This faction was dragged into the spotlight earlier this year by the wife of Irish president Michael D. Higgins, Sabina, who wrote a letter to the Irish Times calling for peace. While Ukrainian soldiers were countering an invasion into their internationally recognised territory, with near-total support from Western countries, Higgins seemed reluctant to come down on one side: “Until the world persuades President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine to agree to a ceasefire and negotiations, the long haul of terrible war will go on. How can there be any winner?”

This is a nation with a national anthem entitled “The Soldier’s Song”. Our war for independence is the most deified part of our history books. Higgins’s decision to publish the letter on the president’s official website drew criticism from many Irish politicians: Fine Gael Senator John McGahon described it as “inappropriate, unhelpful and distasteful”. Higgins was supported, though, by Yuriy Filatov, Russia’s ambassador to Ireland who commented that her views “make sense”. “She’s against war. We’re all against war,” he told the Irish Times.

Higgins was lambasted, but her views aren’t unusual: she represents a significant far-Left camp in Ireland’s politics — one that uses the vague term “anti-war” to justify defanging the Irish military and, at its extremes, acts as an incubator for authoritarian sympathisers. These far-Leftists are known as the Tankies — a term initially used to describe those who supported the use of tanks to crush opposition in occupied areas of the Soviet Union, but is now commonly used to describe those sympathetic to Left-wing authoritarian regimes. In Ireland, it’s not uncommon for the Tankies to justify the actions of dictatorships by employing a toxic mix of whataboutery and generalised condemnation of western powers.

The Tankies aren’t fringe. While the far-Left in other EU countries remain on the outskirts of politics, in Ireland it has significant political sway. Encompassing members of the European Parliament, grassroots political organisers, national politicians and even the deputy speaker of the Irish Parliament, Catherine Connolly, Ireland’s far-Left are a loud minority with senior political positions.

They therefore have the power to shape international policy. In 2017, far-Left Irish politicians and activists travelled to Syria, having obtained visas from a man working with the dictatorship of Bashar Al Assad. The group comprised of several TDs (MPs) and future MEPs, as well as Connolly, who was yet to become deputy speaker. It arrived in Damascus at the same time as a Russian delegation. At this point, relations between the Syrian regime and most European governments were frosty to say the least, and the delegation was criticised by many in Ireland.

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They were right to worry. Previously, one of the delegation’s members, former TD Maureen O’Sullivan, had advocated in the parliament for the Iranian regime to act as peacekeepers in Syria, a regime that is currently embroiled in the brutal suppression of a popular protest movement. And a month after their return from Syria, the group supported a motion to lift sanctions on the nation. (“It is following a visit to Syria and a tremendous amount of research that we stand here tonight to say we do not support the sanctions,” said Connolly.) The move shocked many in parliament — as well as Syrian activists, who accused the politicians of repeating pro-regime talking points. 

Five years later, in the early days of the Ukraine war, Connolly (now deputy speaker) and several other TDs, along with activists and academics, formed The Irish Neutrality Group. Irish troops were being volunteered to train soldiers in Ukraine in skills like demining: this was part of the Tankies’ panicked response.

It was popular support for Ukraine in Ireland that caused an overdue backlash against this motley, oft-ignored group. They have peddled the narratives of authoritarian regimes in Syria, Iran and Venezuela for years, and gone unnoticed. But they made headlines when they refused to applaud Zelensky’s address in Ireland’s parliament — and after making continuous requests for him to negotiate with Russia. 

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This strange standpoint is also in evidence among the Irish Left across the border. Sinn Féin decries human rights abuses at home, within Ireland’s robust democracy. But it also has an MP who in 2017, after being vetted, was invited by the government of Venezuela to participate in a fake election observation: a practice where carefully chosen politicians, activists and trade unionists are invited to countries whose elections are widely seen as undemocratic. These countries often prohibit traditional election monitoring missions in lieu of these “sympathetic” delegations. Despite widespread criticism of the 2017 elections in Venezuela, MP for Newry and Armagh Mickey Brady described them as “fair and equitable”.

