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Columnist Tony Norman: Dissent is our patriotic right
Tuesday, August 11, 1998 By Tony Norman, Post-Gazette Columnist
I think A.J. Muste, the American pacifist and journalist had it right: "The problem after a war is with the victor. He thinks he has just proved war and violence pay. Who now will teach him a lesson?"
In America, a military victory means everything. Decades after the latest bomb has dropped, victory can still mean the muting of civil liberties at home.
The suppression of dissent through ridicule, censorship and simple-minded appeals to patriotism has always been the first line of defense against the rumblings of a skeptical citizenry. Marginalizing the opinions of those who question our sacred myths has been a national sport since the earliest days of the republic.
Just ask the editors of "The Philadelphia Aurora." When the dissident colonial newspaper had the temerity to criticize our first president, its editors were thrown into jail on trumped-up charges of sedition.
Were George Washington president today, he wouldn't deal with journalistic impertinence with something as constitutionally dubious as throwing a writer in jail.
Many editors, even those with the resources of a vast media conglomerate behind them, have learned to capitulate at the first sign a powerful institution, interest group or personality is gunning for them. Maybe that's why balanced discussions about war and peace in newspapers have become as rare as someone saying, "Hey, you make a good point."
Fifty-three years ago, two unprecedented flashes of atomic fire destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The United States immediately took credit for history's first pre-emptive nuclear strikes.
Am I an Axis stooge for thinking this is something we need to discuss? Shouldn't the significance of nuking as many as 120,000 Japanese civilians be of interest to a people whose embassies were recently destroyed in two simultaneous terrorist bombings in Kenya and Tanzania?
I've noticed that whenever the wisdom of ushering in the nuclear age is brought up, editorial pages are dominated by those who feel that even thoughtful considerations of other scenarios to end WWII are blatant acts of historical revisionism.
Others insist that ethics have no place in discussions about WWII, adding that the necessity of defeating Japan at all costs transcended every moral category. This question usually resolves itself for many this way: Dropping the bombs saved more American lives that would've been lost in an invasion of Japan.
How many Americans realize that many credible and patriotic historians have disputed this truism?
Some apologists for the bomb say: You who've never gotten beyond the safety of the local library don't have the standing to question what was done in the name of liberty.
Such logic is reminiscent of the ridiculous political hierarchy in Robert Heinlein's "Starship Troopers." Only those who'd spilled blood or had their blood spilled in war were considered citizens with the right to free speech.
Everyone else had to shut up and take what was done by the military in their name as gospel.
I mean no disrespect to those who fought in WWII, but of all the acts committed in the name of our republic, we have a right, a duty, to question the dropping of the atomic bomb.
They didn't fight for our freedoms so others could silence our opinions, did they?
Tony Norman's email: tnorman@post-gazette.com
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