Here’s the account of Thomas Moore’s campaign against heretics from Wikipedia:

His early actions against the Protestants included aiding Wolsey in preventing Lutheran books from being imported into England. He also assisted in the production of a Star Chamber edict against heretical preaching, treating heretics mercilessly. During this time most of his literary polemics appeared. After becoming Lord Chancellor of England, More set himself the following task:“ Now seeing that the king’s gracious purpose in this point, I reckon that being his unworthy chancellor, it appertaineth … to help as much as in me is, that his people, abandoning the contagion of all such pestilent writing, may be far from infection. ”

Rumors circulated during and after More’s lifetime concerning his treatment of heretics; John Foxe (who “placed Protestant sufferings against the background of … the Antichrist”)[10] in his Book of Martyrs claimed that More had often used violence or torture while interrogating them. A more recent Evangelical author, Michael Farris, also used Foxe’s book as a reference in writing that in April 1529 a heretic, John Tewkesbury, was taken by More to his house in Chelsea and so badly tortured on the rack that he was almost unable to walk. Tewkesbury was subsequently burned at the stake.[11] More himself refuted these charges throughout his life, swearing ‘as helpe me God’ that he had never used torture as a method of interrogation. He was not a man falsely to invoke the deity and it can be believed that the heretics he detained in his household suffered ‘neuer … so much as a fyllyppe on the forehead’.” [12]

Now, whether this is all “in accordance with the law at the time” is not the issue. It probably was. Which only goes to show that the law of the time violated basic human rights. Which of course you think don’t actually exist. But it doesn’t take much of a liberal to see that what Moore did was criminal, using the law of the time as a shield. Not to mention how these acts are of course a violation of the most basic Christian moral codes Moore was supposedly defending.

Passing laws which allow for grotesque butchery, murder, torture, etc., does not bind everyone to respect such actions as “legal”. If so, then all the murders of the Soviet, Nazi, and Maoist eras were perfectly legal and we have nothing to complain about in them, we are the ones who are guilty of trying to impose our own liberal values on their legal traditions. So sorry to have offended any Nazis out there.

When we are the ones who created the tribunal and gave it our full backing, yes, we are obliged to assent.

Nuremburg did not tear down the law, it built it up. Comparisons to Sir Thomas Moore are simply facetious. By the way, SIr Thomas Moore put a number of people to death simply for being of the Catholic faith. He is the one who used “the law” to pursue the Devil, and made a travesty of justice in the process. That it came back to bite him on his own ass is not something that could not have been predicted. He’s not some kind of hero of law and justice as he like to portray himself, but perverted law and justice in the pursuit of “heretics”.

And I never claimed the Emperor had no power, or didn’t participate in the government. He certainly did have blood on his hands. But everyone knew he was a weakling going along with those who actually ran things. He was no Hitler as you claim, and everyone knew that. So the notion that we were ever going to try him for war crimes is facetious, expectially the notion that it should have been some kind of deal-breaker. And you still ignore the fact that, even while we tried and executed a good number of Japanese leaders, we didn’t even depose the Emperor.

My point about the negotiations for surrender is that we didn’t need the atom bomb to make them happen. It was inevitable by that point. We used the atom bomb to force the negotiations to come to an end in a matter of days, solely because we wanted the war to end before the Russians entered the conflict and began to do in the east what they had already shown themselves doing in the west. If anything was impeding the surrender negotiations, it was the Russians, who were independently talking with the Japanese and trying to draw them out, keeping the war alive so that they could enter and gain a political foothold in the japanese empire, including japan itself. Russia wanted a japanese invasion, so that they could co-occupy Japan as they did in Germany. The citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not killed to save lives, but as part of a geopolitical power play.

“My point is merely that if that is the law under which the Nuremburg trials were held, and that law has been upheld as valid every since, it makes not legal sense not to have put allied leaders on trial for their war crimes as well. It only makes political sense.”

You seem think that when a tribunal makes up law as the tribunal at Nuremberg did, that we as a country are obliged to assent. A more patriotic view would be that having engaged in a farce in 1945, we can decline participation in future and rely instead on our own Code of Military Conduct in deciding the guilt of innocence of our personnel. We have tried and convicted our own in the past and will continue to do so.