Meanwhile, we have Clare Daly and Mick Wallace, Irish MEPs from the Independents for Change party — a party that does not have an accessible membership portal. Both have been invited (by the government of Nicaragua in 2021 and Venezuela in 2020) to observe elections that have excluded recognised bodies and are widely seen as fraudulent. Both MEPs previously lauded the 2021 Syrian elections. And Wallace is known for often supporting Chinese positions on human rights issues — he has downplayed the repression of Uyghurs, for instance. China being a country that doesn’t even bother to hold fake democratic elections, of course. The very same Wallace has complained about EU military support for Ukraine, arguing in 2021 that Nazis within the nation were attacking its civil society.

While a few politicians with fringe views on dictatorships is normal in most democracies, in Ireland they tend to take up a lot of public space — often presenting an image of the country overseas that does not reflect the views of the majority. We have a long history of strong leftist thought, which emerged from the country’s seemingly David and Goliath battle with the British Empire. But those people who were once so opposed to empire now appear to be cheering for the behemoth. In one strange incident, “anti-imperial”, Belfast-based activist Francis Huges was part of a small, vetted group that travelled to Ukraine in 2018 to “observe” the internationally ignored general elections in Lugansk. Russia, which has been annexing territory in Georgia and Ukraine for years, is somehow seen as a liberator, a champion of human rights.

The Tankies have also been known to disseminate Russian propaganda, playing a crucial part in the Kremlin’s disinformation war. Irish politicians from the Left were often featured on Russia Today (RT) talking about Russophobia before it was effectively banned after Russia’s latest invasion of Ukraine. And then there’s Irish MEP Clare Daly, who was a member of the EU’s Special Committee on Foreign Interference in all Democratic Processes in the European Union, including disinformation. In her minority report challenging the Committee’s finding she wrote: “The inquiry was used to inflate threats of Russian and Chinese interference”.

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It’s a quote that has aged poorly given the recent bragging by Russian businessman and Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin that Russia did engage in election interference in the US. “We have interfered, we are interfering and we will continue to interfere  carefully, accurately, surgically and in our own way as we know how to do it.” 

As many of these politicians call for negotiations with Russia and a scaling back of military support for Ukraine, Russia is, ironically, busy testing Ireland’s defences — which, even more ironically, are comprised largely of Royal Airforce Typhoon fighter jets (a fact ignored by the anti-war Left, of course). All the anti-imperial, anti-war sentiment means that having a sufficient military is seen as a threat to Irish neutrality — and it has left the country unable to defend its citizens in an increasingly unstable Europe. Ireland relies on its former coloniser to defend its seas and skies. 

When the US army used Shannon airport to refuel during the war in Afghanistan, a large strata of Irish society objected, emphasising the nation’s role as a peacekeeper and cementing a firm position on Nato. Ireland is not a member. But this leaves the nation vulnerable. Earlier this year, Russia carried out a series of naval exercises off the coast not far from Shannon, after discovering a legal loophole that allows them to enter Ireland’s Exclusive Economic Zone. The move was described as “unwelcome” by the Irish government — which could do very little about it.

Of course, when a real threat looms over Ireland, the far-Left buries its head in the sand. But this time, the Irish population’s response to the conflict du jour is too enthusiastic, and differs too much from that of the Tankies for them to be able to claim to represent it. Throughout the country, Ukrainian flags are painted on buildings. The Irish have opened their homes to refugees. Anti-Russian sentiment prevails. And that sentiment, as the Kremlin has recognised in recent days, is now gaining political momentum. Russia’s former hideaway on the edge of Europe has become, at last, unwelcome. 

Usually — and appropriately — sombre, this year’s commemorations were agonised and dramatic. They kicked off with Berlin’s mayor banning Russian flags from war memorials. Then the city government banned Ukrainian flags — after all, they thought, violent pro-Russian activists might try and tear them down. Instead, Berlin police were filmed confiscating an enormous Ukrainian flag and it was viewed millions of times on social media.

