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Some on the Right Are Having a Moral Meltdown

My disdain for the left began at a young age. From as early as I can recall, I hated evil, and I therefore always hated communism. When I realized the left either supported communism or, at the very least, opposed anti-communism, I understood that leftism was a force for evil. Liberals and conservatives hated communism; leftists did not.

As liberals began their leftward drift in the 1960s—to cite one example, virtually all liberal media condemned President Ronald Reagan’s description of the Soviet Union as “an evil empire”—I came to regard conservatism as a moral refuge in a dark world. In the conservative moral universe, America was essentially a force for good; communism was evil; liberty, most especially free speech, was a supreme value; Western civilization was a morally superior civilization; the Judeo-Christian value system was the moral bedrock of the West; and Islamic violence—as exemplified by al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, Boko Haram, the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian regime—was the great religious threat of our time.

That conservative moral universe is in decline. Some leading figures on the right are as confused as the left on some of the most important moral issues. This was made manifest last week when Tucker Carlson told Joe Rogan that any person who defends the dropping of the atomic bombs over Japan is evil.

Here is what he said:

“People on my side … on the right, you know, have spent 80 years defending dropping nuclear weapons on civilians. Like, are you joking? That’s just like prima facie evil. … It’s wrong to drop nuclear weapons on people. And if you find yourself arguing that it’s a good thing to drop nuclear weapons on people, then you are evil. Like, it’s not a tough one. It’s not a hard call for me. So, with that in mind, like, why would you want nuclear weapons? It’s, like, just a mindless, childish sort of intellectual exercise to justify — like, ‘Oh, no, it’s really good because somebody else will get it.’ How about ‘no’? How about, like, spending all of your effort to prevent this from happening? Would you kill baby Hitler, you know, famously?”

Given that nearly every liberal and conservative thinker over the past 80 years has defended the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in Tucker’s view, nearly every conservative and liberal thinker of the last 80 years was or is evil.

For those 80 years, the charge that America was evil for having dropped those bombs on Japan has been associated almost exclusively with the left.

Now, an increasing number of America-first conservatives have adopted the position identified for three generations with the America-hating left.

In another column, I will attempt to explain this right-wing moral decline. But here I will confine myself to a brief moral defense of President Harry Truman’s decision to drop the atom bombs on Japan.

  1. The responsibility for the war between Japan and the United States lay with Japan. Every Japanese death was the result of the fascist Japanese government’s decision to attack the U.S., China, Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Burma, Thailand, and the Philippines. If the Japanese military regime had never attacked those countries, not one Japanese would have been killed.
  2. The Japanese were as cruel and sadistic as the Nazis. Because the average American knows little about history, few Americans know how vile the Japanese were during World War II. The Japanese performed grotesque medical experiments on fully conscious Chinese civilians, just as Nazi doctors did on concentration camp inmates. The Japanese used Korean and Filipino women as sex slaves to be regularly gang raped by Japanese soldiers. The Japanese tortured and murdered American, Australian and other prisoners of war.
  3. Possibly over 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed on the night of March 9-10, 1945, in one of the American bombing raids over Tokyo, far more than were killed in the Nagasaki atom bombing. American aerial bombing over Japanese cities between 1942 and 1945 killed between 241,000 and 900,000 Japanese, and such bombing would have continued had the atom bombs not ended the war. Apparently, however, killing far fewer people with an atom bomb is more immoral than killing far more people with conventional bombs.
  4. Invasion was not the more moral option. In the words of Roman Catholic priest and University of Notre Dame professor of history Father Wilson Miscamble, “Truman sought to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two major military/industrial targets, to avoid an invasion of Japan, which Truman knew would mean, in his words, ‘an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other.’ His assumptions were entirely legitimate.”

More from Professor Miscamble:

“Japanese military and civilian losses had reached approximately three million and there seemed no end in sight. Despite all this, however, Japan’s leaders and especially its military clung fiercely to notions of Ketsu-Go (‘decisive battle’). In fact, the Japanese government had mobilized a large part of the population into a national militia, which would be deployed to defend the home islands.

“Confirming the Japanese determination to fight on is the fact that even after the use of atomic bombs against both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese military still wanted to pursue that desperate option. … It took the unprecedented intervention of a Japanese emperor to break the impasse in the Japanese government and finally order surrender. It was only the dropping of the atom bombs that allowed the emperor and the so-called peace faction in the Japanese government to negotiate an end to

“Japanese losses would have been far greater without the bombs. And the overall casualties would also have included thousands of Allied prisoners of war whom the Japanese planned to execute in case of invasion.”