Your argument reminds me of the young friend of Thomas Moore who would tare down every legal impediment in pursuit the Devil, only to find that those impediments are the only thing protecting us from the Devil.

If you want to believe that the Emperor was not an official with power in the Japanese government, despite the open testimony of the Japanese themselves, then so be it. I do find it revealing that you continue to claim that the war was over and all we had to do was accept Japanese terms as you, rather than the Japanese, understand them to have a peaceful occupation. Surely this is to make up a false history in the service of your indictment of our war leaders.

I think we agree more than we disagree, so I hesitate to keep flogging this horse; but the subject is important enough that I am happy to learn more about it.

I’m just not aware of any evidence that Japan’s government was open to even “unconditional surrender + guarantee of the imperial dignity.” That’s the compromise that was offered and accepted after Nagasaki, but if Japan made any such offer before August 9, I don’t know of it.

“The bombing was a surprise (I think we dropped vague leaflets in advance); a dud bomb would have been hardly noticed. A demonstration could not be a surprise.”

Surprise wasn’t really an important issue, I think. No one could have imagined such an event anyway, without seeing its results. And a dud bombing would have been no worse than a dud demonstration. In other words, it would have no effect. And the dud bomb would have been found and recovered by theJjapanese in any case, which would have been much worse than a failed demonstration. And really, the chance of a dud wasn’t really a serious issue. The scientists had great confidence in the reliability of their work, especially after the first test bomb.

“I am afraid that the main reason the bomb was used at Hiroshima is that our previous bombings of cities had inured us to the slaughter of civilians, at least when accomplished from the air.”

This is terribly true, and one of the primary reasons not to even go down this road. After a while, the most horrible actions begin to seem routine and rational, and even worse things begin to seem reasonable as well. This is one of the primary reasons not to go down the road of war crimes, because of what it does not just to the enemy, but to us as moral beings. We become the very monsters we had originally determined to fight off, and don’t even notice it. If the war had gone on much longer, if the Germans or Japs had developed nukes as well, the whole world would eventually have been destroyed, and it all would have seemed completely rational and reasonable. As of course later become official military doctrine during the cold war.

“That said, I am not sure what a humane resolution to the war with Japan could have looked like, given the extreme obduracy of the militarist government.”

As of August 5, 1945, accepting the surrender of Japan would have worked out exactly the same as it was after the atomic bombs, in that we never deposed or tried the Emperor anyway.

Also, regarding Gordianus’ arguments about the Emperor, I’ve acknowledged that the Emperor had vestigal power (as does Queen ELizabeth, btw), but in reality he had no actual power. His dismissal of Tojo was, again, merely a formality requested by the high command. He merely went through the motions, just as Queen Elizabeth goes through the motions after every election to formally inviite the winner to form a government. Technically she could as someone else to do so, she has that power, but she never exerciises it.

The point is, everyone on both sides knew that the Emperor was not the leader of the war effort for Japan as Hitler was for Germany. He was pretty much just a young puppet-stooge. So there was no issue as you are trying to make it out that of course we couldn’t allow the Emperor to stay on the throne. Because, of course, we did just that, even when we could have deposed him and put him on trial for war crimes. So your argument, which you say is the crux of our disagreement, simply has no grounding in reality. I would agree with you if he really were the Japanese equivalent of Hitler, but he’s more the Japanese equivalent of George VI – yes, both were kept abreast of and approved the actions of their governments, and formally presided over the appointments and dismissals of government officials, but neither really decided anything, and were certainly not the moving force of the war efforts on either side. So it was a meaningless issue to drop an atom bomb over, as was clearly demonstrated in the occupation that followed.

And yes, I’m aware of the long history of massacres and slaughter from ancient times up to the present. And yes, those acts were crimes. I can assure you that every slaughtered innocent in those times felt exactly the same about their own slaughter as any present day victim of slaughter or murder does. Human criminality is not changed by time and circumstance, it’s only a question of whether the killers can be brought to justice. In the old days, justice meant going over and slaughtering those who slaughtered you, just as criminal justice meant blood feuds between familes and tribes. The whole institution of criminal law was created to prevent the perpetuation of blood feuds. And war crimes laws are there to prevent the perpetuation of similar blood feuds in the arena of war. That’s the whole point of puttihg aggressors and slaughterers on trial – to put an end to the cycle of such crimes by subjecting them to a legal process. Otherwise, there is no end to it.