Meanwhile, Olaf Scholz did not visit Moscow on Victory Day, as German Chancellors often do. But nor did he visit Kyiv, despite being invited to do so by Volodymyr Zelenskyy. By evening, the popular German sociologist Harald Welzer was debating Ukraine’s ambassador on a television chat show. What the ambassador did not understand, Welzer told him, was that the 45% of Germans against delivering heavy weaponry to Ukraine might have family memories of conflict. They simply wanted a negotiated ceasefire. Wouldn’t weapon deliveries merely prolong the agony? The memory of World War Two was being used by a German intellectual to argue for a ceasefire with a dictator. Who could have predicted that in 1945?

The new reality has proved to be an unpleasant one for Germany. Russia’s invasion brought out the worst in some Germans. Heated opposition to weapons shipments to Ukraine mirrors the Querdenker movement that took, hysterically and counterproductively, to the streets during the pandemic. Across the political spectrum, and in nearly every segment of society: church leaders, artists, intellectuals, far-Right Putin fans, old-school peaceniks, trade unionists, and huge numbers of social democrats. What unites them all is a special brand of German navel-gazing. “Lumpen pacifism” is the best way to describe it.

This crowd isn’t bothered that the German peace-through-trade policies of the last few decades have failed. Shortly after the war began, Chancellor Olaf Scholz proclaimed a “new era” in which Germany’s defence budget would increase to a level proportionate to the country’s size. But on the path towards providing ever-more military aid to Ukraine, he’s wobbled through a minefield of national anxieties: from the chilly prospect of Russia turning off the gas pipelines, to worries about nukes, to good old-fashioned queasiness about supporting violence on the battlefield — in eastern Europe of all places, as if the Wehrmacht still had boots on the ground there.

This is not a fringe movement limited to sandal-wearing Easter Marchers. On April 29, a group of intellectuals and artists spoke out against sending arms: they published an open letter to Scholz in Emma, a magazine edited by veteran German feminist Alice Schwarzer. “The delivery of large quantities of heavy weapons could make Germany itself a party in the war. A Russian counter-attack could trigger the collective defence clause under the Nato treaty and thus the immediate danger of a world war.” An online petition supporting the statement has been signed 225,000 times. Whether he realised it or not, Scholz’s initial reluctance to send heavy weapons to Ukraine was in accord with these sentiments.

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Many of the names on the list are admirable. But the participation of these ‘Professor Doktor’ types reveals a truth about numerous German public intellectuals: they exude ivory tower arrogance. Too many are out of touch with reality. They dismiss the massive responsibility Germany carries in this war — Europe’s largest economy has spent two decades prioritising lovey-dovey vibes with Putin over the security needs of Ukraine, long seen as a buffer zone between Russian and Western Europe.

One of the signatories was the actor Lars Eidinger, famous for his Hamlet. Unsettled by the backlash, he posted on Instagram (in English): “As an eighteen year old man I refused the so called service with the weapon in front of a jury of the German military, the so-called Bundeswehr. The essential question I had to answer was, when one of my beloved ones is threatened with a gun and I had the chance to kill the aggressor — how would I react? My answer was: I would not shoot, to not service the spiral of aggression. I still believe in this ideal today.” In short: “Blood cannot be washed by blood.” You’d hope a man so familiar Shakespeare might have grasped something about human nature. But no, at 46, Eidinger hasn’t progressed much since his days as a teenage conscientious objector.

He belongs to one of the last age groups to face mandatory military service, which was discontinued in 2011. By the Nineties around 50% of young men were opting out, citing moral reservations, and choosing Zivildienst (civilian service) instead. Which is fine, of course, but that sentiment lives on through today, particularly among West Germans shaped by peace-time entitlement and “never again” convictions. As pathological as it might be to cling to such views today, many share Eidinger’s beliefs.

