Wednesday 16 January 2008

War's Spiritual Nature?

Earlier on this very blog here, the issue of human sacrifice rituals were examined and seen necessarily as propitiatory offerings to particular deities. And that if such spiritual entities actually do exist, they are nourished by these offerings of human blood. On the other hand, even if they don't exist this is still the projected reason for such practices.
Perhaps one could see practices like war and torture in a similar light, that besides being means towards ends, they are also ends in themselves; this end in the case of war being orgiastic human sacrifice rituals with perhaps pride of place to the dropping of the atom bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki over civilian populations, ordered by President Truman in 1945. Truman was a 33rd Degree Freemason and Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of Missouri 1940-1941; having succeeded to the post of President from 32nd Degree Freemason, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

American diplomats and negotiators in June 1945 told President Truman that the Japanese were seeking to surrender on one condition--that they be allowed to keep their emperor. But President Truman and the United States refused these initial Japanese offers, demanding that Japan surrender unconditionally and agree to give up their emperor- whom the Japanese saw as an inviolate link to the sacred, and of absolute value. Instead of accepting the Japanese desire to surrender, in June and July 1945 American planes, using saturation bombing, firebombed and destroyed 59 out of Japan's 66 largest cities, killing over one million people and leaving 20 million homeless. General Dwight Eisenhower, supreme commander of American forces in Europe, told Secretary of War Stimson "that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary." In July 1945 Eisenhower met with Truman and advised him not to use the bomb. The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Admiral Leahy, also advised Truman not to drop the atomic bomb, arguing again that Japan was already defeated.

Back to Truman, and it might be helpful to understand where he saw his priorities. On February 22, 1950 when dedicating the Washington Statue at Memorial Hall, he said the following:

The greatest honor that has come to me, and that can ever come to me in my life, is to be Grand Master of Masons in Missouri.

Grand Master Truman later described the far from benevolent atomic scientist Oppenheimer as "a crybaby scientist", after Oppenheimer became deeply troubled subsequent to the use of the atom bombs over Japan.
Freemasonry views Truman as having ascended towards the very heights of spiritual advancement. In the expectation of seeing some kind of consistency in his character, rather than a schizophrenically divided soul of public and private persona, what might Truman's callousness- pitched to such an extraordinary extreme- tell us about the nature of this spiritual advancement?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

In relation to the bomb in Hiroshima, there is more to that story than meets the eye or has been made public. Do a research on one of the search engines "Jesuits Hiroshima", you will be surprised at what you find, and one of those "miraculous surviving Jesuits" was Pedro Arrupe!!!! Pedro Arrupe went on to become Superior General of the Jesuit Order. He just happened to be hanging around Hiroshima when the americans decided to drop the bomb!!!!!!!!!!!!

Andrew said...

Hiroshima doesn't sound the greatest of places to be hanging around when they bombed Hiroshima.

Anonymous said...

You can assume he had a more pro-active role than merely hanging around. And his survival suggests there is more to the story than the official version (there are some who speculate the bomb couldn't be dropped from a plane as the technology wasn't yet that advanced, that it had to be detonated from ground level). Anyway, that Jesuits Hiroshima story is interesting, worth searching it.

Andrew said...

Though prior to the existence of atomic bombs, technology wasn't advanced enough to use atomic bombs either. It was advanced enough once atomic bombs came into existence.

Anonymous said...

yes, but there are those who make a strong case for saying that it wasn't yet possible to drop the atom bomb in 1945 from a plane.

But whether that is true or not, you might be interested in researching the Jesuits Hiroshima story, and their unusual survival is an indication that there is more to the story than is publicly told.