Editorial: The end of the war
It would take a Thucydides who sees deeply into the remote causes of events to write the history of Japan’s attack upon Pearl Harbor and ultimate defeat. “Whom the gods would destroy they first make mad.” It was in the nature of things that God should destroy the Japanese empire. That empire was all a sham, built upon superstition and falsehood, and nothing that has so flimsy a base can long endure. When Admiral Peary opened Japan to the outside world in 1853 the Mikado and his people were living mentally and spiritually in the dim and distant past. Their god was a war god, who taught them that was their obligation to conquer the earth. From the warlords to the common man, they believed that this was the Japanese destiny.
It was no wonder, then, that Japan was ruled by a military clique, with the Emperor as their puppet. In time, as the Japanese mingled with the civilized world they were joined by another clique – the businessmen who were to bring to their country the science and invention which seemed to them so glittering and desirable. Superficially, Japan put on civilization. Her people were quick to learn and quicker to copy. They learned and copied so fast that they came to despise their teachers. They owed a moral obligation, they believed, to bring the rest of the world under the Japanese roof.
Civilization, however, is not so easily acquired. One does not become civilized in a lifetime. Hundreds of years are essential to that process. The Japanese did not know that the nations whom they thought it would be so easy to overtake had backgrounds of tradition and culture and religion extending back for thousands of years. These things are not seen; they are not on the surface, but their roots are deep. The Japanese had no such roots. So, they thought they were getting ahead when they attacked their neighbors without warning and always won. They thought that that was the way of progress; they had no idea that they were slipping steadily to their doom.
So, they lorded it over the Russians and the Chinese, then over the British and Americans and all of the white race whom they took by surprise in the six months or so beginning with Pearl Harbor. No insult was too dastardly, no torture too horrible for them to perpetrate. They felt that at last their day had come. They had the power, they were to be the lords of the earth.
But the Japanese had no civilization. They had only myths and a “front.” Their lives were as jerry-built as their paper houses. Their conquests collapsed just about as rapidly. They might win for a moment by stabbing an unsuspecting neighbor in the back; but it was quite another thing to hold out after the victim’s friends and relatives had time to collect their forces. The “Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere” rapidly melted away, and when it crumbled the homeland was too vulnerable to hold out.
So, we had the strange spectacle of the last few days: the Japanese mentality was always childish, and the people showed that they were children again. Their arrogance had disappeared; they seemed even to enjoy their defeat as the Allies moved in, as if they were spectators at a pageant or guests at a garden party.
We and our Allies have reason to be happy as the war ends and peace returns to us and to all the earth. The years of worry and sacrifice are over; the outlook is brighter than had seemed possible even a short while ago. We have only one cause for regret, for concern for the future. The atomic bomb, a triumph of our science, has brought doubt and fear as to ourselves. We seemed to forget our sense of high purpose when Germany fell. We did many things that we shall blush to remember. Hiroshima and Nagasaki will be stains upon our own good name. We ourselves shall have to be different men hereafter. We shall need, as someone has well said, to put our intelligence into the service of principle rather than passion. To quote the words of St. Thomas, written almost seven hundred years ago:
In all created things there is a stable element, even if this be only primary matter, and something belonging to movement, if under movement we include operation. Now things need governing as to both, because even that which is stable, since it is created from nothing, would return to nothingness if it were not sustained by a Governing Hand.
We, as a nation, shall have to have more regard for the Governing Hand from this time on, if the peace which begins today is to endure.