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After reunification in 1990, Germans in West and East, consciously or subconsciously, internalised Francis Fukuyama’s End of History thesis. Perpetual peace, as Immanuel Kant imagined, was now a no-brainer. In the bright capitalist future cleansed of 20^th century ideological extremity, a united Germany, cloaked by the EU, would gently spread a soft-power message of trade, democracy, and Eurovision throughout the continent. International law would keep nations in check. Conquest and savagery were relegated to the past.

The entire West fell for this, but the Germans more so than any other nation. It let them finally move on from their war guilt. There was an assumption that geopolitical power struggles had vanished with the Berlin Wall. Cosy trade arrangements would turn Putin into a loveable Euro-softy! But this era is over; it died when Russian paratroopers rained down on Hostomel Airport in February. Yet the peaceniks — like the Lutheran Bishop who said it was a good thing for Germans to be “helpless spectators” — are still getting air-time. Other people’s countries are easy to give away aren’t they?

On April 22, a journalist asked Scholz why he’d been timid about heavy arms. He concluded: “I am doing everything to prevent an escalation leading to a third world war. There must be no nuclear war.” Many Germans agreed. In an ARD TV survey carried out the same day, 40% of Germans favoured restraint so as not to provoke Russia.

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Then, at a May Day trade union rally in Düsseldorf, Scholz changed his mind. He delivered an uncharacteristically passionate speech and a new decisiveness: “We will support Ukraine so that it can defend itself. I respect your pacifism but it must seem cynical to a citizen of Ukraine to be told to defend himself against Putin’s aggression without weapons.” He was booed by many in the audience. Other speakers said the money should be ploughed into the German welfare state instead.

Germany’s allies in Nato were bewildered. Scholz changed course a few days later, and announced that about 50 Geopard anti-aircraft tanks would be sent to Ukraine. The decommissioned vehicles are 40-years old and the only ammo that could be found for them has to be shipped in from Brazil, but better than nothing. Things are evolving. In his Victory Day speech, without a crowd to boo him, Scholz promised to send more heavy weapons to Ukraine. If there is a lesson from Germany’s history, it is surely the one he outlined on Sunday: “No more war. No more genocide. No more tyranny.” More tanks and personnel carriers will be delivered to Kyiv.

But intellectual leadership is missing. On the same day the Emma letter was published, the 92-year-old philosopher Jürgen Habermas argued for a slow, deliberative approach to the crisis. As Scholz had previously intimated, Habermas feared potential nuclear war more than the actual bloodletting suffered by Ukrainians. “For thirty years, Germans lectured Ukrainians about fascism,” the American historian Timothy Snyder tweeted in late April. “When fascism actually arrived, Germans funded it, and Ukrainians died fighting it.”

The most resolute support for Ukraine has not come from Germany’s intellectuals, or the chancellor’s office. Surprisingly, it is the German Greens, who partially grew out of the peace movement, who have become the hawks. For years, they drew attention to Germany’s potentially lethal dependence on Russian fossil fuels. The party’s figureheads, economics minister Robert Habeck and foreign minister Annalena Baerbock, have been particularly vocal about Germany’s duty to sufficiently help Ukraine drive back the Russian invaders. Baerbock, in a visit to Kyiv, said that Germany aimed to cut its imports of Russian energy to zero, adding “and that will stay that way forever”.

This is the new reality. Germany will be Europe’s most preeminent military power within a decade. It will cut its energy ties with Russia. And it will be supplying Ukraine with powerful weapons in the months to come. Whether Germany’s pacifist lobby can stomach this, and whether they will be able to stop it from happening, is less certain.

But I suppose I had some idea what he was up to. Aged 17, studying for my A-levels at boarding school, and more interested in the female company of Munich than in the politics going on around me, my father’s work was off-limits. The Cold War was my adolescent playground.

There is one disturbing thing I do remember very vividly. My father was a member of the American PX in a little town 20 miles or so north of Munich. There was a cheap, tax-free supermarket there, and a recreational facility for its military members, including a golf course. There my father taught me to swing a club at a little white ball, to take pleasure in the satisfying sound of a well-struck shot. I still have the bug. But the name of the town was Dachau. And right next door to the club was the former concentration camp.

