911 v Hiroshima

911 v Hiroshima

For many Westerners the attacks of 911 were the most appalling act they had ever witnessed. Amongst popular broadcasters the sense of shock and awe was uniform and profound. Not since the death of Diana had Radio 2 disc jockeys spoken with such an air of gravity, the same chilling footage playing over and again in their minds.

Over the days that followed many attempts were made to rationalise what had happened. For those with scant appreciation of the West’s role in the world one conclusion stood out. Clearly such an act of barbarity could not have been committed by civilised Westerners – atheists, Christians and Jews. Only ‘medieval’ Islam could supply a perverse enough world-view to drive humans to commit such an act of depravity.

In a sane world this nonsense could be countered with one word: Hiroshima. Similar method of delivery to 911, bar the suicides, but with a payload that extinguished a full 75,000 innocent lives. Twenty-five 911s in one hit, perpetrated by well-fed well-heeled western heroes. End of argument?

The fact that it rarely is demonstrates the lengths some go to maintain contradictory beliefs. At first asking, those who ‘blame Islam’ often argue with conviction that the slaughter of three thousand innocents in ANY situation is deeply and transparently wrong. Morally unjustifiable regardless of the context. My stance entirely.

However, as soon as you mention Hiroshima many back-pedal from this moral obviousness. Suddenly circumstances do matter:

“You can’t compare those two situations!”
“We were in the middle of a war!”
“Those bombs saved lives. They brought the war to a close more quickly.”

Forgetting that all these excuses could equally have come from Al-Qaeda, the moral shift is seismic. Suddenly it’s not that there’s something intrinsically wrong with killing three thousand civvies. The problem is doing it without ‘good reason’. Presumably, if your reasons are valid you should feel free, indeed morally obliged, to slaughter 75,000. Who knows, maybe more?

Revising your moral stance to that of pragmatic advocate of mass-murder comes at a price. It’s a schizophrenic state, doggedly insisting that there are appropriate times to slaughter children when you know in your gut that there can’t be. It makes people defensive. Others who dare to maintain their opposition to all such acts will soon find themselves on the receiving end of that most heinous charge, pacifism. All the old chestnuts roll out, the sort of questions employed by wily schoolchildren and moral philosophers alike, when they want to torture each other:

“So if you knew that the only way to prevent two million people from nuclear annihilation was to press a button that would itself kill one million people, you still wouldn’t do it?”

True, as it stands, out of context, it’s a near impossible question to answer. But so what? Neither 911 nor Hiroshima nor any other colossal act of barbarity has happened out of context. Let’s forget for a moment that the standard justifications for Hiroshima are complete baloney. Even if bombing Hiroshima did save lives in the long run, what justification is there to ever consider it as a stand alone event?: History starts here. Press or don’t press?

In reality, there has to be a suitably insane context before such insane quandaries can arise. Two imperial powers squabbling over whose right it was to rape the pacific. Two governments terrorising their own populations with tales of the depravity and sub-human nature of the other side. Two armies brainwashed to treat each other with no mercy. That’s the lunatic terrain upon which such calm, ‘rational’ choices as whether or not to raze a city arise. With mass-murder context is everything. If you really want to understand why it happens you can’t boil it down to single choices.

Mention of Hiroshima is a good way to counter those who prefer to demonise Islam than study history. Either they must concede that Islam is not a special case and condemn Western crimes with equal intensity (game over), or they must slide down the moral hill to pragmatic approval of such acts, in which case you can refer them to history. No one can hold both positions and remain rational however much they might want to. Establish which and hold them to it.