Is Democide Mass Murder, or Mass Homicide?

Professor Rudy Rummel, to whom I have linked on several occasions (including several days ago), is an indefatigable supporter of human rights democracy.   After decades spent investigating how and how many people were killed by governments for no clear military purpose, he has come to certain conclusions and defends them unambiguously.  He has no patience for leftists apologists of despots and mass-murderers.   

The same forthrightness and unwillingness to engage in diplomatic niceties seems to compel him to  stick up for his conviction that by any standard, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were democide: unjustifiable murder of innocents by a government.   How can we disagree?  It would take a heart of stone.  I have on many occasions been brought to tears by accounts of the suffering, agony and loss of the bombs.  And yet...did they prevent more suffering and agony and help to prepare the way for peace and prosperity?  But yet again, how can we legitimately  justify such cruelty?

Rummel cites objections made by the US to Japanese bombings of Chinese cities, and it's tough not to see the hypocrisy of the U.S. turning around and claiming that its fire bombings and atomic blasts were fundamentally different.  By all means, read the whole post and the thoughtful comments following it.

If you think I'm misapplying contemporary standards to historical events with regard to which such standards were not recognized, consider: at the time of the Japanese bombing in 1937, the United States and Britain sent diplomatic protests to Tokyo over their barbaric, inhuman, bombing of civilians. And the Prime Minister of Britain stood up in the House of Commons and characterized such bombing as a crime under international law.

If this limited Japanese bombing could be so denounced by the United States and Britain, what could be said of the far deadlier American bombing of Japan (and of the American and British bombing of German cities)? The A-bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and firebombing of Tokyo/Yokohama and other Japanese cities should be considered together. One bomb each on Hiroshima and Nagasaki may have murdered together some 150,000 Japanese almost immediately (the total is much higher by 50,000 or so if one counts those dying from radiation poisoning in the following months or years), but the firebombing of Tokyo/Yokohama alone murdered about 100,000 civilians within a day -- men, women and children, old and helpless, and all unarmed civilians (it is customary to display the photos of the Hiroshima destruction and the mangled and burned bodies of the dead, but not of the piles of burned corpses of those burned alive from the firebombing). This was a war crime, and if Japan had won the war they could have by international law, tried as war criminals President Truman and the top military responsible for the bombing. By the Geneva Conventions it is a crime against humanity to bomb unarmed civilians. There were no military targets directly involved.

Of course, the  word was engaged in 'total war' at that time.  Sherman burned his way through Georgia in order to starve the Confederacy into defeat.  Churchill rallied the Brits by reminding them that they were all in it together.  (I cribbed the following quotes from the Wikipedia entry on total war)

...There is another more obvious difference from 1914. The whole of the warring nations are engaged, not only soldiers, but the entire population, men, women and children. The fronts are everywhere. The trenches are dug in the towns and streets. Every village is fortified. Every road is barred. The front line runs through the factories. the workmen are soldiers with different weapons but the same courage...

Excellent stuff for inspiring the factory worker to increase production so that they produce more and more 'thing-ummy-bobs' necessary for the war effort.

And it's the girl that makes the thing that holds the oil

that oils the ring that works the thing-ummy-bob

that's going to win the war.

But...doesn't that make the girl that makes the thing, etc., etc., a legitimate target of bombing raids?   In the minds, so to speak, of our current suicide murders, are similar justifications being made?  Something along the lines of "it's the girl that's on the pill who rides the bus and flaunts God's will who prompts our terrorist attacks that're justifiable jihad."

No, I don't agree, but I'm not sure how successfully I could argue someone out of such a belief.  I imagine that they would answer, "Well, you kill to ensure freedom and democracy, I kill to bring the kingdom of God to the earth. "  I would answer that they're confusing God's judgment for their own.

While theological giants like St Augustine have struggled to formulate theory, situational ethics and the vagaries inherit in human nature will always trump postulates.   

Comments

[rachjak]

Noah's Arc

Your "answer" in the penultimate paragraph presumes that you share a God with your opponent.

And speaking of confusing God's judgment for one's own, here's a link you'll never find on the Tanuki Ramble (in part, because the profit motive makes some of these leftie rags more difficult to access online!)

http://www.harpers.org/ExcerptTheChristianParadox.html