The temptation to revisit past arguments is one usually best resisted. Once the lines of the dialectic have been laid down, there is often not much more to be said. So I might rightly be accused of returning one too many times to a familiar well if, having just already written another Public Discourse piece on the atomic bombings of Japan, I return to that issue one last time.
But it seems merited. In response to that piece, one reader sent a link to a recent video essay by Fr. Wilson Miscamble, with whom I have gone round on this issue before. Fr. Miscamble’s video adds no new information or arguments, beyond the striking visual of a Roman Catholic priest asserting, in his clericals, that the intentional killing of thousands of Japanese civilians was the least bad option. This despite a uniform tradition of Catholic teaching that innocents are never to be intentionally killed, regardless of the consequences.
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