![\"\"](\"http:\/\/consistent-life.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/1-blog-book.jpg\")
Paul Fussell, a literary critic and World War II veteran, wrote an essay<\/a> in the 1980s with the arresting title \u201cThank God for the Atom Bomb.\u201d A passionate defense of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Fussell\u2019s essay is still sometimes invoked today<\/a> by bombing supporters.<\/p>\nHowever, Fussell\u2019s argument is seriously flawed\u2014and notably similar to one used by advocates for abortion access.<\/p>\n
Fussell\u2019s argument resembles the standard defense: dropping atomic bombs on two cities forced Japan to surrender without a costly US invasion of Japan and thus ultimately saved more American and Japanese lives than were lost in the bombings. Bombing supporters emphasize the extreme violence of the US-Japanese war, US plans to invade Japan in late 1945, and the invasion\u2019s probable high casualties. Many aspects of this defense are unsound, such as claims that more lives were saved<\/a> in the long run and that this justifies indiscriminate bombing<\/a>.<\/p>\n However, Fussell\u2019s defense is fundamentally quite different from the standard version. The heart of his essay isn\u2019t the total number of lives saved versus those lost but the experiences and attitudes of American troops. Fussell\u2019s theme is the role of \u201cexperience, sheer, vulgar experience, in influencing, if not determining, one\u2019s views.\u201d<\/p>\n For those combat troops who would have been involved in an invasion of Japan\u2014and Fussell was one\u2014the atomic bombings and war\u2019s subsequent end seemed a reprieve from near-certain death.<\/p>\n Fussell quotes various combat veterans, but the essay\u2019s most powerful passage is on his own reaction:<\/p>\n My division, like most of the ones transferred from Europe, was to take part in the invasion of Honshu\u2026 I was a twenty-one-year-old second lieutenant of infantry leading a rifle platoon. Although still officially fit for combat, in the German war I had already been wounded in the back and the leg badly enough to be adjudged, after the war, 40 percent disabled. But even if my leg buckled and I fell to the ground whenever I jumped out of the back of a truck, and even if the very idea of more combat made me breathe in gasps and shake all over, my condition was held to be adequate for the next act. When the atom bombs were dropped and news began to circulate that [the invasion of Japan] would not, after all, be necessary, when we learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy. We were going to live. We were going to grow to adulthood after all. (Thank God for the Atom Bomb and Other Essays<\/em>, p. 28)<\/p>\n Fussell contrasts his and other veterans\u2019 combat experience with the lack of such experience among various critics of the bombings. Journalist Bruce Page was only nine years old in 1945, while historian Michael Sherry was \u201cgoing on eight months old, in danger only of falling out of his pram.\u201d<\/p>\n Even contemporaries who served in the military Fussell deems inadequately experienced, if they didn\u2019t see combat. Historian David Joravsky \u201ccame into no deadly contact with the Japanese\u201d; and veteran J. Glenn Gray \u201cexperienced the war at [headquarters] level.\u201d The economist and bombing critic John Kenneth Galbraith \u201cworked in the Office of Price Administration in Washington\u201d during the war, Fussell observes. He adds, \u201cI don\u2019t demand that he experience having his ass shot off. I merely note that he didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n The attitude toward the atomic bombings among veterans such as Fussell, who had already been through the horror of combat, is entirely natural and understandable. Had I been in their situation, I\u2019m sure I would\u2019ve had the same relieved reaction. I don\u2019t condemn Fussell or other combat veterans, as people, for being glad for the war\u2019s end and, by extension, for the atomic bombings.<\/p>\n However, I will critique Fussell\u2019s essay for not being persuasive. I see three crucial problems with his argument:<\/p>\n First, Fussell assumes, almost without question, that the only options available for ending the Pacific War were either an invasion of Japan or atomic bombing. He largely doesn\u2019t consider the option of the United States and Japan reaching some kind of negotiated truce.<\/p>\n Second, Fussell doesn\u2019t consider that the combat troops\u2019 understandable personal concern about what happened next in the Pacific in 1945 didn\u2019t necessarily make them the best judges of the situation. Desperate, often traumatized, people with a significant personal stake in a situation don\u2019t necessarily make the kind of careful, far-seeing decisions that should ideally shape foreign policy.<\/p>\n Third, and most important, Fussell\u2019s argument from personal experience ignores a crucial set of personal experiences: those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki\u2019s residents. For those tens of thousands of Japanese whom the bombings killed, maimed, or forever deprived of family members, \u201csheer, vulgar experience\u201d provided a very different conclusion about the correctness of dropping the bombs. As one commentator observed<\/a>, the \u201cexperience thing cuts both ways.\u201d<\/p>\n I see no reason why the experience of Allied combat troops slated to invade Japan should trump that of the men, women, and children killed in the atomic bombings. Fussell laments that combat veterans who support the bombings \u201chave remained silent about what they know.