The English Guy’s Personal Blog

I noticed this article on The Independent, this is the first paragraph:

At last we’ve apologised for Hiroshima – well, sort of. We’ve recognised the suffering our atom bombs caused –well, kind of. President Obama was showing off his anti-nuclear credentials in the killing grounds of Hiroshima, but this was not to be confused with saying sorry.

I was shocked to say the least. And I’m glad that we’re not saying sorry – let’s be honest with one another here, because it seems to me these days that people aren’t taught the real history of things. The Japanese were engaged in a brutal war against the Chinese for years in the 1930′s, then in 1941 they attacked the Americans at Pearl Harbour and us (the British) at Singapore and Hong Kong.

At that time, the Japanese were brutal, they were cruel, ask any surviving soldiers from the work camps. They weren’t “honourable” as movies might portray today, this wasn’t Shogun in any way. It was a war of conquest plain and simple.

Estimates at the time of the Americans invading the Japanese homeland were that 1 million casualties would result. That’s perhaps one of the main reasons the Americans dropped the bomb. Yes, that’s right, the -Americans- dropped it, not us. Sure, the British and other nations were involved in developing it, but the Americans had their fingers on the button. And for this Brit, I’m damned glad they pushed it. They have nothing to apologize for in my opinion.

The author of that article puts things into perspective at the end:

But it raises another question. When do our war “crimes” have an expiry date. Blair gave his half-hearted apology to the Irish a century and a half after the Brits exported Ireland’s food instead of using it to save Irish men and women who were found dead in ditches after trying to eat stinging nettles. The Americans and the Australians have said sorry to their native peoples. But what about Cromwell and Drogheda? Or the Thirty Years’ War, or the Hundred Years’ War? Or the sack of Rome – a Goth war crime (poor Mrs Merkel)? – or the Roman destruction of Carthage? Or the death of Jesus – I guess Rome’s imperial history means Berlusconi has to apologise, though an awful lot of Catholics have spent centuries living in their anti-semitic world by blaming the Jews. Poor Benjamin Netanyahu!

He’s right, when is there an expiry? And for what? War today is much different than even one hundred years ago, civilians died back then too. Do we take into account who dies, and what led to it, or who won? Magnanimous us, we apologize for the deaths caused by our ending of the war. I’d say that since then the Japanese have done quite well, if the shoe were on the other foot, would we have done so well under German or Japanese hegemony? Would they be apologizing?