The message of Hiroshima

[Briar]

The message of Hiroshima

Paul Oestreicher

"The complicity of religion with acts of violence is something that Islam does not face alone." Giles Fraser wrote that in this column two weeks ago, focused on death in London. The truth of his words was demonstrated by more than 100,000 civilian deaths 60 years ago today.

A chaplain read prayers as the crew of the Enola Gay prepared to take off for Hiroshima; five months earlier, after the carpet bombing of Dresden and other German cities had killed hundreds of thousands, Churchill sent a memo to the Air Ministry asking: "Is it not time to end this terror, though we call it by another name?"

Churchill was big enough not to be fooled; he knew what he had ordered. State terror, disguised by sanitised language, is on the grand scale demanded by the logic of war. It is legitimised on all sides by patriotic sentiment. And it is given moral support by every religious establishment. When Bishop Bell of Chichester condemned the deliberate killing of as many enemy civilians as possible (air crew instructions: "Go for the working-class districts, where the people live closer together"), he was a voice in the wilderness.
There are only two legitimate Christian approaches to war. The Christian pacifist, accepting the injunction of Jesus to love friends and enemies alike, says no to all war. A majority, since the Emperor Constantine became a Christian, accept war as permitted in a just cause and when fought by just means. Every version of that doctrine rules out the deliberate killing of non-combatants.

In practice, that has been ignored. By his presence, the chaplain, in the uniform of every nation, quietens every unquiet conscience. Even Hitler's war had the support of the church hierarchy. "God with Us" was inscribed on every German soldier's belt-buckle.

...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/japan/story/0,7369,1543792,00.html

[bpilgrim]

1. "Boys, either we now learn to end war, or war will end us."

The real enemy always was war itself. I was 13, in New Zealand, the day after Hiroshima. I cannot forget the words of our physics teacher as he tried to explain what had happened: "Boys, either we now learn to end war, or war will end us."

thanks for sharing :toast:

peace