Sunday, August 9, 2009
The Forgotten Bomb
Related: The Single Greatest War Crime in Human History
Now the second greatest war crime in human history.
"Nagasaki the forgotten bomb
Nagasaki and Hiroshima were disasters of human history.
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Nagasaki is like the forgotten bomb. I will be talking about Hiroshima, but I wanted to talk about Nagasaki first. I went to both places and one of my best friends in Japan, Tomoyo is from Nagasaki. When you live in a city and meet all the poeple there and then just imagine it it being blown away it makes you want to stop and cry.
They dropped the Fatman on Nagasaki on August 9th. It was the second atomic bomb dropped and the first and more powerful Plutonium bomb ever used. It not only had plutonium but it had 15% more mass than little boy which was dropped on Hiroshima. The blast was less effective because of the mountains, but 80,000 people were killed and far more would die later from the starvation, radiation, and injury it caused.
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A cultural city and history were lost. Erased in seconds. And why? The Japanese had been trying to surrender. Well the main reason the American used the bombs when they did was because they did not want to divide Japan with Russia the way they were East and West Germany. Russia agreed to invade Japan (who had defeated Russia in their last war) three months after the German surrender May 8th. Well that time was August 8th (or Aug 9th Japan time). And the Russian began attacking Manchuria China where the Japanese army was on that day.
The US wanted all of Japan they had plans to invade Korea after all which we all saw and Japan was the unsinkable aircraft carrier. Even now almost 65 years later the US still has troops in Japan. In fact if you are a foreigner whose been to Japan the first questions you will be asked is are you military and Okinawa or Misawa?
When I arrived in Japan 4 years ago it was in August. The first thing I saw on TV was reports about the bombs. Over in Japan every year they talk to survivors and have remembrance. I've been to the museums and I've talked to countless numbers of Japanese about the bombing.
The typical argument for dropping the bombs will never admit to the kind of sick individuals that just revel in the power of it and love the showmanship or shall we say "Shock and Awe" of the bomb that makes them feel mighty through some distance attachment to their ego via nationalism. No the typical rationalization is that the bomb actually saved lives in their bizzaro world. So I guess the next time the police chase a bank robber they should just fire at the car with bazookas or artillery and take out the entire city block for after all, if they tried to shoot the robber with their guns they might get shot back at.
The reason to drop the bombs wasn't to save lives and it did not save lives it killed hundreds of thousands and the US could have ended the war long before dropping the bombs and saved lives on all sides by accepting the surrender the Japanese had been offering. But just like in Europe the US wanted to destroy things in over kill and wreck as many cities as possible. Like in Dresden and Rohan the clean up and reconstruction was just too profitable to pass up. The Russians needed to see US might and the US wanted to take the stage as the next Super power with a flash.
Bombing Nagasaki was completely unnecessary. Hiroshima was already wiped off the map. The war was over. The US kept killing until they had total control. In the aftermath of the war Japan was turned into ruins, the CIA paid the Yakuza Mafia to run the show, women whored them selves out to GIs for they were without homes, work or food in many cases. An entire entertainment ring grew up in the new generation of black markets, gambling, and prostitution.
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There is no justification for killing civilians must less cities full of them. Just imagine where ever you are right now and everyone you know, being bombed. You might be completely against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but imagine you were blown up anyway. Kids, babies, animals, everything sacrificed because you're the same nationality as the people at war. The US propaganda towards Japan was highly racist and well received. It wasn't much different than the Nazi Propaganda about the Jews. And to top it off, in America Japanese citizens were put into "internment" camps. They didn't do that to the Germans or Italians just the Japanese. Don't think it was because it's easier to tell who is who. It's no easier to tell the difference between Asians as it would be between European groups.
