By Craig Hovey
President Obama’s visit to Hiroshima is historic—he is the first sitting president to visit there—and he spoke movingly and philosophically about the desire for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to mark the “start of our own moral awakening.”
But observers also noted that Japan should not expect an apology for America’s actions 71 years ago. Why not?
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| Hiroshima Peace Memorial - Wikipedia |
According to Stanley Hauerwas,
war is a sacrificial system which, like anthropologists have long noted about religion, sacralizes violence through ritual. Even when surrounded by the most rigorously secular discourse, war often takes on a quasi-religious significance for a society, especially in how it is remembered. It is very difficult for a society to admit that an entire war was wrong (Vietnam) or that particular acts within a war otherwise thought justified might be wrong (Hiroshima) because admitting this calls into question all of the sacrifices that that society asked of its people when it waged those wars in the first place.
