Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Ultramarine (talk | contribs) at 10:15, 29 May 2008 (sources does not mention terrorism, debatte regarding justification is in separate article). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

It has been suggested that this article be merged into Allegations of state terrorism by the United States and Talk:Allegations_of_state_terrorism_by_the_United_States#Ending_the_war_over_the_war_over_Japan. (Discuss)

It has been suggested that this article be merged into Debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Talk:Allegations_of_state_terrorism_by_the_United_States#Ending_the_war_over_the_war_over_Japan. (Discuss)

Alongside the ethics debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, certain scholars and historians have characterized the the United States' World War II nuclear attacks against the Empire of Japan as state terrorism. This interpretation centers around a definition of terrorism as the targeting of innocents to achieve a political goal. As such, Frances V. Harbour suggests the goal was to create terror for political ends both in and beyond Japan. However Burleigh Taylor Wilkins has written that it stretches the meaning of "terrorism" to include wartime acts.

Scholars have suggested the success of the bombings weakened moral taboos and lead to attacks on civilians as a standard tactic in later U.S. wars, though the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain the only time a state has used nuclear weapons against concentrated civilian populated areas.

Viewed as state terrorism

Historian Howard Zinn writes: "if 'terrorism' has a useful meaning (and I believe it does, because it marks off an act as intolerable, since it involves the indiscriminate use of violence against human beings for some political purpose), then it applies exactly to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki." Zinn cites the sociologist Kai Erikson who states that:

"The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not 'combat' in any of the ways that word is normally used. Nor were they primarily attempts to destroy military targets, for the two cities had been chosen not despite but because they had a high density of civilian housing. Whether the intended audience was Russian or Japanese or a combination of both, then the attacks were to be a show, a display, a demonstration. The question is: What kind of mood does a fundamentally decent people have to be in, what kind of moral arrangements must it make, before it is willing to annihilate as many as a quarter of a million human beings for the sake of making a point?"

Michael Walzer writes of it as an example of "...war terrorism: the effort to kill civilians in such large numbers that their government is forced to surrender. Hiroshima seems to me the classic case."

Professor Tony Coady writes in Terrorism and Justice: Moral Argument in a Threatened World that "Several of the contributors consider the issue of state terrorism and there is a general agreement that states not only can sponsor terrorism by non state groups but that states can, and do, directly engage in terrorism." Coady instances the terror bombings of World War II, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as acts of terrorism.

Richard A. Falk, professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Princeton University has written in detail about Hiroshima and Nagasaki as instances of state terrorism. He writes "The graveyards of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the number-one exhibits of state terrorism... Consider the hypocrisy of an Administration that portrays Qaddafi as barbaric while preparing to inflict terrorism on a far grander scale.... Any counter terrorism policy worth the name must include a convincing indictment of the First World variety.". He writes elsewhere that:

"Undoubtedly the most extreme and permanently traumatizing instance of state terrorism, perhaps in the history of warfare, involved the use of atomic bombs against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in military settings in which the explicit function of the attacks was to terrorize the population through mass slaughter and to confront its leaders with the prospect of national annihilation....the public justification for the attacks given by the U.S. government then and now was mainly to save lives that might otherwise might have been lost in a military campaign to conquer and occupy the Japanese home islands which was alleged as necessary to attain the war time goal of unconditional surrender.... But even accepting the rationale for the atomic attacks at face value, which means discounting both the geopolitical motivations and the pressures to show that the immense investment of the Manhattan Project had struck pay dirt, and disregarding the Japanese efforts to arrange their surrender prior to the attacks, the idea that massive death can be deliberately inflicted on a helpless civilian population as a tactic of war certainly qualifies as state terror of unprecedented magnitude, particularly as the United States stood on the edge of victory, which might well have been consummated by diplomacy. As Michael Walzer puts it, the United States owed the Japanese people 'an experiment in negotiation,' but even if such an initiative had failed there was no foundation in law or morality for atomic attacks on civilian targets."

A head of state has also condemned the bombings as an act of state terrorism. The President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, while paying tribute to the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, referred to the bombings as "the greatest act of terrorism in recorded history."

Viewed as primarily wartime acts

Burleigh Taylor Wilkins states in Terrorism and Collective Responsibility that "any definition which allowed the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to count as instances of terrorism would be too broad." He goes on to explain "The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, while obviously intended by the American government to alter the policies of the Japanese government, seem for all the terror they involved, more an act of war than of terrorism."

Additionally, if Japan is viewed as having engaged in a total war, then there was no difference between civilians and soldiers. The targets also had a certain strategic value. Hiroshima was used as headquarters of the Fifth Division and the 2nd General Army, which commanded the defense of southern Japan with 40,000 military personal in the city. Hiroshima was a communication center, an assembly area for troops, a storage point and had several military factories as well. Nagasaki was of wartime importance because of its wide-ranging industrial activity, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials.

