A couple of days ago, Morgenländer posted some quotes from General Eisenhower, in which the general said that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unnecessary, because Japan was already defeated and they knew it.
Here is an article from Sunday's Boston Globe which tells of a historian who goes one step further and says it was actually the Russian declaration of war on Japan that was the determining factor in the decision to surrender.
If that thesis is correct, it bolsters the argument that is often made that our insistence on "unconditional" surrender was a motive for the Japanese to continue to fight even though they knew they were defeated.
An der Grabstätte von Kronprinzessin Cecilie
1 week ago
2 comments:
As long as their emperor doesn't think he's God, I guess...
I've been thinking about this off and on. Maybe I should even do a post about the idea of divinity in cultures which have not achieved what Eric Voegelin calls "the leap in being," which means the realization that there is a reality which transcends nature. He sees the leap in being occurring more or less contemporaneously in ancient Israel, in Greek philosophy, and with the Buddha. I forget if he brings China in as well.
So if divinity is thought of as immanent in the universe, rather than transcendent, it would seem that the divinity of the Japanese Emperor was not understood in the same way we understand divinity. How the arrival of Buddhism in Japan affected the Shinto outlook is another question.
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