President Obama on May 22nd, 2016 in Hiroshima, took measure of the Memorial Day weekend to attempt to memorialize the tremendous loss of life that occurred in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945 as the extreme spasm of a world lost in aggressive impulses without steadying institutional control.
The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.
That is why we come to this place. We stand here in the middle of this city and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell. We force ourselves to feel the dread of children confused by what they see. We listen to a silent cry. We remember all the innocents killed across the arc of that terrible war and the wars that came before and the wars that would follow.
Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering. But we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.
He stated further:
And since that fateful day, we have made choices that give us hope. The United States and Japan have forged not only an alliance but a friendship that has won far more for our people than we could ever claim through war. The nations of Europe built a union that replaced battlefields with bonds of commerce and democracy. Oppressed people and nations won liberation. An international community established institutions and treaties that work to avoid war and aspire to restrict and roll back and ultimately eliminate the existence of nuclear weapons.
Still, every act of aggression between nations, every act of terror and corruption and cruelty and oppression that we see around the world shows our work is never done. We may not be able to eliminate man’s capacity to do evil, so nations and the alliances that we form must possess the means to defend ourselves. But among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.
A horrible event occurred in Hiroshima seventy-one years ago, but is what President Obama describes really the means to assure the prevention forever of passive death of innocents in the face of ever more destructive technology? Was the absence of institutional control the reason for the advancement to actual use of an atomic weapon? Would more institutions and treaties to eliminate weapons present prior to a war provide the means to prevent war or development of such weapons? The tough historical truths are that global organizations such as the League of Nations were useless in preventing global conflict, and the atomic weapon, though no more objectively destructive in lives than any number of other catastrophic weaponry used before it, proved philosophically the precise tool to end the global conflict and prevent large scale conflict for the next seventy years.
The prevention of war and avoidance of death for countless innocents has too many times been left passively in the hands of organizations that looked at vigilance and strength as mechanisms for starting wars, not preventing them. President Obama sees the start of WorldWar II for America, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor and the climatic end of the war, the atomic bomb dropped on Japan, as equivalent evils of aggression against innocents. The avoidance of the concept of good and evil is an important foundation for all liberal progressive thought. It is important to see all conflict as primeval genetically driven aggression of individuals, requiring the continual regulation of more objectively minded institutions to suppress the baser reflex. Aggression is driven by animal greed, need for dominance, religious and nationalist fervor that clouds any rational human thought. The idea that a moral dilemma would arise, that would require recognition of evil, and the need to surmount and defeat evil intent, is alien to progressive thinkers like Obama. All versions of society are relative and need only understanding is what has been responsible for many of the darker periods of human conflict. The society that evolved the evil that led to the tens of millions of deaths prior to Hiroshima, was finally stopped by the society that marshaled its goodness into the overwhelming might of the atomic weapon.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Edmund Burke
The brilliant British parliamentarian Burke got to the core of human conflict that progressives like Obama always fail to grasp, that it is the value system, not the weaponry, that defines momentum to conflict. The individual soldier does not defend a series of treaties or a constellation of institutions, but a bedrock of ideas. The American Revolutionary left his home to defend the abstract cause of free will against a distant tyranny. The Civil War soldier on both sides felt he was defending his homeland against invasion, the southerner from the federalist north, the northerner against the rebel insurrector. The World War II soldier saw the spectacular evil of totalitarian society impressing its collectivist values against the individual freedoms to such an extent that genocides were institutionalized and remorselessly codified. The atomic bomb was achieved in a race between the defenders of freedom who achieved the technology by an chronological eyeblink over the evil, genocidal societies that would not have hesitated for a moment its use. The soldier defending individual freedom and free will, is there to defend, and at times die, for a concept larger than life itself, if it means that liberty survives for others to benefit and propagate. No treaty will have such power to defend against evil, or to assure its destruction.
On this Memorial Day we do not glorify the treaties that were designed to suppress aggression, or the wars that were fought to promote institutions. We memorialize the individuals who recognizing their own humanity, could grasp the greater values that life offers, and propel themselves to serve and at times sacrifice for the survival of a good that would many times outlive them. Wars are not won by old men protecting present realities, but by young men envisioning a better world they, through their sacrifice, personally can secure for others. President Reagan was the great communicator and visionary that President Obama could never remotely be, because Reagan could articulate this basic truth, and recognize this basic good. Obama’s moral equivalence only permits the seeds of future conflicts by creating passivity when vigilance and preemption is necessary. President Reagan understood what elevates men and women beyond their own survival instincts toward a greater truth that in the end protects us all from the slide to oblivion. In the larger sense, it is not sacrifice that is memorialized, but the individual life that briefly burned so bright for an abstract value that might possibly build a better, freer world.
God Bless all who serve. God Bless all who defend. God Bless all who feel the calling. We know what you have done for us, and we will never forget.