FUSsa-talk Mailing List: Homily on the annihilation of Nagasaki August 9, 1945‏

[MADELINE SIMON (madeline-mpls]

We are not alone in this.  From Dick's P&J list, and Every Church A Peace 
Church.

Peace,
Madeline


Living by the Sword, Dying by the Sword:
A Homily on the Golden Rule and Matthew 26:51-56
 
Repenting of the Annihilation of Nagasaki Christianity by American Christians 
on August 9th, 1945
 
By Gary G. Kohls, MD
 
“And behold, one of those who were with Jesus stretched out his hand and drew 
his sword, and struck the slave of the high priest, and cut off his ear. Then 
Jesus said to him, ‘Put your sword back into its place: for all who take up the 
sword will perish by the sword’…Then all the disciples forsook him and fled.”
 
In 1995, during the 50th anniversary week of the bombings of Hiroshima and 
Nagasaki, I was at Holden Village, a politically and theologically progressive 
Lutheran retreat center in the Cascade Mountains of Washington. During that 
week, there was a one-man play about the life of Harry Truman, the president 
who was in office when the United States dropped the two atomic bombs on Japan. 
The actor portraying President Truman mentioned pointedly that as a young man 
he had kept in his billfold a copy of the Golden Rule (“do unto others as you 
would have them do unto you”), from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Apparently 
Truman had claimed at various times during his life that he consulted the 
Golden Rule whenever he had ethical decisions to make.
 
Later in the monologue, the actor talked about Truman’s decision to order the 
bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two defenseless, mainly civilian targets, 
both of which had been protected, for scientific reasons, from the conventional 
incendiary bombings that had destroyed nearly every major city in Japan during 
the first half of 1945. At the end of the play, the actor mentioned Truman’s 
conviction that ordering the bombings had been the right thing to do, that he 
had never lost any sleep over the decision and that he would do it all over 
again without feeling any pangs of conscience.
 
The grotesque contradiction of that statement coupled with Truman’s professed 
commitment to Jesus’ Golden Rule was too much for me, and so, during the 
question and answer period, I asked for clarification. How, I wanted to know, 
did Truman rationalize what Jesus clearly commanded his followers to do in the 
Sermon on the Mount, with his decision to order the incineration of hundreds of 
thousands of innocent Japanese civilians, especially with his awareness that 
Japan had been searching for a way to surrender with honor for weeks before the 
bombings. All I got was a sputtering defense of Truman’s political decision, 
and, of course, no coherent comment about the Golden Rule.
 
Harry Truman was a Bible-believing person of faith and privilege who obviously 
never felt any remorse for his part in causing the cruel suffering of other 
children of God. But I suspect that if he had been on the ground at Nagasaki in 
the weeks after August 9, instead of half-way around the world in the safety of 
the Oval Office, his cavalier attitude would have probably been different. If 
he had been at ground zero, Truman would have been forced to witness the agony 
of the living dead, pleading for water, pleading for relief from their pain or 
pleading for someone to kill them and put them out of their misery. He would 
have smelled the unforgettable stench of rotting flesh and feces that always 
follow military air strikes. He is also likely to have succumbed to 
radiation-induced malignancies himself as did so many American soldiers and 
Japanese civilians who visited the irradiated cities after the bombings.
 
If Truman had been at ground zero on August 10, 1945, he might not have been so 
proud of American technological superiority. He may have even expressed shame 
at having been part of such atrocities, as have so many other American 
observers of the aftermath. Truman might even have recanted of the deed, asked 
the Japanese for forgiveness, ordered compensation and looked for other ways to 
atone for the crime. If Mr. Truman and the tens of thousands of Manhattan 
Project workers who developed the bombs, and perhaps even the Christian bomber 
crews that dropped them from the safe distance of 31,000 feet, had witnessed 
the end result of their efforts up close and personal, they may have stopped 
cheering their success and instead would have started searching their souls.
 
If Truman’s cabinet ministers, his Joint Chiefs of Staff, his bomber command 
and the military chaplains who were involved in the war had actually been at 
ground zero those with any conscience at all would have experienced acute and 
chronic symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), with overwhelming 
guilt, panic attacks, insomnia, nightmares, flashbacks, depression, shame and 
even suicidality. Their symptoms would have persisted for the rest of their 
lives, as has been the experience of so many victims, perpetrators and 
bystanders of history’s battlegrounds.
 
If Harry Truman had really experienced the carnage of the scorching, 
radioactive fireball that created such a hell on earth for the hundreds of 
thousands of innocent, defenseless civilians, he may even have worked for the 
abolition of war and refused to put so much time, mind and money into the 
post-war development of America’s military machine, its nuclear weapons 
industry and its national security apparatus, all of which have been such 
tremendous curses to the world and to the soul of America.
 
But the problem isn’t just Harry Truman. And it isn’t just WWII. And it isn’t 
just the military. The problem is that most post-Constantinian Christians, 
politicians, war profiteers, super-patriots and the professional officer class 
are willing to cause others to suffer and die when their security is threatened.
 
The problem lies in our nation’s desire for power, prestige, property and 
prerogative.
 
