DEMCORACY NOW
Psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton PHOTO/DVD Talk
For the past five decades, Robert Jay Lifton has written extensively on the psychological dimensions of war from the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima to doctors who aided Nazi crimes to nuclear war. In 1967, Robert Jay Lifton won a National Book Award for his work, “Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima.” In 1986, he published the seminal book, “The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide.”
Watch more of our interview with Robert Jay Lifton: Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3
AMY GOODMAN: What do you say to those who say American lives were saved by the dropping of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki because it ended the war faster.
ROBERT JAY LIFTON: At the time the bombs were dropped, Japan was totally devastated. We had bombed all the major cities with conventional weapons, and as you know, more people died in Tokyo bombings than died in Hiroshima. It was not necessary to use, in my view, and there’s lots of historical scholarship to back this, to use nuclear weapons to end the war. There’s developed all kinds of mythology about saving a half million lives, a million lives figures that came from nowhere. The use of nuclear weapons on an unarmed population is a crime of war. It was raised as such both in Tokyo and at Nuremberg, but only briefly because, although those trials were important, they were still victors justice and the claim of a war crime on the part of the victors was not permitted. This is the kind of view that I think we need internationally and in terms of human kind as opposed to a justification of American behavior. I will say that in making the bomb, there was the powerful fear on the part of American leaders and scientists at Los Alamos that the Nazis would make the bomb first. And this shows how a war time fear, which was grounded in actuality because the Germans had been more advanced in nuclear physics at that time than we were, how such war time fear can lead to extreme behavior in the effort of fighting evil. And in a way, when Oppenheimer made his famous statement, “the physicists have known sin,” what he meant was saying that in fighting evil we had to resort to lesser evil. Whether that was lesser evil or not is a question that one can contest. But that leads to the truth that in fighting extreme evil, the danger can be embracing some of that evil and methods of combating it.
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