Truman used to keep a sign on his desk saying "the buck stops here".
OK, Harry, the buck stops with you, too, for the mass-murder of innocent Japanese Christians. We may doubt that God was impressed by your excuses for such an astonishingly foul deed. So you think you're better than Emperor Hirohito? At least he only attacked military targets at Pearl Harbour! Tell that to the Marines, Mr President!
The ruins of St Mary's Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Assumption, Urakami, Nagasaki, after the "Fat Man" dirty Atom Bomb exploded near it, having been dropped by Irish-American air crewShockingly and appallingly, the "Fat Man" A-Bomb dropped on 9 August 1945 in the Catholic district of Nagasaki, a short distance away from Urakami Cathedral, was a "dirty" bomb which was deliberately designed to maximise radiation sickness, so continuing to poison Japanese Catholics even decades after.
Also shocking is the fact that many of the US air crew were of Irish-American stock, including the commander of the B-29 Bomber, Bockscar, who was Major (later Lieutenant Colonel) Charles Sweeney.
Other Irish-Americans included Capt Raymond "Kermit" Beahan, bombardier, Staff Sgt Ray Gallagher, gunner, assistant flight engineer, Staff Sgt Edward Buckley, radar operator.
2nd Lt Fred Olivi, regular co-pilot, may well have been an Italian-American.
The rest of the crew were Capt Charles Donald Albury, co-pilot, Capt James Van Pelt, navigator, Master Sgt John D. Kuharek, flight engineer, Sgt Abe Spitzer, radio operator, and Sgt Albert Dehart, tail gunner.
Ironically, some of the aircrew were Catholic and/or were raised Catholic.
The crew of Bockscar the B-29 that dropped the "Fat Man" A-Bomb on NagasakiAs Robin Wright wrote of Pope John Paul II in The Washington Post on 4 April 2005:
It is a sobering thought, is it not? Catholics used to murder other, innocent, Catholics, blasting them to smithereens.
For what is the deliberate, foreseen, intended killing of innocent civilians in war other than murder? So are we taught by the Catholic doctrine of just war. Let us not forget it!
The smoking ruins of Nagasaki after the "Fat Man" A-Bomb was droppedEqually shocking is the fact that Nagasaki is the sacred site of martyrdom of the Nagasaki Catholic Martyrs of 1597, St Paul Miki and his saintly companions, who were crucified for their Catholic faith by pagan Japanese.
St Paul Miki was born into a rich, military Japanese family who all later converted to Catholicism under the influence of St Francis Xavier SJ.
He was educated by Jesuit missionaries in Azuchi and Takatsuki. He joined the Society of Jesus and preached the Gospel to his fellow citizens. The Japanese government feared Jesuit influences and persecuted them. In 1588, Emperor Cambacundono claimed that he was god, and ordered all missionaries to leave Japan within six months.
Original Japanese portrait of St Paul MikiMiki and his companions did not do so and continued to minister in secret. They were eventually arrested and jailed. He and his Christian peers were forced to walk 600 miles from Kyoto as a punishment against them and the Jesuit community.
Finally they arrived at Nagasaki, the city which had had the most conversions to Catholic Christianity. They did not lament but rejoiced, singing Te Deum to the glory of God.
There they were crucified, in mockery of Christ's own crucifixion, on February 5, 1597.
Miki preached his last sermon, Christ-like, from the cross, forgiving his executioners and calling upon them to recognise that he, too, was Japanese and no foreigner and that he had done them no evil but only worked for the good of his countrymen.
Alongside him died Juan Soan (de Gotó) and Santiago Kisai, of the Society of Jesus, in addition to twenty-three clergy and laity, all of whom were later canonized by Blessed Pope Pius IX in 1862.
As Robin Wright recalled above, Pope John Paul II visited some of the many Catholic victims of the dirty "Fat Man" bomb many years later in a Nagasaki hospital, many of them horribly crippled and wasted by radiation sickness caused by the "Fat Man" A-Bomb.
Japanese Catholic woman at prayer in the new Nagasaki Catholic CathedralThese victims, too, were "Nagasaki martyrs", innocents caught up in a war not of their making and brutally maimed by the shockingly immoral actions of a thoughtless, sinful government.
Oh, man, what a foolish, arrogant, senseless, sinful creature you are! And even decades later you still idly and evilly defend your gross and horrifying sins. How can you be saved if you will not repent?
God forgive us all...
St Paul Miki SJ carries his cross to crucifixionHere are the last words of St Paul Miki, crucified and lanced in the side at Nagasaki on 5 February 1597:
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10 comments:
Catholics' murdering other Catholics in the names of their nations is simply the inevitable consequence of the Satanic "Peace" of Westphalia. What is far more appalling is that many Catholics continue to support the Westphalian principle even to this day.
Alas, all too true!
Tragic indeed. But please inform me what you would have done instead.
Well, anonymous, it is not for me to say how America should conduct its wars and foreign policy save to say that they should not do so immorally.