Miscamble concludes:

“The judgment of history is clear and unambiguous: the atomic bombs shortened the war, averted the need for a land invasion, saved countless more lives on both sides of the blood-soaked conflict than they cost, and ended the Japanese brutalization of the conquered peoples of Asia.”

These quotes are taken from Fr. Miscamble’s PragerU video, “Was it Wrong to Drop the Atom Bomb on Japan?” made 10 years ago.

In Tucker’s view, Fr. Miscamble is just another evil man, as is one of the most morality-driven conservatives of our time, Victor Davis Hanson, who has written:

“To Americans and most of the world 75 years ago, each day in early August 1945 that the Japanese war machine continued its work meant that thousands of Asian civilians and Allied soldiers would die. In the terrible arithmetic of World War II, the idea that such a nightmare might end in a day or two was seen as saving millions of lives rather than gratuitously incinerating tens of thousands.”

What explains the moral confusion of some on this New Right is worthy of another column. But I, for one, have found a silver lining: clarity about a heretofore puzzling development. The inability of many America-first intellectuals, podcasters and their followers to call Hamas evil and morally defend Israel is not necessarily a function of antisemitism. It is a function of a broken moral compass.

Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His commentary on Numbers, the fourth volume of “The Rational Bible,” his five-volume commentary on the first five books of the Bible, will be released in November 2024 and is available now for presale on Amazon. He is the co-founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

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About Dennis Prager

Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His latest books include The Rational Passover Haggadah and The Rational Bible, a commentary on the book of Genesis. His film, "No Safe Spaces," is now available on DVD and BluRay. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

Photo: Desolation and dilapidated structures in Hiroshima following the atomic bombing of Japan, 1945. Image courtesy US Department of Energy. (Photo via Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images).

Notable Replies

  1. I doubt many Americans look to Tucker Carlson for moral direction, and those who do need a better understanding of the function of a moral compass. Unfortunately, public schools, where most Americans are educated, also lack moral direction. That may explain why we now face a multi-generational problem with moral clarity and direction. Abortion is OK with them, but biologically-based understanding of sex is not. Government dependency is fine with them, but working and striving to be independent of government so that they can honestly possess the rarest commodity on earth, liberty, is not. Escaping reality with drugs and violent video games are de rigeur, attending church is kryptonite. If we are being honest, we must admit the reason the U.S. will collapse is due exclusively to rejection of the requirements for sustaining any republic: a moral and religious people. Where are those people? They’re certainly not coming across the border!

    We live in a country governed by those with a moral deficit so great, they are stealing money from taxpayers to give to Ukraine - the most corrupt country in Europe - claiming they are taking the moral high ground. Its leader has killed off two generations of Ukrainian men for the sake of a money laundering operation with US politicians and business leaders. Various governments within the U.S. are prosecuting a legitimately-elected President for multiple violations of law from which they exempt themselves, and installed the current, but not legitimate “President”. It cozies up to foreign leaders and governments with staggering violations of human rights like live harvesting of human organs for sale, not to mention active and widespread interference in, and spying on American elections and lives. The United States as a whole, and not simply Tucker Carlson suffers from moral confusion, but at least Tucker Carlson is not fooling himself that he is a moral leader. He’s a journalist and a damn good one.

    Watching Carlson’s interview with Alexandr Dugin was an epiphany. For all of the bloviating about “Russia, Russia, Russia”, that country is still home to some deep thinkers (Russians have always been deep thinkers, e.g., Fyodor Dostoyevsky) who value reality and believe in the importance of family as the center of society, moral clarity and the consequences which proceed from a lack of it, and have a much deeper understanding of suffering under tyrants.

  2. Had not heard Tucker’s comment about the atomic weapon but it doesn’t surprise me. He tends to be in the passivist column when it comes to war.

    One statistic that put things in perspective for me is that 1 out of 10 American POW’s died in German POW camps. One in 3 died in Japanese POW camps. I don’t think that includes the Death March of Baton of which my great uncle survived. There was a special barbarism with the Japanese. A brainwashed populace where men easily gave up their lives in kamikaze fashion, families that gave up their children for the cause. The human rights atrocities were plentiful - concentration camps, human experimentation and numerous massacres.

    Lastly, like Hitler, Japan wanted territory. They inflicted horrors upon other nations all for their power and resource accumulation. The atomic bombs saved countless lives and we shouldn’t fall of fairy tales. War is awful.

  3. Tucker is “full of it” on this one.

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