I still have disturbing dreams about that course, 40 year later, given how inappropriately it was situated. In some I slice a ball out of bounds and into the place where men, women and children were shot and burned — my fun-filled summer holidays coming into direct emotional contact with the horror of the Holocaust. The dreams interweave my father’s mysterious job, his Jewishness, the ovens of the camp, Hitler’s face on a violently defaced poster in the exhibition at Dachau, images of emaciated men being tortured in ice baths — all jumbled up with my own summer holiday recreation, barbecues down on the banks of the River Isar, the nudist colony in the Englischer Garten, of course, and my own teenage fumblings. Lots here for my shrink to unravel.

Of course, I felt guilty at having so much fun. Sex and golf were my peace dividend. My girlfriend was a pacifist; all of the people I met my age were pacifists. We sang 99 Luftballons by Nena. And in the year I arrived in Germany, 1981, a peace demonstration was held in Bonn, a protest both at the existence of nuclear weapons and at the presence of American and British bases on German soil. Around 300,000 people turned up that day: Christians, union members, students. I didn’t tell my new friends what my father did.

I also remember the graffiti. Munich was a seriously tidy and ordered town, but hate-filled graffiti was still puked up on the walls under flyovers, mostly about Turkish Gastarbeiters — immigrant workers. “What is the difference between a Turk and a Jew? Forty years”, was the one I cannot forget. The tidiness of the place wasn’t able to hide the fact that this was Hitler’s home patch.

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How different Germany today is from the Eighties. At Berlin’s train stations — yes, trains too are inevitably a part of the nightmares — tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees are now being welcomed by generous open-hearted German volunteers, providing shell-shocked families with hot drinks and food, advising them where to find permanent shelters. In 2015-16 Germany took in over a million refugees fleeing Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. During my lifetime at least, the Germans have been the conscience of Europe, responding to their defeat in the war and their national shame with a reinvention of their national consciousness.

This process — Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or “overcoming the past” — was the only way Germany could come to terms with Nazism and the Holocaust. Nobody wants to look at the darkest parts of their history. It is the equivalent of discovering that your parents were killers. After decades of post-war denial, a new German generation, coming of age in the Sixties, insisted on digging up the past. They were called Nestbeschmutzer (“nest-foulers”) and were derided. But what they began set in motion the process that created modern Germany.

Today, the country pauses to engage in what the historian Susan Neiman calls “public rites of repentance” around events such as Kristallnacht, and the liberation of Auschwitz. There are the “stumbling stones” — plaques placed throughout Berlin to mark where Jews lived before the Nazis deported them. And, where it cannot be missed, at the centre of the capital: the Holocaust Memorial.

Of course, there was (and is) some barely hidden recidivism — especially in the East. But I never really encountered it, apart from dark messages scrawled under flyovers. I lived in Germany before the wall came down. For me, Germany was a place of peace and love. But also a place of hidden secrets. They only met in sleep, when a golf ball was sliced from one psychic realm to another.

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Two weeks ago, the new German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, announced a massive €100 billion rise in German defence spending. This includes the purchase of F-35 fighter jets capable of carrying nuclear weapons. The rational side of my brain thinks this is a good thing, the Germans rising to the challenge of this new era of Russian aggression. For too long, the Germans have not contributed their fair share to Nato — something Nato has calculated as 2% of GDP — or to the defence of the vulnerable globally. Some might say that they have freeloaded on the defence spending of other countries, and kept their own hands clean by relying on others to make the impossible moral decisions that keep down dictators like Assad and Putin. But my emotional side mourns the final end of that 1981 summer of love in Germany and fears the sight of what looks to me like an Iron Cross on the side of the aeroplanes that my father helped to develop.

Putin’s war against Ukraine has destroyed the long taboo about Germany and the military. After the war, the Germans were allowed to maintain a small army, looking East across the wall, towards the Soviet Union. Out of the ruins of the Forties, a kind of default pacifism was established as the norm.

