Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 41 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
The moral tug-of-war appears to be between two essential principles; no one may do evil to bring about a good, and the lesser of two evils is permissible.
I’m glad I wasn’t Harry Truman, having to make that decision.
How far we’ve come down as a civilization where our leaders now aggressively defend the taking of millions of innocent life and the wanton sale of their bodies and parts for..ugh…profit!
War: Hemingway knew (WWI and Spanish Civil War) war up close and personal. He wrote, “War is a crime. Go ask the infantry. Go ask the dead.”
You can justify war, but that doesn’t make it any less a crime/sin.
Meanwhile, the liberal, Hiroshima whiners are dumb on abortion, artificial contraception, class hatred, gay privileges, race hatred, satanic brainwashing of public school children, etc.
“How far we’ve come down as a civilization where our leaders now aggressively defend the taking of millions of innocent life and the wanton sale of their bodies and parts for..ugh…profit!”
Yep, and how many Catholics today will scream about Hiroshima seventy years ago who don’t say a peep about Planned Parenthood, and/or who give their votes to the Democrat Party that views abortion as a sacred rite? By no means are all Catholic critics of Hiroshima in that category, for example Anscombe was a firm pro-lifer, but enough are to make the hypocrisy we will doubtless see on display today truly nauseating.
Yep, and how many Catholics today will scream about Hiroshima seventy years ago who don’t say a peep about Planned Parenthood, and/or who give their votes to the Democrat Party that views abortion as a sacred rite?
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Speaking somewhat impressionistically, I’d say those who are argumentative on this issue appear to be alt-right types for the most part, who vote Democratic (if they do) as an expression of general perversity (Scott McConnell, etc). Others are oddball populists like the chap who wrote the “From the Mail” column in The Wanderer (though I do not recall that he himself has written on this issue). Liberal Catholics tend to favor disputes in which they can display their sophistication tail feathers, not their moral tail feathers.
These men wish the bomb had been dropped a little sooner. God bless their eternal souls.
http://www.aleteia.org/en/religion/article/video-rare-footage-of-a-catholic-mass-aboard-a-ship-on-its-way-to-iwo-jima-5300417638432768
I think what upsets people is the enormity of what Little Boy did at Hiroshima. A single ten thousand pound bomb, of which 161 pounds was U-235, no more than 2 pounds of which underwent fission, released the energy equivalent of 30 million pounds of tnt, accomplishing nearly instantaneously what otherwise would have taken however long it would have taken for “220 B-29s carrying 1,200 tons of incendiary bombs, 400 tons of high-explosive bombs, and 500 tons of anti-personnel fragmentation bombs” to achieve the same result.(source)
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Of course, it was that enormity which compelled the Japanese to surrender, as Fr. Miscamble remarked. But still, maybe it would have been better if we had killed Hiroshima the old fashioned way.
“But still, maybe it would have been better if we had killed Hiroshima the old fashioned way.”
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Well, that is one thing that would have made people forget about Hiroshima. The other is, of course, the next nuclear war.
Yeah, but see, maybe we would have been the victims in that nuclear war, and for some people, there’s no higher status than Victim
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–not even Celebrity.
True, but my money is on South- or Southwest Asia.
Ernst –
energy equivalent is a bad metric; the incendiary bombs alone would have a large secondary “energy” because…well, you’ve seen how the old Japanese stuff was built, and I’m guessing you can imagine what the wind off of the sea would be like.
*shudder* Right up the ridges in the hills, and if it wasn’t Americans dropping them, then there wouldn’t be the “run away, NOW” warning to the Japanese civilians….
I just think it’s interesting that we could have accomplished the same death and destruction by conventional means, so my question for the critics of the A-bomb is what exactly is it about the atomic bombing that you find so morally objectionable?
Sorry couldn’t get through the article. A mass of words!
Some simple formatting ie more paragraphs would make it an easier read plus being in blue is not ideal either.
If you want to get your views/ideas across you have to make the content easy to consume and the above isn’t.
I have this section of the article written by Father Miscamble in the same five paragraphs he had. As for the blue, when I link to another article, as I do here, the linked passage shows blue on the blog. Try clicking on the blue and you will go to the original text. It is well worth reading.
The good Fr. Wilson fails to identify that many tens of thousands of faithful Catholics were murdered of these three Orders of Nuns who took care of the sick at the Catholic Hospital and the two Priests who were hearing Confessions of many Catholics when the Cathedral took a direct hit. But most of all out of all the Catholic churches that were consumed by the radioactive fireball were all the Tabernacles holding the living Body of Christ. Christ suffered as much and that is very telling in this horrible event but much overlooked and Judgment Day that is sure to come shall be very interesting on our Lords Witnessing the event from His Churches.
I wonder how many Catholic churches were destroyed by Japan during its war of conquest and how many priests and nuns, not to mention ordinary Catholics, were murdered by the sons of the Rising Sun? Considering that the Japanese killed some twenty million people, the Catholic portion probably exceeded a million. An estimated one million Filipinos died as a result of the Japanese invasion and most of them would have been Catholic.
“In the Battle of Manila from February to March 1945, the United States Army and the Philippine Commonwealth Army advanced into the city of Manila to drive out the Japanese. During lulls in the battle for control of the city, Japanese troops took out their anger and frustration on the civilians in the city. Violent mutilations, rapes, and massacres occurred in schools, hospitals and convents, including San Juan de Dios Hospital, Santa Rosa College, Santo Domingo Church, Manila Cathedral, Paco Church, St. Paul’s Convent, and St. Vincent de Paul Church.[1]:113 Dr Antonio Gisbert told of the murder of his father and brother at the Palacio del Gobernador, saying, “I am one of those few survivors, not more than 50 in all out of more than 3000 men herded into Fort Santiago and, two days later, massacred.”
The US defeated a great evil in the Pacific War and Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought the curtain down on a shower of bloodshed that people today are almost completely ignorant of, except for the politicized condemnation of the US for the blood shed to bring the whole business to a mercifully rapid close.
Here is a particularly gruesome account of a massacre in the chapel of De La Salle University in Manila. Most of the clergy killed were German citizens, BTW, and so in theory protected by Japan’s treaty obligations (was that not racism?). Read it and ask, how could a hypothetical Japanese A-bomb attack on Manila have been worse?
http://www.pinoyexchange.com/forums/showthread.php?t=334445
Don, I was about to respond to Sixtus, as a result of long research I once did for a book on Bataan and the Philippines.
But after reading your much more informed response to Sixtus (about his moral equivalency attempt), I stand humbled.
College kids in skivvies sitting around the dorm at 2AM and sanctimonious hypocrites, liberals and progressives can whine about the A bombs as most hadn’t lived (if you can call it living) with instant death and dismemberment. That’s my final ad hominem for today.
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Final word to the sanctimonious from my Uncle Bob (RIP), he was a machinist mate/engine rooms in USN Liberty ships, on Hiroshima/Nagasaki. “The A bombs saved my life.” His only other response (catch-all “brevity is the soul of wit” response for all hypocrites, liberals and progressives) would have been, “Screw you.”
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