Hiroshima anniversary

Yeah, it's time to rip America again.  Actually, I got a bit of a surprise when I went over to Maha's blog and checked out what she had to say about it.  She wasn't ripping America to shreds, but she was worried about the morality of it all.

The idea is not to be moral in order to feel good about oneself.  But that is the usual pattern now isn't it?  No, I'm not going to get on some high horse so that I can accuse others of being beasts, and feel better because I am not one myself.

Hiroshima was the culmination of a series of events that took years to unfold.  Nobody thought it would come to what it came to at the time.  For example, when the French wouldn't do anything about Hitler's march into the Rhineland, they had no idea that ultimately the war that would come would result in something like Hiroshima.  But that is what happened.  Small events can have huge consequences.  Not to blame the French, though.  Do not misunderstand.

The point is that Hitler could have been stopped relatively easily at that point, but they failed to act. Hitler eventually starts a war that makes it necessary to pursue the bomb.  Although Hitler was defeated before the bomb could be used on him, it was used on the Japanese instead.  The Japanese were Hitler's allies and they attacked America at Pearl Harbor.  All of it very complex chain of events, don't you know.

One could argue if all stops were pulled out in order to stop the bomb from being dropped on Hiroshima, that this awful event could have been avoided.  That might even be true.  But you can also argue if such care was taken years earlier with Hitler, that the bomb wouldn't have been built in the first place.

The point?  By the time the bomb was built, it was already far too late to talk about the morality of using it.  There were already tens of millions of deaths.  It may seem cruel to mention, but the dropping of the bomb was not that big of a deal once you consider everything else that happened.

Why feel guilty about Hiroshima, then?  Why not feel guilty about the invasion of the Rhineland? If Hitler had been stopped there, World War II may never have happened.