The Guardian has chosen to give space for marking this latest - 63rd - anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima to John Pilger. What a lack of seriousness in a serious newspaper. And what a farrago he rewards the paper with. Not to be altogether ungenerous in assessment, however, let me start by saying that I think Pilger gets one thing right. He says:
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality.
I know, from when I have said why I for my part think the bombing of Hiroshima was a war crime and have said why I think nuclear weapons are criminal by their very nature, that there are readers of this blog who disagree. But I don't see how one can claim that weapons which must, when used, kill tens and tens of thousands of non-combatants are usable non-criminally - unless it is by simply setting aside the idea that there are laws of war and crimes against humanity, and setting aside, accordingly, the belief in any peremptory norms governing political conflict (as, for example, in prohibiting terrorism), ruling out the deliberate killing of the innocent. I am aware that in war, as in life, it is sometimes necessary to do one wrong in order to prevent another, but even justified in that way, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have to be acknowledged to have been a crime - an evil to prevent some greater evil - and, as it happens, I don't think the justification is persuasive in this case.
So much for agreement. Apart from that point, Pilger's piece is thick with half-truth and casual innuendo. First, he gives us that 'apologists [for the bombing] have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate "good war"'. Mythology?! This is, to my knowledge, a novel step even on (what I shall call here) the lousy part of the left. Typically, those who speak for it do allow that the Second World War was a good(ish) war and only take their distance from all the subsequent wars in which some revolting tyranny has been confronted by external forces, generally more democratic forces these, but unsuitably 'imperialist'. But WWII? I mean, who wants to be seen as of ambiguous leanings over what was at stake back then, in the face of Nazism and the Axis powers? Pilger dips his toe in the water: 'mythology', he utters. By change of watery metaphor, a deeper current trickles up through the surface here. Does the condemnation of the later wars generate a question mark about an earlier one?
Next, we have what has become a standard trope in lousy-leftist denialism: the denial that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has ever threatened the destruction of Israel (on which see here). And next after that, we have that the nuclear threat putatively posed by Israel is 'unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the media'. Like another Guardian regular, Martin Jacques, Pilger says 'unmentionable' while mentioning the alleged unmentionable, and in the media even. But note the deeper current once more: those not inhabiting the same fantasy world as Pilger does will know that matters unmentionable in establishment circles are still eminently mentionable where you have a free press. But writing freely, Pilger and those for whom he speaks flourish on the delusion that their views are silenced, while yet expressing them without more ado. Finally, while Ahmadinejad, president (no less) of a certain large country, apparently threatens nothing, Benny Morris on the other hand, a professor at Ben-Gurion University, he really does threaten: according to Pilger, he threatens 'an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland'. 'For a Jew', Pilger says, 'the irony cries out.' Hold your nose there, but they evidently equip the professoriat differently at Ben-Gurion than they do in Manchester. Or wasn't I told?
Apart from all that, there's what one can only call the totalizing ambition in Pilger. It's all one: Truman and Hiroshima 63 years ago, Iran today, Israel, Benny Morris, complicit media, unmentionable mentionables: a seamless lousy world for the spokesman of left-lousiness, so that you might have trouble imagining someone who thought the bombing of Hiroshima was justified but an attack on Iran today not, or vice versa. And to cap it, there is one of Pilger's trademark introductions: the personal story - with the concretizing detail to set the scene and let everyone know that such are his links; to let them know that he, the sainted John, hates poverty, war and injustice, unlike the rest of us squares.