Some hot headed people will say, "well they shouldn't have bombed Pearl Harbor." Well that's damn right they shouldn't have bombed Pearl Harbor. But that's just the thing "THEY" didn't bomb the harbor the military did. And when the Japanese military bombed the Harbor that's what they bombed, US war ships, not Hawaii and not cities full of civilians. And will leave aside the issues of the US antagonizing that by the oil embargo the attacks in China as well as the foreknowledge of the attack. The fact is the people living in Nagasaki and Hiroshima had about as much say in that as you or I did (and I wasn't even born yet).
For the record my grand father fought the Japanese all the way to Okinawa. He used a flame thrower to toast bunkers and holes and was shot in the leg eventually but continued to fight. I'm proud of him for serving his country. But like he felt himself, there was no glory in burning people alive even soldiers. It was just a horrible thing to never talk about. War is hell and nationalism attached to war is a sick sick disease. There is no shame in serving in WWII. The issue here is with the nuclear bombs. There was no need to add that pointless destruction to the innocent.
Just imagine right now if America nuked Iraq, and not a base but a city. Imagine if they had nuked Fallujah a few years ago under the wild justification that it would save American lives. I could see some imperialist idiot saying to nuke every inch of Afghanistan just to kill bin laden or to turn the whole middle east not only Iraq but all of it into a glass parking lot. That was the kind of Insane comments made by many Americans in the run up to the Iraq War or after 9/11.
Nuclear weapons are terrible. And right now the new nuclear weapon first used by Israel in 1973 and currently used by the US is depleted Uranium. This stuff murders by radiation poisoning. If causes massive birth defects and destroys the unborn and the young the most.
What is the argument for it? "Saving lives" really saving lives by killing people and putting a radioactive poison in the ground for eons?! Radiation doesn't create super heroes. In the real world it only does one thing, kill everything around it. Other than creative torture it is among the most horrible ways to die possible.
Well winners write the history. Had the allies lost the war the nuclear bombings of Japan would be seen as what they are. Human atrocities. People are still dying from those damn bombs.
And it was not "good for Japan." Japan rose to its economic leadership because of the Japanese's people. For one they didn't have to spend countless billions on war and military defense. Secondly they have year round school, the longest work hours, and busted their asses day and night to make Japan what it is. There is nearly no religion, and there are creative minds to invent and improve things. Rather than selling guns, they produced goods sold all over the world. But with the stroke of a pen the BIS ended all of that. Japan once held one half of all the money in the world. Now it's down to about a 1/6th. Still they have the longest life expectancy, most centurions, gold reserves, most advanced technologies in several fields, top two in language and math, top two in health care, highest standard of living, lowest crime rate in the industrialized world even with the biggest cities. Japan has the second largest market in the world behind US of America which is currently falling apart and was based mostly on credit.
The future for hybrids, robotics, cell phones, flat screens, mass transit, wind power, game consuls, and international business is Japan.
One reason is the country's near empty appetite for war. With shinto now disconnected form government, and organized religion all but reduced to rituals for funerals and weddings there just isn't a way to amass the people into senseless violence. There would be a better chance of violence from angry baseball fans than from nationalism or religion. Japan is proud of what it can Create not Destroy.
America could learn from that. America's ego is still attached to what it can break.
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Posted by Rocker at 11:53 PM Links to this post
Labels: Japan, U.S.
Burchett's Testimony
"An Honest American Reporter Defends Truth About Bomb’s Effects (Reprised)
The mushroom cloud over Hiroshima after the dropping of Little Boy
The Fat Man mushroom cloud resulting from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rises 18 km (11 mi, 60,000 ft) into the air from the hypocenter
Voice and Silence in the First Nuclear War: Wilfred Burchett and Hiroshima
By Richard Tanter*
Hiroshima had a profound effect upon me. Still does. My first reaction was personal relief that the bomb had ended the war. Frankly, I never thought I would live to see that end, the casualty rate among war correspondents in that area being what it was. My anger with the US was not at first, that they had used that weapon – although that anger came later. Once I got to Hiroshima, my feeling was that for the first time a weapon of mass destruction of civilians had been used. Was it justified? Could anything justify the extermination of civilians on such a scale? But the real anger was generated when the US military tried to cover up the effects of atomic radiation on civilians – and tried to shut me up. My emotional and intellectual response to Hiroshima was that the question of the social responsibility of a journalist was posed with greater urgency than ever.
