The whole purpose of the Cold War was to in some weird Dante like image way – to turn the planet into one big pile of bio-trash?
The August 6 anniversary of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima is upon and again the MSM gets a free minute or two of airtime showing archive footage and an historic footnote gets mentioned but not analyzed. The Mayor of Hiroshima this year has words to repeat from the American President and a bold new concept for the ban of nuclear weapons from the planet. An unusual word, “Obamajority” refers to and represents the sentiment of the majority of the planet who agree with the concept.
Hiroshima mayor backs Obama's call for an end to nuclear weapons
Are we crawling to Bethlehem as the poet Yeats describes our progress toward the future? Is that crawling a good thing? Are we to be reborn into a better more efficient monkey package in terms of our evolutionary capacity to change - and hopefully for the better?
The Image of Hiroshima, burn victims, salt shadows (evaporated people) on the sidewalks and the naked raw image of the burned landscape - are eternal in humanity’s personal and historic scrapbook.
I am for nuclear disarmament.
As an American, I stand by President Truman and his command decision to use the bombs to save a million American military casualties. I had relatives in the Pacific theatre of war who would have been in a likely physical invasion of the Japanese mainland.
Truman had been in the trenches in World War One. His was a hands on decision based on experience. Right, wrong or indifferent, Harry Truman used the device of war to end war – an old formula.
To Truman’s credit, his humanity, his possible regret, he had a brief discussion with his biographer Merle Miller in which the topic of discussion was whether he would or could visit Hiroshima to lay a wreath. The old cantankerous man responded that he might do that, he might go to Japan but that he would not kiss their ass. Harry did have a way with words. Men in previous generations of western culture have not been allowed to be emotionally honest in so many ways. Truman dropped the bomb and now we have to live with the consequences of proliferation.
The other city that got hammered with science in 1945 was Nagasaki on August 9 with the second bomb, in our new age of non-reason related to nuclear arms. People don’t visit that city or remember it as much. Hiroshima is the premiere icon of nuclear destruction. Nagasaki is more a local domestic thing while Hiroshima is the icon of international focus.
I believe that a very bubble wrapped Japanese government in total denial about surrender looked at Nagasaki and drew a horrible conclusion about its destruction. In the Japanese mindset of race and blood, Nagasaki was not considered to be Japanese but European. The Japanese allowed one port city, set aside in the sixteenth century, and in conjunction with trade from Portugal. While on Japanese soil this city was virtually walled off in access and psychological reference from mainstream Japanese culture up until 1945.
The photo above is of a burned wooden image of the Virgin Mary from the Cathedral there in the European colony port of Nagasaki. The Japanese saw the destruction of a European city by the Americans and they did not understand the concept. Were the Americans ignorant of history or was the nuclear genie a madness that could not be contained?
Nagasaki cathedral chapel – Virgin Mary
Is the nuclear genie a madness that cannot be contained?
That is what anniversaries are for. To remember and to consider, reconsider the facts of the day in focus - August 6, 1945.
