Wednesday, August 6, 2025
D+271/199/1262
1945 HIROSHIMA
1965 LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act.
2018 Chicago police appealed for help after 66 people were shot in the city in one weekend
In bed around 10 and awake around 12, with a little GERD?, raw throat, and the trots. From the anesthesia? surgery? Kopps cheeseburger and vanilla malt? Up for hours playing Willy Makeit. 68°, high of 81°, AQI=134 Unhealthy for sensitive groups.
Meds, etc. Morning meds sometime this morning.
An archival photo of a Hiroshima baby too weak to draw milk from the mother’s breast. The baby was reported to have died three days after the photo was taken.
One day, the woman who owned or at least managed the bar we frequented took us on a commuter train to Hiroshima to see the Peace Memorial Museum at the original Ground Zero. The twentieth anniversary of the bombing of the city was only several weeks away. I was – stupidly – struck by how new and modern the city was as I emerged from the train station. Walking to and through the Peace Memorial Museum was a searing experience. The “Atomic Bomb Dome” building was still standing. The bomb had detonated almost directly above that building and a few others that were still standing. The force of the blast was downward, blowing away roofs and floors and everything in between but leaving the steel-reinforced exterior walls standing.
I was solemn the whole time I was in Hiroshima, but the atmosphere in the city’s downtown area and even around the Peace Memorial was busy, bustling, like New York or Chicago. There were a great many people, including families with children, at the Peace Memorial and their demeanors seemed not all that different from people going into the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago or the Metropolitan Museum in New York, kind of semi-festive. The Japanese adults ignored Ron and me but little children stared at us. For many of them, I suspect we were the first Americans or Europeans that they had seen in person and up close, or perhaps they stared because of the Marine Corps ‘whitewall’ haircuts that we had. I was a freak in the eyes of the children.
It was hard not to feel some responsibility, even guilt. I was (forgive the expression) blown away by the photographs and artifacts and the realization of where I was. I was a couple weeks shy of my 4th birthday when the bomb was dropped, but I am connected with Hiroshima by the fact that I am American. By the fact that my father shared a killing field with Japanese soldiers. By the fact that the justification for dropping the bomb was to obviate the necessity of invading the home islands, an invasion my father had been in line for. By the fact that I was a Marine on my way to another Asian killing field. By shared humanity. The Japanese government would have resisted invasion to the bitter end, as the Germans had, and the cost in lives would have been appalling. There doesn’t seem to be much doubt about that. Indeed, the battles on Iwo Jima and Okinawa had been ‘designed’ to make it clear to the Americans how high the cost of invasion of the home islands would be. But was it necessary to bomb the city? Two cities? Could the power of the Bomb have been shown by dropping it atop Mount Fuji or in Tokyo Bay or on the big naval base at Yokusoka? The U. S. had inflicted perhaps hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties by the fire bombing of Tokyo, Yokohama, Kawasaki, Kobe, Nagoya, and Osaka starting in March of 1945 while the battle was raging on Iwo Jima, and then on Okinawa. The destruction already inflicted on the home islands narrowed the choice of ‘suitable’ targets for the A-bombs but I believe it is naïve to think that Truman and the generals and the American public did not wish to inflict maximum civilian casualties. The firebombing raids proved otherwise. The feeling had to have been widespread that, as the song said, ‘we’re going to have to slap the dirty little Jap, and Uncle Sam’s the guy who can do it.”
I couldn’t know it at the time, of course, but visiting the Peace Memorial and seeing evidence of the devastation wrought by American bombing was a fitting introduction to my impending work in Vietnam. The Japanese suffered hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties from American strategic bombing, mostly from B-29 missions from late 1944 through the August, 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The human toll in Vietnam was to be worse.
I take special note this morning of my paragraph that started " It was hard not to feel some responsibility, even guilt." It was only 4 days ago that I wrote a long reflection on identifying the people of a state with the actions of the state's government. It was triggered by thinking of Israel's apparent identification of all Gazans with Hamas, and Hamas' apparent identification of all Jews with the actions of the State of Israel. In the October 20, 2020, issue of Prospect, Samuel Moyn wrote an essay titled "You have misunderstood the relevance of Hannah Arendt." In it, he discussed Arendt's ideas on 'universal responsibility' which she spelled out in a 1945 essay entitled “Organised Guilt and Universal Responsibility,” where she warned that it would not be easy to tell the good from the bad German after the war ended.
Those who were not in Germany but condemned it from the outside were going to be tempted to punish the bad Germans. But the truth is that their crimes (while they of course deserved prosecution) spread complicity far and wide. Until such evils were preventable, even those with no relation to them should admit that they earned not pride but shame. The religion of the Jews, Arendt suggested, taught humanity not comfortable moralising but “universal responsibility.” Even in the face of Nazism, Arendt insisted that responsibility allowed no one to say “I am not like that.” Compared to those with vengeful zeal for the punishment of Nazi perpetrators (which she supported), Arendt praised those “who are filled with a genuine fear of the inescapable guilt of the human race.”
Her thinking seems to be in line with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's famous lines from The Gulag Archipelago:
“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”
He didn't need to add the clear corollary that even within hearts filled with goodness, at least one small bridgehead of evil exists.
Samuel Moyn ended his short essay on Arendt with this:
In her 1945 essay, Arendt wrote that when she met people who told her they were ashamed of being German, she was always tempted to reply: “I am ashamed of being human.” In America, there is going to be an immense pressure to exact apologies, if not from Trump (who is incapable of them), then from those who enabled him. Not generalising responsibility, as Arendt demanded, but othering and scapegoating is how the mainstream will proceed, in an attempt to bracket the Trump era as if it never was, for the sake of a new zero hour. Her former aficionados will stop citing Arendt precisely when she is relevant. Not only will they skirt embarrassment at being human; few will even say that they are ashamed of being American.
I added this footnote to my discussion of Hiroshima and guilt in my memoir:
The best book I have read about modern war is Chris Hedges’ War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, including this passage:
There is among many who fight in war a sense of shame, one that is made worse by the patriotic drivel used to justify the act of killing in war. Those who seek meaning in patriotism do not want to hear the truth of war, wary of bursting the bubble. The tensions between those who were there and those who were not, those who refuse to let go of the myth and those that know it to be a lie, feed into the dislocation and malaise after war. In the end, neither side dares to speak to the other. The shame and alienation of combat soldiers, coupled with the indifference to the truth of war by those who were not there, reduces many societies to silence. It seems better to forget.
“I, too, belong to this species,” J. Glenn Gray wrote [in The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle]. “I am ashamed not only of my own deeds, not only of my nation’s deeds, but of human deeds as well. I am ashamed to be a man.”
Exchange with JJA on FB yesterday:
Janice Jenkins Anderson
If the Trump admin was actually interested in “justice for the children” they would talk to the victims who were trafficked, NOT the convicted sex trafficker Maxwell. They are trying to buy her silence and/or keep her quiet. She should be wary of open windows. Novel idea but perhaps people should simply believe the victims. Release the Epstein files!
Charles D. Clausen
I had a colleague in our law firm when I was practicing law, Madeleine Kelly. She was also a former student of mine from my teaching days and became a good friend after our law school days. She had an expression I loved and never heard expressed by anyone but her. "That stinks out loud," she would say when she thought somethng stunk "out loud." Reading your comments above, I was reminded of Madeleine.
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