I am surprised that in your generally conservative and pro-Christian magazine not one of the four articles debating the pros and cons of dropping the Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (August 2020 Chronicles) presents the orthodox Christian evaluation of that literally earth-shattering decision.
Indeed, that orthodox position is not even addressed by your authors. It evades their radar screens as totally as ‘Enola Gay’ did those of the Japanese. One of the four, C. Jay Engel, does indeed argue (in “The Tragedy of the Atomic Bomb”) that the bombings were unethical, but only on the grounds that their bad effects outweighed the good. Mr. Engel argues that Japan was already effectively defeated, and that the war could have been speedily ended by negotiating a conditional surrender that satisfied American requirements without inflicting further massive killings and lasting injuries on Japanese noncombatants.
However, the orthodox Christian verdict has to be that this slaughter of large civilian populations was an intrinsically evil act. It should therefore have been discerned as morally unjustifiable even prior to any cost-benefit calculus, such as trying to estimate which option would eventually result in a greater or lesser loss of life. Indeed, the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be seen as a textbook example of violating the biblical teaching that we may never “do evil that good may come” (Romans 3:8)—popularly expressed as “the end doesn’t justify the means.”
In 1945 only a few countercultural Americans, including the renowned Jesuit scholars John Ford and Leonard Feeney, condemned the bombings for the above reason. Braving inevitable denunciation by a war-weary and victory-elated public, they pointed out that if such direct killing of innocent men, women, and children born and unborn could be justified for a supposedly greater good, such reasoning would torpedo Catholic teaching against abortion—and indeed, against all other behaviors that Christians have traditionally considered intrinsically immoral. While very few U.S. bishops spoke out at the time in support of these beleaguered priests, nearly all the American hierarchy signed off 20 years later on the second Vatican Council’s declaration that, “Every act of war directed to the indiscriminate destruction of whole cities…with their inhabitants is a crime against God and man which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation” (Gaudium et spes, 80).
—Fr. Brian W. Harrison, O.S., S.T.D.
St. Louis, Mo.
The Right List of Reds
In a recent discussion of my book American Betrayal (“Vestigial Reds” March 2020 Chronicles) Editor-in-Chief Paul Gottfried conveyed the impression that the late M. Stanton Evans, author of Blacklisted by History, and I both were taken to task for “misidentifying some accused Communists,” and that I “came under especially heavy fire for misnaming ‘Source 19’ as known Communist agent Harry Dexter White.”
As a student of Evans’ work, I have never known him to misidentify any accused Communists. In my own case, I was neither accused of misnaming “Source 19” as Harry Dexter White, nor would I do so. Interested parties may turn to pages 147 and 148 of American Betrayal, where I describe the groundbreaking research into the identity of Source 19 in a Venona cable by U.S. Air Force historian Eduard Mark, whose painstaking analysis led him to conclude that it was “probable virtually to the point of certainty” that Source 19 was top FDR aide Harry Hopkins (Mark did not regard Hopkins as any kind of a Soviet agent, however). Soviet expert Herbert Romerstein and Eric Breindel concurred with Mark’s finding, while Britain’s dean of espionage history, Christopher Andrew, and KGB defector Vasili Mitrokhin called Mark’s essay “detailed, meticulous and persuasive.”
What followed in my book, among other things, was my own examination of what Hopkins actually did in his position of immense power and proximity to the president (he even lived in the White House for several years during World War II). Notably, my detractors ignore this compendium of Hopkins’ activities, fixating on the earlier research into the identity of Source 19, which they dispute, just as if that single piece of paper were the only existing evidence of Hopkins’ perfidy. It is not.
—Diana West
(location withheld at request)
Prof. Gottfried responds:
Despite some demurs about my treatment of her work, I am delighted that Ms. West has responded to my overall favorable discussion of her defense of the “McCarthy witch hunt.” Like her, I believe McCarthy and his committee went after real, flesh-and-blood Soviet agents. I also applaud Ms. West for rising to the defense of M. Stanton Evans and his meticulous study of McCarthy’s investigation of suspected Communist agents. Although at one time most self-described conservatives would have joined this defense, times have changed, and now the “conservative movement” has taken the same position on the supposed horrors of the McCarthy era as the leftist press.
There are two controversial positions that Ms. West has taken on the McCarthy hearings and the revelations about Soviet agents after World War II. I fully agree on the larger issue but disagreed in my comments in March on what seems the less significant one. Contrary to the judgment of Harvey Klehr and John Earl Haynes, I think that Ms. West and Stan Evans were right that the McCarthy hearings exposed Communist agents, and indeed more than a few of them. These agents might have been otherwise exposed, but it is wrong to present the hearings as having little basis in fact.
The issue that I might have judged too emphatically concerned the role of FDR’s ubiquitous, leftist aid Harry Hopkins as the Soviet mole mentioned in the Venona Papers as Source 19. Although most sources that I have seen identify the already-known Communist agent Laurence Duggan as Agent 19, former Communist Herbert Romerstein momentously pointed to Hopkins as the agent in question. Since I don’t know enough about the relevant research to offer a definitive opinion, I may have been hasty in ascribing an error to Ms. West.
Image Credit:
above: ruin of the the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, which was destroyed by the atomic blast on Aug. 6, 1945. It is now commonly called the Genbaku Dome, and is part of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima, Japan (Suicasmo/Wikimedia)
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