Wilfred Burchett 1980 [1]
Wilfred Burchett entered Hiroshima alone in the early hours of 3 September 1945, less than a month after the first nuclear war began with the bombing of the city. Burchett was the first Western journalist – and almost certainly the first Westerner other than prisoners of war – to reach Hiroshima after the bomb. The story which he typed out on his battered Baby Hermes typewriter, sitting among the ruins, remains one of the most important Western eyewitness accounts, and the first attempt to come to terms with the full human and moral consequences of the United States’ initiation of nuclear war.
For Burchett, that experience was a turning point, ‘a watershed in my life, decisively influencing my whole professional career and world outlook’. Subsequently Burchett came to understand that his honest and accurate account of the radiological effects of nuclear weapons not only initiated an animus against him from the highest quarters of the US government, but also marked the beginning of the nuclear victor’s determination rigidly to control and censor the picture of Hiroshima and Nagasaki presented to the world.
The story of Burchett and Hiroshima ended only with his last book, Shadows of Hiroshima, completed shortly before his death in 1983. In that book, Burchett not only went back to the history of his own despatch, but more importantly showed the broad dimensions of the ‘coolly planned’ and manufactured cover-up which continued for decades. With his last book, completed in his final years in the context of President Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ speech of March 1983, Burchett felt ‘it has become urgent – virtually a matter of life or death – for people to understand what really did happen in Hiroshima nearly forty years ago . . . It is my clear duty, based on my own special experiences, to add this contribution to our collective knowledge and consciousness. With apologies that it has been so long delayed . . .” [2]
That one day in Hiroshima in September 1945 affected Burchett as a person, as a writer, and as a participant in politics for the next forty years. But Burchett’s story of that day, and his subsequent writing about Hiroshima, have a greater significance still, by giving a clue to the deliberate suppression of the truth about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and to the deeper, missing parts of our cultural comprehension of that holocaust.
[Read Burchett's eye-witness testimony below]
One Day in Hiroshima: 3 September 1945
91847-004-669368aca-bomb-hiroshima-victim-1banks04hiroshima1hiroshima-2fuser-559518_1163252037article-atom-bomb-hiroshima
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Posted by Rocker at 11:48 PM Links to this post
Labels: Japan, U.S.
Hiroshima Didn't Have to Happen
"Hiroshima Didn't Have to Happen
"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom." - Thomas Paine, "Common Sense," 1776
Fifty-six years ago this month, we became the first and only nation to use nuclear weapons in warfare. The world was told that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified in order to bring a swift end to the war without a costly and bloody invasion of Japan's home islands. This, to put it charitably, was a lie. No less an authority than General Dwight Eisenhower has stated unequivocally: "It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."
Yet millions of Americans still believe what they were told in August of 1945, well before the experience of being regularly deceived by our government became commonplace. As we saw with the controversies surrounding the 50th anniversary exhibition at the Smithsonian, many are outraged by anyone who agrees with Eisenhower's views. But Eisenhower was hardly alone at the time.
President Truman's top military advisors were virtually unanimous in their belief that the atomic bombs were not needed to end the war without an invasion: Generals MacArthur, Clarke, Bonesteel and Marshall of the Army; Admirals Leahy, Nimitz, Halsey, Wagner and Radford of the Navy; and Generals Arnold, Eaker, LeMay, Spaatz and Chennault of the Air Force. (Comments from each of these men can be found at www.doug-long.com, in an extended discussion of Gar Alperovitz' book The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb, the most extensive examination of the new evidence in this case.)