However, since you ask, I will say at least this:
- Japan had already as good as surrendered before the A-Bombs were dropped. The Soviet Union blocked at least one peace offer but the real problem was Truman's insistence upon unconditional surrender which caused all sorts of problems for the Japanese government who would otherwise have been willing to surrender much earlier. Instead dopey Truman and his war cabinet of short-sighted big-heads insisted on being allowed to dismantle Japan's religion and culture at their good pleasure. That was foolish in the extreme and cost many American lives.
- The A-Bombs should have been used, if at all, on military targets exclusively. The "demonstration" effect would have been the same but without a direct attack upon civilians.
- The same applies to conventional bombing since the carpet bombing of cities caused more damage than the bomb on Nagasaki. That, too, was a war crime.
- Only the very depths of stupidity and/or culpable ignorance, if not actual malice, could cause a US government deliberately to choose the centre of Japanese Christianity as a target. Either the massive US military intelligence machine was incompetent or else the government was plainly malicious.
Truman seems to have shown much of the generally amoral outlook that characterises too many who, like him, belong to the Freemasonic Lodges.
In truth, he and his government were guilty of major war crimes and deserved to be tried along with the Axis leaders at Nuremburg.
But because they were the winners they got away with it.
They will not get away with it in the next world.
Let us hope and pray they all repented or else they will now be spending an eternity in a place worse than the Nagasaki fireball.
A sobering thought.
Tribunus.
Excellent post. I'm an American Catholic living in Korea, have visited both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and had a profoundly religious experience in the latter city before my conversion to the Church.
I've written two articles on the subject: The Holy City of Nagasaki and Japs and A-rabs, Not Fellow Christians.
I've also blogged a great deal about the city:
http://orientem.blogspot.com/search?q=nagasaki
This might be my definitive post: Nagasaki, Mon Amour.
Fascinating posts. Thank you!
My friend's a liverpudlian journalist and lecturer in Patristics living in Japan.
The Japanese version of the second world war is very different to the popular normative western one....
Whichever way one looks or route one takes back through history it invariably returns to the USA resorting to vindictive, intimidating, economically disastrous foreign policies.
Chesterton condemned the US's funding of Prussia and afforded it considerable blame for the rise of Hitlerism. Belloc and AJP Taylor condemned the US for their blackmail of Tsarist and Menshevik Russia [stay in the war or starve to death!] leading directly to circumstances fomenting the Bolshevik revolution.
He cites a long list of factors accumulating over twenty years which destroy any hope of a more liberal, pacified, non-expansionist,less miltarist Japan to which one could apply ameliorating diplomacy ; and when one regresses to the source it's the USA at the heart of the discord - even when it uses its economic power on Britain and France to submit to its will.
The US was behaving like a spoilt brat depriving anyone of anything they could not control.
Japan was forced into war, and the US's idiotic policies made it easier and more necessary for them.
[the Wall street crash destroying three successive Japanese liberal governments to be replaced with militarists, the treaty of washington which actually removed the policing forces and compelled expansionism, the treaty of 1921, the 1924 act alienating asians from the US, the US forcing britain to break its Japanese alliance, the sequestration of oil and all japanese funds in the US]
When it comes to the crunch the US only won the pacific war because it had broken the Japanese military code from 1940 [allowing it to win both guadalcanals], it had radar [thus winning midway] and it had illimitable finances and resources to instigate the ridiculously profligate in lives two pronged attack because admirals and generals couldn't agree on who had the biggest egos.
The Imperial records reveal that Japan sought truces only four months after Pearl harbour when it had succeeded in virtually all its military aims [keeping the US out of their business] , then repeatedly in the stalemate/lull of 1943[significantly after yamamoto's assassination] - but it was all to no avail.
Off-topic : Two things that really infuriate me - first Pearl harbour: They were warned four times that it was happening and did nothing ; plus any military historian could have predicted it as a repeat of the Port Arthur assault in 1904 - the Admiral Fisher proposition that could have prevented world war I - the 'copenhagening'[Nelson] of enemy fleets.
Secondly the lie regarding the illegality of the Pearl harbour assault - it's still the presumed history by most americans [i.e. that Japan only declared war 35 minutes after the bombing started] it's not true ! the japanese declaration was over 5000 words long and it took the US over four hours to translate it.
I'm not attempting to justify japanese aggression or their atrocities or attempting to mitigate anything - but the US was neither utterly innocent or devoid of any culpability in the ensuing events that unnecessarily cost millions of lives.
Very interesting stuff - thank you.
Very well written and thruthful piece. I lived near Nagasaki and visited the sites of St. Paul Miki and the Cathedral, with parts of the old building, in which you can see the disformed stone figures of saints that witnessed the tragedy of the bombing.
Many Japanese Catholics feel that they were victims of a conspiracy cooked up by Freemasonic and antichristian forces. Nothing can stop however the Truth and the Way that is Our Lord Jesus Christ. Some of the most devout Christians I ever met are Japanese. The best is yet to come!
Thanks for that. Yes, I am full of hope for Japanese Christianity.
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