And to pretend that war crimes have no emotional element to them, that murder is just something like jay-walking, straying over some imaginary line, is to be so completely disassociated from the reality of what these crimes represent as to be incapable of actually dealing with the conflicts involved. If your use of reason is incompatible with emotion, it is a false use of reason, that’s for sure. And to use a word like “squeamishness” to describe the annihilation of hundreds of thousands of human beings? What kind of depraved shadow of reason is that indicative of?

This is the crux of our disagreement.

“I understand that you find the Nuremburg trials questionable. But you have lost that argument to history. The trials occurred, they have been accepted as legal, even though ex-post facto, and defendents were executed or served time in prison. My point is that there is no legal excuse therefore for not bringing allied leaders to trial for their war crimes as well. The only excuse for that is political – to the victor goes the right to judge the vanquished.”

I have not lost the argument to history. WE have lost the argument. By participating in an ex post facto sham trial, we have assented to a “legal” tribunal law based on sentiment. Frankly, your whole argument proceeds from the assumption that there is some universal sentiment against what you deplore and that this universal sentiment somehow constitutes law. It does not. Law defines law.

Since you keep bringing Genghis Khan up, I wonder if you have read the Old Testament. The wholesale slaughter of populations is actually in at least one of the founding documents of our civilization. The wholesale slaughter of the Gauls by Julius Caesar is not studied as an indictment of Rome. Strange as it may seem, the norms of people of different eras differ from yours. I’m sure that the use of terror tactics by the Khan caused great fear. That is what they were intended to do. But to impute adherence to your own own moral scruples to populations in antiquity based on this is a nonsense.

I cannot reason with an argument based emotion. Squeamishness is not law, nor is it a reliable guide to policy.

Sorry, I can’t agree. The bombing was a surprise (I think we dropped vague leaflets in advance); a dud bomb would have been hardly noticed. A demonstration could not be a surprise.

I am afraid that the main reason the bomb was used at Hiroshima is that our previous bombings of cities had inured us to the slaughter of civilians, at least when accomplished from the air.

That said, I am not sure what a humane resolution to the war with Japan could have looked like, given the extreme obduracy of the militarist government.

The Emperor’s role in the government was not entirely passive. He was not opposed to the war plans of the government, and was even a bit enthusiastic about them. But he excercised no actual authority in the process, and was fully submissive to their plans. Things might have been different if he had voiced a passivist, anti-war attitude, and he perhaps could have stopped the war if he’d wanted to, but he might have suffered an “accident” as well. Tojo, the Prime Minister, and his cabinet are the ones who ran the country.

I understand that you find the Nuremburg trials questionable. But you have lost that argument to history. The trials occurred, they have been accepted as legal, even though ex-post facto, and defendents were executed or served time in prison. My point is that there is no legal excuse therefore for not bringing allied leaders to trial for their war crimes as well. The only excuse for that is political – to the victor goes the right to judge the vanquished.

And no, crime is not always a matter of law, especially the further one goes back in history when legal systems were not terribly comprehensive or fair. It is also a matter of ethics, morality, and common sense. Long before Westphalia, I’m sure ordinary people considered the acts of warriors like Ghenghis Khan to be criminal, if unenforceable. The victims of such attrocities I’m sure felt that it was an example of criminal behavior, against the native laws of God and man. You are just playing word games and I think you know it. But even if one argues under your system of legal frameworks, the Nuremburg trials themselves demonstrated a legal framework for trying war criminals in WWII that has been almost universally accepted, and made the basis for all war crimes proceedings since. So in that regard you have no basis for not considering war crimes committed during WWII as not being “criminal”.

Also, you are aware that German leaders were tried at Nuremburg for the crimes of invading Poland and France as you describe? So those acts were indeed considered war crimes at Nuremburg, not just because they targetted civilians, but because they were acts of unprovoked aggression. That they worked to produce a speedy surrender had more to do with the surprise and speed of the attack, and yes, the general confusion they created, which overwhelmed all their defenses, than any kind of desire on the part of the French or Polish governments to stop the killing of their civilians. And as mentioned earlier, attacks on such targets in cities as railroad centers and tracks, even if they resulted in civilian losses, would be legal. But clearly the mass incendiary bombings of cities like Dresden were not necessary to accomplish such a goal, and were clearly used to kill as many civilians as possible.

