Hiroshima

When the sculptor Mowry Baden and I were young punks, we sometimes would apologize for one another to anyone nearby. “I’d like to apologize for the shirt my friend decided to wear this morning” etc. The joke, of course, was that it makes no sense to apologize for something someone else has done. Soon President Obama is going to visit Hiroshima, and most of my friends want him to apologize for the nuclear holocaust Truman committed before Obama was born. That would not bring back the dead, and it would not address the central crime, which goes unmentioned even by Amy Goodman.

At the start of the Second World War, America had a policy in place that forbad the deliberate bombing of civilians. Gen. Jimmy Doolittle, who led our bombers in Europe, was adamantly opposed to bombing civilians, as was FDR in the beginning. The British, however, decided that bombing German civilians might scare them into quitting the war. The Brits won the argument with us, Doolittle was relieved of command, Berlin was bombed, Hitler retaliated, and the race to the bottom was on. 

We tend to focus on whatever weapon gets used. Right now it is drones. It used to be bombs. The actual war crime is simple. It’s a crime to kill civilians on purpose. It doesn’t matter whether you use an a-bomb, a drone, a knife or wear a vest filled with explosives. It’s a war crime to target civilians.