I read this article a week ago or so and it’s been coming to mind pretty much every day. It covers basically a U.S. delegation to Hiroshima on the 65th anniversary of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It’s a fascinating dynamic, but it illustrates on a very large and deep scale a fairly frequent dynamic. From a war standpoint – both parties claim victim status. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The U.S. did the unthinkable in many ways by wiping out two whole cities in a blink of an eye. I’m not here to start a debate about who attacked who first or what’s just in war or not. That’s for another day.What I find fascinating is that the U.S. can express general sympathy 65 years later for victims of the war, but avoid really engaging the specific and contextual impact on that specific community and city that their morally ambiguous decision resulted in. Is it to much for the U.S. to say that it was horrible and that nuking cities was in fact morally ambiguous, but it was what they felt like had to be done at the time and didn’t have a better option to bring an end to the war? I can see how you can’t really say now with absolute certainty that it was the right or wrong thing to do. But you don’t have to say it shouldn’t have been done no matter what to at least acknowledge the specific horrors of that kind of a decision on those communities – who have been living with the consequences for 65 years now.It’s a leadership thing and a relationship thing. Frequently leaders who are leading in crisis or leading out in crisis make sweeping decisions or take extreme action that leaves quite a wake. The crisis stops – because there are no dissenting voices left. I think most leaders I’ve seen in many setings act like the U.S. in this example. They only see that whatever they did stopped the drama or solved the problem, but they don’t see the cost. Even in retrospect if they do see that mistakes may have been made, any acknowledgment that what was done was in fact sketchy, morally ambiguous, or questionable is viewed as having to confess total responsibility and failure.Such a mindset closes the door to compassion, empathy, and understanding. it closes the door to building trust and relationships and experiencing the power and depth of reconciliation. I’m glad the U.S. is going to Hiroshima to acknowledge that horrors were done. It’s something. But I would hope to live in a world that when we have more information that provides different perspectives that we can admit uncertainty when it exists.This topic could lead to a lot of different subtopics for me, but I’ll ask the question what you think? What would you think would be appropriate and respectful and contrite in this situation?Can you enter into the sufferings of another party even if the action(s) in question can be justified in good measure? Or do you have to preserve the image of all-knowing all-wise leadership in fear of losing credibility and trust?Also – if anyone comes here and feels compelled to justify the decision to drop the bombs, I’ll say now that I’ll delete your comment. It’s not to be rude, but it’s to keep the focus on the question of how to relate to people who have been victimized even if the offending action in question can be defended on some level.http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08/05/delegation-no-apology-at-hiroshima-ceremony/
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
