" It was a few days after the war’s end, and the victory celebration that had surged through downtown Chicago was still a fresh memory. But Fred Eastman of the Chicago Theological Seminary was not in a celebratory mood. “King Herod’s slaughter of the innocents – an atrocity committed in the name of defense – destroyed no more than a few hundred children,” he wrote bitterly to Christian Century; “Today, a single atomic bomb slaughters tens of thousands of children and their mothers and fathers. Newspapers and radio acclaim it a great victory. Victory for what?” The poet Randall Jarrell, stationed at an air force base in Arizona, had a similar reaction: “I feel so rotten about the country’s response to the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” he wrote a friend in September 1945, “that I wish I could become a naturalized dog or cat.” Socialist Norman Thomas deplored the “pious satisfaction” of most commentators – including those on the left – at Truman’s announcement. The atomic destruction of a second city, Thomas wrote, was “the greatest single atrocity of a very cruel war.” Surely, [Stuart] Chase insisted, Washington could have found a way to achieve its objectives “without this appalling slaughter of school children.” The New York Herald Tribune found “no satisfaction in…the greatest simultaneous slaughter in the whole history of mankind….” The Omaha World Herald criticized as “almost sacrilegious” the unctuous tone of Truman’s announcement “in using the name of a merciful God in connection with so Satanic a device.” “Surely we cannot be proud of what we have done,” wrote David Lawrence in the U.S. News and World Report. “If we state our inner thoughts honestly, we are ashamed of it.” Newspapers all over the country… were receiving letters “protesting the killing of the non-combatant civilians in Japan, calling it inhuman, and protesting our disregard of moral values.” One called the bombing a “stain upon our national life”; another said it was “simply mass murder, sheer terrorism.” An appalled reader of Time wrote: “The United States of America has this day become the new master of brutality, infamy, atrocity. Bataan, Buchenwald, Dachau, Coventry, Lidice were tea parties compared with the horror which we…have dumped on the world…. No peacetime applications of this Frankenstein monster can ever erase the crime we have committed.” Two weeks after Hiroshima, thirty-four prominent Protestant clergymen, including several well-known pacifists, addressed a letter to President Truman condemning the decision. One of the signers, Harry Emerson Fosdick of New York’s Riverside Church, was particularly outspoken. In an early post-war sermon broadcast nationally, Fosdick declared: “When our self-justifications are all in, every one of us is nonetheless horrified at the implications of what we did. Saying that Japan was guilty and deserved it gets us nowhere. The mothers and babies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not deserve it.” To argue that the “mass murder of whole metropolitan populations is right if it is effective,” Fosdick went on, was to abandon “every moral standard the best conscience of the race ever has set up.” Another independent religious voice of protest was that of John Haynes Holmes of the nonsectarian Community Church of New York. The atomic bomb, wrote Holmes in the September 1945 issue of his magazine Unity, was “the supreme atrocity of the ages; …a crime which we would instantly have recognized as such had Germany and not our own country been guilty of the act.” [From “Atomic Warfare and the Christian Faith,” a report to the Federal Council of Churches in March 1946]: “We are agreed that, whatever… one’s judgment of the ethics of war in principle, the surprise bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are morally indefensible.” Catholic World, the voice of the Paulist Fathers, called the surprise use of the atomic bomb against civilians “atrocious and abominable” and “the most powerful blow ever delivered against Christian civilization and the moral law.” All “civilized people,” this September 1945 editorial continued, should “reprobate and anathematize” this “horrible deed.” Of the argument that the two doomed cities had been given sufficient advance warning, Catholic World said: “Let us not combine cruelty with hypocrisy, and attempt to justify wholesale slaughter with a lie.” Between Hell and Reason, Albert Camus August 6, 1945 We can sum up in one sentence: technological civilization has just reached its final degree of savagery."
Posted on: Sat, 03 Aug 2013 22:43:20 +0000
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