Reply #28: That is A Good Deal Weaker than You Seem To Think, Sir

[The Magistrate]

And it clearly illustrates the a-historical quality of your position.

While it is not my intention to engage the German element at any length, it is worth pointing out one very large fact you are over-looking. The Nazi war aim was exterminationist; the purpose of victory was to commence the slaughter of peoples in the east excess to the requirements of chattel slavery to create of the German population as a whole a leisure class of masters. This was not only stated openly, but put into practice in appreciable degree in occupied areas populated by Slavic peoples. This is not a justification of military necessity, which is to maintain some ghastly act is needed for military advantage that will bring victory closer, and thus be held to have the effect in the long run of lessening the totality of suffering. While there was a good deal of exterminationist rhetoric in the United States regarding the Japanese during World War Two, and there can be no doubt racial feelings played a role in our conduct of that war, this ceased on victory, and the occupation of Japan was not marked by wholesale killings and enslavement. There is thus a significant difference in kind in the war aims, and the sort of blurring you are attempting can only be done extracting the events from history, and disregarding actual factors in the situation.

Your statement of the Japanese war aim is similarly inaccurate. Imperial Japan from the last years of the nineteenth century pursued a policy of establishing Japanese dominion over East Asia, which it considered to be inhabited by inferior native races who ought to be put under a Japanese yoke. Western Imperialists were a stumbling block to this, but were considered similarly inferior as human material, and not a threat to Japan's existence, merely an obstacle to be over-come. The level of atrocity with which this pursued is, as others have stated here, not widely appreciated to this day outside Asia, any more than is its duration. A pattern of atrocity was clearly apparent from 1932 in Manchuria, in the conquest of that region and creation of the Manchukuo regime. Actions ranging from bayonetting wounded Chinese soldiers (uniformed regulars, not guerrillas) to reprisals for guerrilla activity against villagers deemed friendly to them ranging from burying a few persons alive to herding hundreds into corrals and opening fire on the mass with machine-guns are well attested in contemporary eye-witness reports. The first large-scale use of incendiaries against an urban population domiciled in wood and paper construction occurred early in 1932 in Shanghai, with raids from Japanese carrier planes on the 'Little Chapie' district, carried out at dawn when there would be the greatest assistance from hearth fires for breakfast, and produced a rolling sheet of flames reportedly a hundred feet high sweeping through the district, incinerating thousands. This established pattern escalated over intervening years in the occupation of parts of Inner Mongolia and northern China, and simply expanded in scope and scale with the onset of full-bore war with Nationalist China from the summer of 1937. Western opposition to this, particularly that of the U.S., may well have had self-interested elements, focusing on a disinclination to allow themselves to be frozen out of the economic pickings of the China market by any single power, and certainly not by an Oriental one, but it cannot rightly be classed either as aggression against Japan, or a threat to its existence. In practical fact, it was opposition, however mild, to a policy of atrocity and conquest on the part of Japan, which was by any honest reading of the situation an imperialist aggressor of the highest water.

This is the sort of thing one expects left and progressive people to be opposed to, and to denounce in strenuous terms, and to agitate for the defeat of when it is on-going. The problem which emerges is that generally there is no way to effectively oppose and bring to an end such a course of action by a state save military force applied through the medium of war. Persons who oppose war as a general thing are thus unable ever to bring effective opposition to this sort of behavior, since they recoil from the necessary implement. Once the necessary implement is wielded, they immediately begin to focus on what the society to which they belong does, and to view it as morally equivalent to the enemy, since both are employing the detested course of war. It is a position which, as a matter of practical fact, ranges the person alongside the aggressor, and assists the aggressor in his atrocious course.

Despite the Biblical injunction, much of life consists in doing evil in the hope good may come of it, and war employed against atrocious aggression, and in self-defense, is an extreme example of this. What it tends to do is shift the suffering from one set of shoulders to another. For some years in the Orient, it was only Chinese who were being burned alive in wholesale lots by aerial bombardment; by 1944 or so, it was Japanese who suffered this instead. Ruin and death in Japan spared great numbers of Chinese, Indonesians, Burmese, and various others in Japanese power. Forcing a surrender by Japan certainly saved a good many Japanese lives, as well as the lives of Allied soldiers. There is little doubt an invasion of Japan, fought to conclusion, would have taken on an exterminationist character.