The problem lies in our nation’s unquenchable thirst for retaliation when its 
honor is besmirched.
 
The problem is the church’s silence about, complicity in, or active support for 
its nation’s wars.
 
The problem is that most of Christianity has been nurtured in the type of 
religion that seems to never oppose its nation’s war-mongering until it is too 
late for the war victims, to whom, after the fact, we then pour out our hearts 
in charity.
 
The story of the bombing of Nagasaki is a particularly sordid chapter in the 
history of post-Constantinian Christianity, for on August 9, 1945, an 
all-Christian bomb crew dropped the second atomic bomb on the center of 
Japanese Christianity - the Nagasaki Urakami Cathedral. The massive Cathedral 
was one of the few aiming points that the bombardier had been briefed on and 
the bomb exploded only 500 meters above it. What the Japanese Imperial 
government had tried and failed to do for over 200 years – destroy Japanese 
Christianity - was done by American Christians in 9 seconds.
 
Since the Cathedral was at the epicenter of the blast, most Nagasaki Christians 
who lived in the area did not survive. 6000 Nagasaki Christians died instantly, 
including all who were at confession at 11:02 am that morning. Of the 12,000 
members of the church, eventually 8,500 died as a result of the bomb. Three 
orders of nuns and a Christian girl’s school were incinerated. Tens of 
thousands of innocent people died instantly and hundreds of thousands were 
mortally wounded, some of whose progeny are still in the process of dying from 
the cross-generational contagiousness of the deadly plutonium.
 
Is this the way of Christ? It is not.
 
For rational non-religious people, it should be obvious that the economic and 
psychological costs of war are too high. It should be obvious to the followers 
of Jesus that the spiritual costs of war are way too high.
 
War and violence are equal opportunity destroyers of the soul, whether the 
psychologically and spiritually traumatized humans in the combat zone are the 
victims, the bystanders or the perpetrators.
 
When Martin Luther King was asked what he wanted said at his funeral, he said: 
”Tell the people that Martin King tried to feed the hungry, give drink to the 
thirsty and that he was right on the war question.”
 
And looking back on the true history of the monstrous evil that was the Viet 
Nam war, it was obvious that King was ethically correct when he joined the 
antiwar protest movement, even though that highly ethical, courageous and very 
Christlike stance was an unpopular one. It is generally agreed that King was 
signing his own death warrant when he delivered his famous anti-Viet Nam war 
speech at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967, exactly one year, 
to the day, of his assassination.  The pacifist Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was 
right on the war question - and it cost him his life.
 
The pacifist Gandhi was “right on the war question” when he led his nonviolent 
revolution against British military-enforced economic oppression.
 
The pacifist Christian church of the first 3 centuries was “right on the war 
question” when it refused, on the basis of their understanding of the message 
of Jesus, to allow its members to join Rome’s military.
 
The pacifist Jesus was also “right on the war and violence question” – and it 
cost him his earthly life. “Love your enemies” was not a throwaway line. And 
Jesus meant it when he said to the sword-wielding Peter in the garden of 
Gethsemane: “Put up the sword, for he who lives by the sword, dies by the 
sword.”
 
We American Christians are citizens of the nation that possesses the largest 
collection of lethal weapons in the history of the world – and we have the 
military-industrial-congressional complex that has the willingness to use them. 
Let us not find ourselves on the wrong side of the war question when Judgment 
Day comes, whatever is that reality. Let us learn and teach and adopt into our 
lives the ethical lessons of Nagasaki and Viet Nam before it is too late. Let 
us learn and teach and incarnate the ethics of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount 
and the Golden Rule. Let us learn and teach and incarnate what Jesus modeled 
for us in the way he lived his life – a life of unending mercy, compassionate 
understanding, forgiveness 70 X 7 and the unconditional love of friend, 
neighbor and enemy.
 
If we Christians don’t teach and live what Jesus taught - rejecting violence in 
all its forms, refusing to throw the first stone, rejecting the very human 
desire to retaliate against our enemies, being merciful to the inconvenient 
“least ones”, who is going to teach and live it? If we fail to teach all that 
Jesus taught us, we will find ourselves living by the sword and then we will – 
along with our progeny and the progeny of our friends and enemies – eventually 
wind up dying by the sword, figuratively if not literally; spiritually if not 
physically.
 
We disciples have the crystal-clear model of the nonviolent Jesus to emulate. 
Let us pray for the courage to follow him and not flee him as the pre-Easter 
disciples did. Let us pray for the strength to drop our swords and, in that 
seemingly radical action, minimize the chances of dying by the sword. Our 
children and grandchildren’s futures, the future of the planet and certainly 
the future of Christianity depend on whether or not we disciples, and the 
greater church, finally start teaching and living as Jesus taught and lived.
 
For the past 17 centuries most Christians, contrary to the way of Jesus, have 
been disobediently and faithlessly trying to live by the sword, and it hasn’t 
worked out so well. Jesus showed us the way to live. Let us follow that way. 
Amen.
 
Gary G. Kohls, MD, Duluth, MN for The Community of the Third Way (an Every 
Church A Peace Church local affiliate – www.ecapc.org)