Lessons in Complexity
- Dougie
- Aug 9
- 3 min read
My father was a copy boy, newspaper journalist and sub-editor, then television news editor, then radio news and current affairs producer with BBC Radio Scotland. His final job title (before his untimely death, age 44) was Senior Producer News & Topicality. The programme he and his team created -- Good Morning Scotland -- is still broadcasting every morning, Monday to Friday.
Oddly, when I think about his profession, me growing up and my love of reading and writing, there were surprisingly few books in our house: the home of a journalist and his well-educated Scottish family.
We were encouraged to read the Christian Bible and Arthur Mee's 10 volume Children's Encyclopedia (I still have a set). And everything required by school English classes, of course. I read lots more. My brothers less so.
A long, long time ago (I was a teenager) my father did suggest, however, I read two books in particular. This was uncharacteristic of him (as I recall).
They came to mind to today -- 9 August 2025 -- for rather obvious reasons.
We Of Nagasaki (1951) by Takashi Nagai & And All The Trumpets (1955) by Donald Smith (who my father may have known through Church of Scotland connections in Aberdeen).
Both books were written by survivors of war time atrocities. The first is a series of personal accounts of Nagasaki survivors of the bomb. The second is a thinly disguised novelisation of Donald Smith's years of captivity in Burma
Takashi Nagai survived the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki by the USA. He converted to Roman Catholic Christianity in the 1930s and became a doctor specialising in radiology. He entered Japanese military medical service and was based initially in China then worked at a radiology department in Nagasaki (before, during and after the bomb was dropped). He died in 1951 of leukemia (diagnosed — with tragic irony — before the atomic bomb attack).
Donald Smith was an Aberdonian called up in 1940 and shipped to Singapore about one month before the fall of the then British colony to Japanese forces. He was captured and imprisoned for 4 years, including a period working on the notorious railway line. After the war he became a Minister of the Church of Scotland.
I can't recall what -- if anything -- my father said to me by way of explaining why he thought I should read those two books. As a pair.
Perhaps it had something to do with the idea of his perspective on the concept of his God's Grace. Something I didn't fully grasp (if indeed I have grasped it) until I read Flannery O'Connor's Southern Gothic nightmare short story ‘A Good Man Is Hard To Find’. Read it if you have not yet done so.
My father was not one to fall for redundant falsities dressed up in lazy arguments about moral equivalence. A plague on both your houses just leaves one sitting uncomfortably on the fence of isolation, lacking independent thought or agency.
I think he hoped I would appreciate two truths that even my teenage self could understand before and after reading both books more than 50 years ago.
Human societies and individual people are capable of carrying out monstrously immoral acts (but most of us don't).
Life can be complicated: it’s never as simple as good guys and bad guys, pure and evil, us and them as binary absolutes.
That does not mean I think there are no such things as categorically right and wrong actions. I do not mean to suggest I adhere to such bunkum as … it all depends on your point of view…. or the latest fetish known as ‘our’ truth.
You know, reading the news today, some things are demonstrably true (but not yet uncontested, sadly). Some examples off the top of my head
Nazis are bad.
Peace in Gaza is needed urgently. As in ‘now’.
Recognise Palestine.
Secure a two-state solution.
Race, religious, gender hatreds (to name but three of many more) are bad.
Vaccines save lives.
Etc.
I think this idea is also necessary (as in true and desirable). No Nukes. Never again. Not Now. Not Ever.
Today reminds us.
On the 80th anniversary of dropping the (second) A Bomb on a Japanese city, I think it's an idea we still need to win in the hearts and minds of foolish men. Sadly.
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