Saving Civilization- My Foot!

[Shimatoree]

The US has always insisted that the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were necessary to end World War Two.
But it is a narrative that has strangely very little emphasis on the human cost.
A young American Student in Hiroshima a student at Princeton University in America.
Standing near the famous A-Bomb Dome, I asked Jamal whether his visit to Hiroshima had changed the way he views America's use of the atom bomb on the city 70 years ago.
He considered the question for a long time.
"I think we as a society need to revisit this point in history and ask ourselves how America came to a point where it was okay to destroy entire cities, to firebomb entire cities.

A conventional view in the US is that while terrible, the use of the bomb brought an end to the war


The COOKED conventional wisdom in the United States is that the dropping of atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war, and because of that it was justified - end of story.

But it is one that was constructed AFTER the war, by America's leaders, to JUSTIFY what they had done. And what they had done was, by any measure, horrendous.

A deliberate civilian target

Crew of the Enola Gay in a military parade in New York, April 1946
The crew of the Enola Gay were treated as heroes for dropping an A-bomb on the heavily populated city
Hiroshima was not a military target.

Their target was the geographical centre of the city. The bomb was set to explode 500m (0.3 miles) above the ground for maximum destructive effect.

A US military team and Japanese camera crew shot more than 20 hours of film in March 1946. It is the most complete and detailed visual record of the after effects of the first atomic attack.
There is high-quality colour footage of the horrific scarring caused by flash burns from the bomb. There are injuries that had never been seen before.
'They should not thank the bomb'
What is all the more remarkable is that the film was not seen in public until the early 1980s. It was marked secret and suppressed by the US government for more than 30 years.
Instead,
Americans were told a sanitised narrative of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: that a great scientific endeavour had brought quick victory, and saved hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides.

Decades later when Ms Ogura travelled to the Washington DC to see the unveiling of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Museum, she was astonished to find this version of history still holding sway.
"Many American people said to me, '"Congratulations, you could come here thanks to the bombing! Without the bombing you would have to do hara-kiri, you know, commit suicide'."
"That is a very awful excuse. We do not blame the Americans, but they should not say that thanks to the bomb so many people could survive."
A lifetime of radiation secrecy


The human cost
It is said that those who don't know their own history are condemned to repeat it.
Japanese leaders are rightly criticised for their continued attempts to whitewash Japan's WWII crimes in China, Korea and South East Asia.

It is also true that terror bombing was not invented by the United States.

The Nazis unleashed it at Guernica in 1937 and again on British cities in 1940.

The Japanese bombed Chongqing for six years. The British destroyed Dresden and many other German cities.
But no other bombing campaign in WW2 was as intense in the destruction of civilian lives as the US bombing of Japan in 1945. Between 300,000 and 900,000 people died.
As the student said-, how was it that the country that entered the war to save civilisation ended it by slaughtering hundreds of thousands of civilians?

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33754931

[Mirza Ghalib]

Firstly my profound gratitude that you for one did not let August 6 go by without a return to the past. At the time Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed, the Japanese Emperor had already capitulated to the Americans on behalf of the country. But they still went ahead with their nefarious designs, part of which was sheer intellectual curiosity, if one may put it that way: what effects did the unleashing of the bomb produce on the ground.

What else does one find to say about Hiroshima-Nagasaki? One thing close to my heart. I love Japanese literature. They've had great writers. And yet, in their disciplined fashion, most have never treated this horrendous sage of suffering. Well, that's their business. But it does raise questions in our minds about just how honourable Japanese intellectuals have shown themselves in the past. Mishima apart, they had all become willing slaves of the US.

Last but not least, the West learnt no enduring lessons from the Hiroshima-Nagasaki trauma. They have once again begun playing with the idea of using the bomb in their on again-off again relations with Russia. And once again the brilliant title to this piece will be used to justify any such incredible act, namely Saving Civilization. To which, of course, the heartfelt *My foot!" trips off the tongue with no prompting at all.