\u201d Yet the voices of at least 100,000 residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have also been silenced, in a far more definitive way.<\/p>\n Granted, a bombing advocate could respond by arguing that a diplomatic resolution to the war was unrealistic; that a government\u2019s first responsibility is to take care of its own people, including its troops; or that the bombings ultimately saved more lives than were lost. Whatever one thinks of such arguments, though, they make Fussell\u2019s appeal to personal experience irrelevant. These arguments involve a dispassionate assessment of the situation, the kind of armchair theorizing that Fussell scorns when done by bombing opponents. The personal experiences of combat veterans, powerful though they are, don\u2019t prove anything by themselves.<\/p>\n Fussell\u2019s claim that only one group of people, those directly affected by an act of violence, can credibly make judgments on this act is similar to claims made by advocates for abortion access. While Fussell argues that only combat troops slated to invade Japan can speak with authority on the atomic bombings, pro-choice advocates sometimes argue that only women can speak with authority on abortion.<\/p>\n This is reflected in the slogan \u201cNo Uterus, No Opinion.\u201d It\u2019s reflected in the (highly questionable) claim<\/a> that most pro-life leaders are men<\/a> who will never be pregnant. Alesha Doan, a pro-choice public-affairs professor at the University of Kansas, comments<\/a> that \u201cI think [abortion] has been defined as exclusively a women\u2019s-rights issue that therefore has to only be dealt with by women.\u201d (Doan and other pro-choicers have even expressed concern<\/a> about this attitude, in some cases because it alienates potential pro-choice male allies.)<\/p>\n Moreover, this pro-choice emphasis on experience could be taken a step further to exclude anyone who hasn\u2019t been through a crisis pregnancy\u2014much as Fussell rejects the perspective of troops who didn\u2019t experience combat. The cartoonist Lynda Barry, who writes powerfully about getting an abortion amid dire personal circumstances, sounds a similar note as Fussell, writing of anti-abortion protesters, \u201cThose people out there, they come from another world. They\u2019ll never know what it means to come from our street.\u201d (Harper\u2019s Magazine, <\/em>November 1992, p. 46)<\/p>\n However, the position that only women or only those who have faced crisis pregnancies can speak credibly on abortion has the same fundamental problem as Fussell\u2019s position. This stance excludes the interests of other people centrally concerned with abortion: the children in the womb who are killed by it. Again, the experience thing cuts both ways. One could turn around the familiar slogan to say \u201cNo Threat of Death by Dismemberment, No Opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n Pro-choice advocates could respond that a human organism in the womb doesn\u2019t have the same rights as a pregnant woman. Or they could argue that the woman\u2019s rights trump whatever rights the child in the womb might have. However, as with the atomic bombings, raising these types of arguments again moves us away from direct personal experience and into larger abstract issues that someone can analyze without having \u201csheer, vulgar experience.\u201d<\/p>\n Personal experience certainly matters, especially in situations as serious as war or crisis pregnancies. People who face such situations deserve our utmost sympathy and support. Those of us who haven\u2019t faced these situations \u2013 and never will \u2013 should be exceedingly humble and shouldn\u2019t condemn people in these situations.<\/p>\n We also shouldn\u2019t let our lack of experience lead us to abandon our own judgment or concern for the lives of all the people involved. Rather, we should apply ourselves to finding nonviolent responses to situations that are all too often dealt with through violence, whether from a suction machine or an atom bomb.<\/p>\n =======================================<\/p>\n For more of our posts on the theme of men’s say in abortion policy, see:<\/em><\/p>\n What Do Men Have to Say on Abortion?<\/a><\/p>\n If Men Could Get Pregnant\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n How Abortion is Useful for Rape Culture<\/a><\/p>\n The Myth of Sexual Autonomy<\/a><\/p>\n For more of our posts on the theme on the atomic bombings and their aftermath, see:<\/em><\/p>\n Rejecting Mass Murder: Looking Back on Hiroshima and Nagasaki<\/a><\/p>\n The Wages of War, Part 1: How Abortion Came to Japan<\/a><\/p>\n Wages of War, Part 2: How Forced Sterilization Came to Japan<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cRemember Pearl Harbor\u2014Keep \u2018Em Dying\u201d: War and Racism in the Pacific<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cEverybody Else in the World Was Dead\u201d: Hiroshima\u2019s Legacy<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\nThe Experiences Left Out<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/consistent-life.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/1-blog-bombing.jpg\")
<\/p>\n\u201cNo Uterus, No Opinion\u201d<\/strong><\/h3>\n
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/consistent-life.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/1-blog-uterus-300x179.jpg\")
<\/p>\n