The military leaders knew, as most civilians and soldiers did not, that Japan's military situation was completely hopeless. We controlled both her seas and her skies with impunity. The war would be over long before an invasion could be mounted. Eisenhower also knew what some of his fellow generals did not: that for over a year we had been intercepting Japanese diplomatic cables seeking surrender. Dozens of such messages have now been declassified. This cable traffic became more frequent and more desperate in the final weeks of the war. By then it was clear that the Japanese Emperor and even elements of her military were committed to surrender. And there is now no doubt that President Truman knew this when he made the decision to use nuclear weapons. We have a diary entry in his own handwriting concerning the "cable from Jap Emperor asking for peace."
There was only one condition. Japan was asking for the same terms on which the war was later settled: that she be allowed to retain her Emperor. Truman's political advisors told him that even a hint that we would agree to this, even a private assurance, would be likely to bring the war to an end. But Truman not only refused to offer such assurances, he explicitly removed them from the statement issued at the Potsdam summit in July, knowing full well that this would prolong the war. He waited long months until the atomic bomb was available, without pursuing other avenues to peace. Far from saving lives, the nuclear option caused more soldiers to die in a war that was essentially over.
Why did Harry Truman do this? The available evidence in the historical record indicates that Truman and his closest advisor, Secretary of State James Byrnes, felt that nuclear weapons would give America unchallenged military power. They were looking ahead to the Cold War; they believed that demonstrating our willingness to use such weapons would make the Russians "more manageable" in the postwar period. Other advisors warned that this would lead to a costly nuclear arms race. But Truman and Byrnes chose to believe General Groves, leader of the Manhattan Project, who predicted that it would be twenty years before another nation could develop nuclear arms.
This, of course, was one of history's greatest miscalculations. They could not definitively foresee what we know now: that their decision is still killing the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in their fifties and sixties; that we would spend trillions of dollars in a needless arms race; that thousands of patriotic soldiers and atomic workers would be sickened and killed by the careless use of nuclear power; that island nations of the South Pacific would be destroyed in our quest for nuclear supremacy; or that we would lose a good measure of our democracy in assuming a permanent war footing and adopting extraconstitutional measures in the name of national security.
It is their responsibility nonetheless, and it is our legacy. Because of geostrategic political calculations, our government chose to use nuclear weapons without warning, against a civilian target, and without first pursuing any other method of achieving Japan's surrender. Rather than justifying it by invoking revenge for Pearl Harbor or other Japanese atrocities; rather than expressing a triumphalist joy for the lives saved in an invasion that never would have occurred; we should unflinchingly recall this anniversary with humility and sorrow.
From the August 18, 2001 issue of the Arizona Daily Star
For a much, much longer version of this piece click here
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Posted by Rocker at 11:44 PM Links to this post
Labels: Japan, U.S.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
The Single Greatest War Crime in Human History
Wars have killed more; however, this is the greatest single act -- a day that will live in infamy, as someone once said.
An inexcusable act, once again told upon a foundation of lies. The U.S. had extracted all the demands we wanted from the Japanese, and we let them keep the emperor anyway. This was done to "see if it would work" and send a message to the Russians -- stay out of Asia!
A HORRENDOUS WAR CRIME that is CONDEMNED by this American -- and yet, our society celebrates this mass-murder like we celebrate all our slaughters.
How embarrassing and criminal! Yeah, you're number one, AmeriKa!!!
"The lies of Hiroshima live on, props in the war crimes of the 20th century; The 1945 attack was murder on an epic scale. In its victims' names, we must not allow a nuclear repeat in the Middle East
* Jon Pilger byline
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o John Pilger
o The Guardian,
o Wednesday August 6 2008
o Article history
.... In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb's blast. It was the first big lie. "No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin" said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. "I write this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called "an atomic plague". For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared - and vindicated.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate "good war", whose "ethical bath", as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.
