Recalling Hiroshima's Horror

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!

"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

• 
• • John Pilger
  • The Guardian,
  • Wednesday August 6 2008
  • 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 For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared - and vindicated.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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