Although the numbers of causalities are at best estimate, it has been estimated that the number casualties of the American bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki it has been estimated that 69,000 people were killed and 65,000 injured in the bombing of Hiroshima and 39,000 killed and 25,000 injured in bombing of Nagasaki. Those are big numbers. John Rawls argued that the bombing was not justified.
I would like to add something here to what John Rawls said in his analysis of America’s bombing of those two Japanese cities. The statesperson must be someone who can resist the lure of the extremists. This is not easy to do. Particularly in times of war when feelings were running high. In fact, in the Middle East this has proved impossible. But it is not impossible. Look at Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela. And there are others. These are men and women who found there is another way. A way that rejects violence and rejects extremism. That is the only way forward in the furnace of the Middle East. That is the way of non-violence. It is almost the only thing that has never been tried.
The statesman or woman is not on offer in the Middle East. Not on any side, at least as far as I can see. Hamas embeds its soldiers among hospitals and schools to make it necessary for Israeli’s to kill the civilians if they want to kill Hamas. It is certainly not offered by Netanyahu. He is the exact opposite of the statesman. He is always willing to turn to the extremists, even if it means the death of Israel. Rawls is much wiser than Netanyahu. He suggests this:
Statesmen need not be selfless and may have their own interests when they hold office, yet they must be selfless in their judgments and assessments of society’s interests and not be swayed, especially in war and crisis, by passions of revenge and retaliation against the enemy.
The statesperson is the person who avoids doing those things that make it more difficult to achieve peace. For example, Netanyahu has made peace much more difficult, if not impossible by sprinkling the occupied territories with extremist settlers in the occupied West Bank. They are deliberately trying to create what they call “facts on the ground” which will make it harder for Israel to make peace. Apparently, there are now 750,000 of these settlers and they can vote. And Netanyahu knows it. They make peace virtually impossible. Netanyahu was warned over and over against this but he persisted in his folly. Now Israel is paying a big price for that mistake.
As Rawls said,
“… the proclamations of a nation should make clear (the statesman must see to this) that the enemy people are to be granted an autonomous regime of their own and a decent and full life once peace is securely reestablished.Whatever they may be told by their leaders, whatever reprisals they may reasonably fear, they are not to be held as slaves or serfs after surrender, or denied in due course their full liberties; and they may well achieve freedoms they did not enjoy before, as the Germans and the Japanese eventually did. The statesman knows, if others do not, that all descriptions of the enemy people (not their rulers) inconsistent with this are impulsive and false.”
The statesperson must not be like Hitler or Netanyahu. As Rawls described Hitler he could just as well have been talking about Netanyahu:
” Yet characteristic of Hitler was that he accepted no possibility at all of a political relationship with his enemies. They were always to be cowed by terror and brutality, and ruled by force. From the beginning the campaign against Russia, for example, was a war of destruction against Slavic peoples, with the original inhabitants remaining, if at all, only as serfs. When Goebbels and others protested that the war could not be won that way, Hitler refused to listen.”
The United States generally, follows the rules of war. But Rawls says they failed in the case of Hiroshima:
“The principles of the conduct of war were always applicable to it. Indeed, in the case of Hiroshima many involved in higher reaches of the government recognized the questionable character of the bombing and that limits were being crossed. Yet during the discussions among allied leaders in June and July 1945, the weight of the practical means-end reasoning carried the day. Under the continuing pressure of war, such moral doubts as there were failed to gain an express and articulated view. As the war progressed, the heavy fire-bombing of civilians in the capitals of Berlin and Tokyo and elsewhere was increasingly accepted on the allied side. Although after the outbreak of war Roosevelt had urged both sides not to commit the inhuman barbarism of bombing civilians, by 1945 allied leaders came to assume that Roosevelt would have used the bomb on Hiroshima. The bombing grew out of what had happened before.”