The Satanic Thesis on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Resurfaces

The 'Demonic Evil' Thesis on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The quote is from 1962, from C.S. Lewis's preface to The Screwtape Letters: capital-letter Evil is not hatched in "crime dens", but in clean, carpeted offices, by men with trimmed fingernails. That passage has become the cornerstone of a reading that describes the history of the United States as a "demonic possession" and reinterprets the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the culmination of that logic.

The "Demonic Possession" Thesis

Those who uphold this reading are not speaking figuratively: America's expansionist drive would stem from the conviction of a divine mandate and would have involved "mass killings" since the days of the settlers. The selection of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they insist, was no accident. The reasoning has its acquiescence: the bombings sought not only to force Japan's surrender, but to demonstrate to the world —and to the USSR in particular— the reach of a power believed to be blessed.

The Rebuttal: Japanese Camps and Wartime Pragmatism

Against that narrative, another school recalls that the Japanese Empire was running extermination camps in China in 1945 and that the occupation would not have ended without surrender. In that reading, the bombings were an act of force to avoid an even bloodier invasion. "If they had surrendered earlier, they wouldn't have taken the hits", goes an argument that reduces the question to pure wartime arithmetic.

Philippines 1899 and McKinley's Shadow

The controversy then opens onto other episodes. One of the most cited is the 1899 Philippine War, with William McKinley's words about "docile natives" and a death toll that, according to the figures cited, exceeds one million — more than 10% of the population. The Spanish response is not long in coming: the Junta of Valladolid was already asking in the 16th century whether the conquest of America was just. "There is no precedent in history", the argument goes, "of halting a conquest in order to judge it".

If demonic evil is decided in carpeted offices, the uncomfortable question is who occupies those offices today. And so we remain: not knowing whether Hiroshima and Nagasaki were an exception or a symptom.