Forward effects

Political science professor Michael Stohl and peace studies researcher George A. Lopez, in their book Terrible beyond Endurance? The Foreign Policy of State Terrorism, discuss the argument that the institutionalized form of terrorism carried out by states have occurred as a result of changes that took place following World War II, and in particular the two bombings. In their analysis state terrorism as a form of foreign policy was shaped by the presence and use of weapons of mass destruction, and that the legitimizing of such violent behavior led to an increasingly accepted form of state behavior. They consider both Germany’s bombing of London (q.v. The Blitz) and the U.S. atomic destruction of Hiroshima.

Scholars treating the subject have discussed the bombings within a wider context of the weakening of the moral taboos that were in place prior to WWII, which prohibited mass attacks against civilians during wartime. Mark Selden, professor of sociology and history at Binghamton University and author of War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century, writes, "This deployment of air power against civilians would become the centerpiece of all subsequent U.S. wars, a practice in direct contravention of the Geneva principles, and cumulatively the single most important example of the use of terror in twentieth century warfare." Falk, Selden, and Prof. Douglas Lackey, each of whom relate the Japan bombings to what they believe was a similar pattern of state terrorism in following wars, particularly the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Professor Selden writes: “Over the next half century, the United States would destroy with impunity cities and rural populations throughout Asia, beginning in Japan and continuing in North Korea, Indochina, Iraq and Afghanistan, to mention only the most heavily bombed nations...if nuclear weapons defined important elements of the global balance of terror centered on U.S.-Soviet conflict, "conventional" bomb attacks defined the trajectory of the subsequent half century of warfare."

See also

• Allegations of state terrorism by the United States
• Debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

References

1. Harbour, Frances Vryling (=1999). Thinking About International Ethics: Moral Theory And Cases From American Foreign Policy. pp. 133f. ISBN 0813328470. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: extra punctuation (link) CS1 maint: year (link)
2. ^ Wilkins, Burleigh Taylor. Terrorism and Collective Responsibility. Routledge. p. 11. ISBN 041504152X.
3. ^ Selden, War and State Terrorism.
4. Frey, Robert S. (2004). The Genocidal Temptation: Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Rwanda and Beyond. University Press of America. ISBN 0761827439. Reviewed at: Rice, Sarah (2005). "The Genocidal Temptation: Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Rwanda and Beyond (Review)". Harvard Human Rights Journal. Vol. 18. {{cite journal}}: |volume= has extra text (help)
5. Dower, John (1995). "The Bombed: Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japanese Memory". Diplomatic History. Vol. 19 (no. 2). {{cite journal}}: |issue= has extra text (help); |volume= has extra text (help)
6. ^ "Hiroshima; Breaking the Silence". Retrieved 2008-01-30. {{cite web}}: |first= missing |last= (help)
7. Walzer, Michael (2002). "Five Questions About Terrorism" (PDF). 49 (1). Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc. Retrieved 2007-07-11. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help); Unknown parameter |name= ignored (help)
8. Coady, Tony (2004). Terrorism and Justice: Moral Argument in a Threatened World. Melbourne University Publishing. pp. XV. ISBN 0522850499. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
9. Falk, Richard (1988). Revolutionaries and Functionaries: The Dual Face of Terrorism. Dutton. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help); Unknown parameter |city= ignored (|location= suggested) (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
10. Falk, Richard (January 28, 2004). "Gandhi, Nonviolence and the Struggle Against War". The Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research. Retrieved 2007-07-10. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
11. Falk, Richard. "State Terror versus Humanitarian Law",in Selden,, Mark, editor (November 28, 2003). War and State Terrorism: The United States, Japan, and the Asia-Pacific in the Long Twentieth Century. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.. ISBN 978-0742523913. ,45
12. Campanioni, Maria Salomé (2005-08-08). "Chavez Calls Dropping of A-Bomb, 'Greatest Act of Terrorism in Recorded History'". watchingamerica.com. Retrieved 2008-01-30. {{cite news}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
13. "The Avalon Project : The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki". Retrieved 2005-08-06.
14. "Hiroshima Before the Bombing". Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum . Retrieved 2008-03-16.
15. Hanson, Victor Davis (August 05, 2005). ""60 Years Later: Considering Hiroshima"". National Review. Retrieved 2008-03-24. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
16. Hoffmann, Hubertus. "Hiroshima: Hubertus Hoffmann meets the only U.S. Officer on both A-Missions and one of his Victims".
17. "The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima".
18. Selden, Mark (2002-09-09). "Terrorism Before and After 9-11". Znet. Retrieved 2008-01-30.

• Foreign relations of the United States
• Terrorism
• Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki