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“Thank God for the Atom Bomb”


Subdeacon Joe

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A few years old, but still a good read. It starts:

"

Many years ago in New York I saw on the side of a bus a whiskey ad I’ve
remembered all this time. It’s been for me a model of the short poem, and
indeed I’ve come upon few short poems subsequently that exhibited more
poetic talent. The ad consisted of two eleven-syllable lines of “verse,” thus:
In life, experience is the great teacher.
In Scotch, Teacher’s is the great experience.
For present purposes we must jettison the second line (licking our lips, to be
sure, as it disappears), leaving the first to register a principle whose banality
suggests that it enshrines a most useful truth. I bring up the matter because,
writing on the forty-second anniversary of the atom-bombing of Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, I want to consider something suggested by the long debate
about the ethics, if any, of that ghastly affair. Namely, the importance of
experience, sheer, vulgar experience, in influencing, if not determining, one’s
views about that use of the atom bomb.
The experience I’m talking about is having to come to grips, face to face,
with an enemy who designs your death. The experience is common to those
in the marines and the infantry and even the line navy, to those, in short,
who fought the Second World War mindful always that their mission was, as
they were repeatedly assured, “to close with the enemy and destroy him.”
Destroy
, notice: not hurt, frighten, drive away, or capture. I think there’s
something to be learned about that war, as well as about the tendency of
historical memory unwittingly to resolve ambiguity and generally clean up
the premises, by considering the way testimonies emanating from real war
experience tend to complicate attitudes about the most cruel ending of that
most cruel war."
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There are some folks out there, Joe, that just do not believe that a large portion of the world population do not like us, want what we have achieved, and want to KILL US.

 

Ever so often, around September 11, they get a notice, but it is soon forgotten by many, and the PC crowd is quick to point blame elsewhere.

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