One aspect of this in the European theater which bear mentioning is that much of these strategic bombings against German civilians were pushed by the British air commanders, who wanted blood revenge pure and simple for the air attacks on England during the war, including the V2 attacks. They knew very well that it had no real strategic value, they just wanted to kill a lot of Germans, because the German air force had killed a lot of English. American air commanders tended to be opposed to these operations, but didn’t want to get in the way of the British, so they went along with it. So lets not pretend that this was really some kind of military campaign.

As for Lemay, the man was a sick bastard. He’s the same guy who wanted to use nukes in Vietnam. Him of the “bomb them back into the stone age” mentality. Is this really anything but a criminal mind in charge of advanced weaponry?

MAD was simply insane. Fortunately, we never got down to actually implementing it. And really, what would you do if the Soviets lauched their first strike attack on us? What would really be accomplished by murdering all their civilians too? We’d all be dead anyway. A number of American Presidents have said they didn’t think they could have gone thourgh with it, they didn’t want that much blood on their hands. But we all had to pretend it was perfectly logical and sane. Murdering one another’s entire country, and possibly the whole world, for what exactly?

I’m glad you admit that targeting population centers was morally wrong. But when a moral wrong means murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, it becomes a criminal wrong also. Otherwise, what’s the point of morality? If we are just to shrug our heads at murder, what’s gone wrong with our heads?

This argument falls prey to Larison’s point in his next post — failure to prosecute past war crimes does not equal innocence of war crimes.

There is, I believe, a substantial body of evidence that Hirohito was not merely a passive observer of Japan’s militarism and aggression.

Dropping the atom bomb on a military base would have been enough, and not a war crime.

That, I admit, is not an idea I recall having seen before. I wonder why it was not tried. I suspect the goal was to put civilian pressure on the gov’t, on the theory that “the people” would rise up. That of course does not legitimate the bombing of cities.

Many at the time even suggested droppiing it on an unihabited island as a demonstration of what we could do.That would have been just as effective as Hiroshima.

Now, that I have never agreed with, simply because the bombs were too new. There had been exactly one A-bomb explosion before Hiroshima. Even if the scientists were convinced it would work, Truman and his cabinet would have to have feared convening Japanese observers (& probably those of other countries as well) to watch a failed test. The morale-building effect on Japan would have been dreadful.

Japanese cities were a bit different in that Japanese war production was very much diffused in the cities. Still in retrospect targeting Japan’s population centers after a certain point was probably for the sake of pressure on the government. I know that LeMay’s intelligence people were complaining that they were running out of significant targets to bomb by the time the decision to drop the bomb came. And still the Japanese would not give up.

I make clear that I find the Nuremberg trails questionable, both legally and from a practical point of view. Morally, the idea of the Soviets military judges passing judgment on Nazis is black humor.

Crime is always a matter of law. I understand and share your horror at atrocities but the prosecution of crime requires reference to law if it is not to be just a matter of vengeance. You are quite wrong about the Axis Powers trying our leaders in a tribunal. They rarely if ever did that. They just went out and executed those they thought might make trouble for them. It is only we and the Communists that pretended our mortal enemies were criminals.

“Indiscriminately bombing cities and killing civilians did not end either war much faster than it would have without committing such war crimes.” In fact The German victory over both Poland and France was in part due to the tactic of bombing civilian centers in order to create refugees who would clog the roads and interfere with the opponent armies mobility. The allied bombing of populated city rail centers did hasten the collapse of Germany.

By your lights mutually assured destruction during the Cold War may not have been justified, but having been saved by the tactic, I’m willing to let it slide. If the US decided to target only disbursed USSR military assets and the commies chanced an assault on our cities, would that have been more moral in your view?

“But it has been known for a very long time that deliberately targetting civilians is out of bounds and thus criminal.” Actually until the treaty of Westphalia, it was common practice. Populations in walled cities were bombarded without mercy. The norms you want to apply to everyone from Ronald Reagan to Genghis Khan are specifically Western Christian norms. Pretending that the family of man agrees with you on what we all know is criminal is a delusion.