Earlier this month, the anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had conservatives once again defending the U.S. government’s slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
Normally one doesn’t find political pundits devoting entire columns to defending things the government did more than half a century ago, but I can see two reasons why they do so here.
One, of course, is the atrociousness of what the government did. A nuclear attack on a civilian population is so heinous that it might make people think about the violent, criminal nature of their rulers. So you have to keep reminding everyone that it was okay because it was (supposedly, not really) necessary to save grandpa’s life.
The other purpose — for neoconservatives, the main purpose — is to justify in advance doing it again to Persians and others who have been deemed less than human.
This is why libertarians must never shy away from this issue. It’s also why it’s especially disgusting to see the bombings defended in an official publication of my alma mater, Grove City College. What defending mass murder has to do with “Christian scholarship” or the school’s advertised “authentically Christian” education, I can’t fathom. (I would say it’s a new low, but they did it last year, too.)