As recently as 2019, the German government refused to even consider an American request to send ground troops into Syria. One year previously, 72% of the population were against committing the German military against Assad, even if he was using chemical weapons against his own people.

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On the 70^th anniversary of the Allied landing in Normandy, the head of the German Evangelical church, Margot Käßmann , refused to countenance the idea that the defeat of the Nazis could constitute a just war: “There can be no just war,” she said. “That was even true of the Second World War”. No one pushed back against this. “German pacifism is here to stay,” wrote the political editor of Die Zeit in 2019, “and there is no use asking the country to be what it isn’t.”

All of which makes the events of recent weeks so much more extraordinary. German pacifism is no more. Germany is about to have the third largest defence budget in the world, behind only the US and China. Some will feel that this is as it should be. For others it will bring back dark and disturbing memories. For me, it is both.

It extended to 84 plaintiffs, with ages ranging from late 70s to 90s, the certification of atomic bomb victims. In other words, it recognised them as having been exposed to radioactive “black rain”. These plaintiffs were just outside the area, officially designated after the fact, where radioactive droplets from the nuclear explosion fell. In spite of their long struggles with radiation-linked diseases, they had been denied the same level of medical benefits that were given to “certified” atom bomb survivors.

For those plaintiffs and other survivors, the nuclear summer of 1945 is never a distant memory. For most Japanese today, it is. Nevertheless, all Japanese people grow up with ample knowledge of the horror and cruelty of nuclear weapons — be it from obligatory lessons at schools, or from popular manga and movies. (Barefoot Gen, a semi-autobiographical manga by Keiji Nakazawa that has sold 10 million copies worldwide, is but one example.) As a result, Hiroshima — Hiroshima more than Nagasaki, for being the “first” — has become a quasi-religious abstraction that reigns at the heart of Japan’s pacifist ideology.

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During the Second World War, Japan’s national ideology revolved around the cult of emperor worship. After Japan’s defeat, the cult of peace worship took its place. This worship draws its moral strength from two interconnected sources. One is Article 9 of the US-drafted postwar constitution, which renounces “war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes”. The other is Japan’s broad-based anti-nuclear arms sentiments, of which Hiroshima is the most potent symbol. And so every year, on 6 August, the city makes national headlines as Japan commemorates the anniversary of the bombing.

“Peace” is everywhere on that occasion. The “Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony” is held in the “Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park”, built near the bomb’s detonation point. Top politicians and dignitaries join in silent prayers with ordinary citizens at 8.15 am, followed by the tolling of “peace bells”, the mayor’s “peace declaration”, and a releasing of doves into the sky once shrouded by a mushroom cloud. Around the anniversary, many commemorative events are held, including art exhibitions, flower shows and concerts featuring the world’s top musicians. (The late pianist Peter Serkin, in 2017, played with the Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra at its “Music for Peace Concert”. He also gave a moving private performance on a Baldwin piano that once belonged to Akiko Kawamoto, an American-born teenager. The piano survived the bombing. Akiko didn’t.)

Due to fear that Covid-19 will spread, many of this year’s 75th anniversary events have had to be cancelled, and the main ceremony will be drastically downsized. Even so, Hiroshima’s essential importance as a galvanising point of postwar Japanese identity will remain unchanged.

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Three is nothing inherently wrong with a country valuing and praying for peace. Peace is hard not to like, and it is also unifying. It can act as the lowest common denominator to bring together people of different political persuasions — as well as former enemies. (The Japanese welcomed Barack Obama when he made a peace-making visit to Hiroshima in May 2016, the first US President to do so while in office.) Adopting pacifism as a national ideology also helped Japan regain its international legitimacy in the Cold War era. Going pacifist meant that Japan, an erstwhile rogue state with expansionist designs, could begin identifying itself as a reformed, benign power — and the most dependable US ally in East Asia.