The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and save lives. "Even without the atomic bombing attacks," concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, "air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that ... Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
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Also read: The Big Lie of Hiroshima
The Hiroshima A-bomb blast photographed by the US military on 6 August 1945
The Hiroshima A-bomb blast photographed by the US military
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"Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Worst single terror attacks in history
by Norm Dixon
August 6 and August 9 2009 mark the 64th anniversaries of the US atomic-bomb attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Hiroshima, an estimated 80,000 people were killed in a split second. Some 13 square kilometres of the city were obliterated. By December, at least another 70,000 people had died from radiation and injuries.
Three days after Hiroshima's destruction, the US dropped an A-bomb on Nagasaki, resulting in the deaths of at least 70,000 people before the year was out.
Since 1945, tens of thousands more residents of the two cities have continued to suffer and die from radiation-induced cancers, birth defects and still births.
A tiny group of US rulers met secretly in Washington and callously ordered this indiscriminate annihilation of civilian populations. They gave no explicit warnings. They rejected all alternatives, preferring to inflict the most extreme human carnage possible. They ordered and had carried out the two worst single terror acts in human history.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki anniversaries are inevitably marked by countless mass media commentaries and US politicians' speeches that repeat the 63-year-old mantra that there was no other choice but to use A-bombs in order to avoid a bitter, prolonged invasion of Japan.
On July 21, 2005, the British New Scientist magazine undermined this chorus when it reported that two historians had uncovered further evidence revealing that “the US decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ... was meant to kick-start the Cold War [against the Soviet Union, Washington's war-time ally] rather than end the Second World War”. Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at the American University in Washington, stated that US President Harry Truman's decision to blast the cities “was not just a war crime, it was a crime against humanity”.
With Mark Selden, a historian from Cornell University in New York, Kuznick studied the diplomatic archives of the US, Japan and the USSR. They found that three days before Hiroshima, Truman agreed at a meeting that Japan was “looking for peace”. His senior generals and political advisers told him there was no need to use the A-bomb. But the bombs were dropped anyway. “Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war”, Selden told the New Scientist.
While the capitalist media immediately dubbed the historians' “theory” “controversial”, it accords with the testimony of many central US political and military players at the time, including General Dwight Eisenhower, who stated bluntly in a 1963 Newsweek interview that “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing”.
Truman's chief of staff, Admiral William Leahy, stated in his memoirs that “the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”
At the time though, Washington cold-bloodedly decided to obliterate the lives of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children to show off the terrible power of its new super weapon and underline the US rulers' ruthless preparedness to use it.
These terrible acts were intended to warn the leaders of the Soviet Union that their cities would suffer the same fate if the USSR attempted to stand in the way of Washington's plans to create an “American Century” of US global domination. Nuclear scientist Leo Szilard recounted to his biographers how Truman's secretary of state, James Byrnes, told him before the Hiroshima attack that “Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might and that a demonstration of the bomb may impress Russia”.
Drunk from the success of its nuclear bloodletting in Japan, Washington planned and threatened the use of nuclear weapons on at least 20 occasions in the 1950s and 1960s, only being restrained when the USSR developed enough nuclear-armed rockets to usher in the era of “mutually assured destruction”, and the US rulers' fear that their use again of nuclear weapons would led to a massive anti-US political revolt by ordinary people around the world.
Washington's policy of nuclear terror remains intact. The US refuses to rule out the first use of nuclear weapons in a conflict. Its latest Nuclear Posture Review envisages the use of nuclear weapons against non-nuclear “rogue states” and it is developing a new generation of ‘battlefield” nuclear weapons.
Fear of the political backlash that would be caused in the US and around the globe by the use of nuclear weapons remains the main restraint upon the atomaniacs in Washington. On this 64rd anniversary year of history's worst acts of terror, the most effective thing that peace-loving people around the world can do to keep that fear alive in the minds of the US rulers is to recommit ourselves to defeating Washington's current “local” wars of terror in Afghanistan and Iraq.
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Also see: THE FORGOTTEN HOLOCAUST REMEMBERED
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