? I don’t know. But we can’t move forward if we don’t really understand where we are in history in the first place.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3A%22Fat_Man%22_Nuclear_Bomb_Mockup_-_Flickr_-_euthman.jpg; By Ed Uthman from Houston, TX, USA (“Fat Man” Nuclear Bomb Mockup) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

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