But peace, or more precisely, the kind of pacifism that Japan has cultivated over the past three quarters of a century, has its drawbacks. For one, it has hindered a meaningful political debate. By emphasising Japan’s own wartime sufferings and its current desire for peace, the conservative Japanese regime, in power for most of the postwar period, has tended to downplay Japan’s record as an imperialist aggressor, first in East Asia, and later in the Pacific and Southeast Asia. And until recently, the Right’s narrative generally overlooked the fact that the nuclear casualties included Allied POWs, as well as Chinese and Korean forced labourers.

The vociferous Right — for some time now represented by the hawkish leadership of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — insists that a revision of the postwar pacifist constitution is necessary so that Japan can become a truly sovereign nation-state. Unless it becomes an active military power, this line of argument goes, Japan cannot preserve peace. But that same need to preserve peace is invoked by the political Left too, which regards any intimation of a constitutional revision as a sacrilege.

“Peace”, in this instance, is tautological. It serves as a reason for Japan to have an active military and at the same time, to continue rejecting that option. A lack of dialogue between those two opposite camps is worrying, when changing conditions — primarily in the forms of China’s rise and a nuclear-armed North Korea — are making it necessary for Japan to examine what kind of peace Japan wants and how best to achieve it. Does Japan need to alter its constitution? How active should the Japan Self-Defense Forces be? Can Japanese peace — and by extension, regional peace — be secured without the strong backing of the United States? If pressed on any of these questions, Japanese individuals would likely have different answers. Yet, the Japanese version of pacifism, anchored in the horrific experience of the atom bombings, has long created a misleading sense that the nation is more united than it really is.

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Another disadvantage of Japanese pacifism is the selective historical memory it has helped to forge. In this retelling, nuclear weapons become overly exceptional. In 1945, they were an extension of strategic preferences that had led all the belligerent parties to bomb their enemies’ civilians. The world was initially shocked by the German bombing of Guernica in April 1937. But all the powers would adjust to the dehumanising idea that civilian deaths were a necessary part of total warfare, either because precision-bombing of military targets was deemed too difficult, or because targeting civilians was regarded as an effective demoralising strategy — or, more and more, as the war dragged on, both.

Before the Blitz, Japan was one of the first countries to bomb civilians, most notably in Chiang Kai-shek’s relocated capital Chongqing from late 1938 onwards. Once the Allied forces, too, got started, they went all out — in Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, and many other cities, followed by a series of B-29 fire-bombings of Japan. Too few Japanese individuals nowadays, even those who whole-heartedly preach “No More Hiroshima”, remember that Tokyo sustained the biggest air-raid on the night of 9/10th March 1945: 80,000 to 100,000 people perished in one night.

This is not to minimise the exceptionally destructive power of the nuclear weapons or the subsequent moral controversy that emerged as radioactivity’s horrifying and long-lasting effects became known. It is only to stress that one cannot assume, from what we have learned since, that explicit calculations of an immoral or an even racist nature propelled the US decision to drop those atomic bombs on Japanese cities. While those calculations could have existed alongside more urgent strategic preferences. The foremost US priority in the summer of 1945 was to win the war with Japan through extensive bombing, be it incendiary or atomic.

By the time Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945, more than 200 Japanese cities of various sizes had been bombed. Okinawa had fallen. And the civilian population had been thoroughly starved by a blockade of US-planted sea mines that prevented the transportation of food supplies. The prospect of a two-fronted invasion by the Soviet Union and the United States terrified the Japanese leadership. (Stalin was poised to declare war on Japan even before Hiroshima.) With the Soviet Union’s entry into the war on 9 August, Japan’s surrender was imminent. The atomic bombs might have influence the timing somewhat, but the fear of the Soviet invasion and a potential revolution were compelling enough reasons for Japan to give up the fight.

With more than 80% of Japan’s population having grown up in peacetime, war is understandably a remote notion. It is also understandable that for most of today’s Japanese, “peace” — or at the very least, the absence of war — feels like a sui generis condition given to them in response to their earnest prayers for it. But without an active political debate, based on a more balanced view of history, that peace might not last.