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
When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps
was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human
being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as
she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the
morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into
the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked
down to the river and met a man called Yukio,
whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was
wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped. He and his family still
lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic desert. He described
a huge flash over the city, "a bluish light, something like an electrical
short", after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell.
"I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers
were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there
were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin
or hair. I was certain I was dead." Nine years later, when I returned
to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.
...
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."
...
This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous
nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost
unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in
the media. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle
East and that is Israel. The heroic Mordechai
Vanunu tried to warn the world in 1986 when he smuggled out
evidence that Israel was building as many as 200 nuclear warheads.
In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today clearly itching to
attack Iran, fearful that a new American administration might, just
might, conduct genuine negotiations with a nation the west has defiled
since Britain and America overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953.
...
The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming,
as good Germans did, that "we did not know"? Do we hide ever more
behind what Richard Falk
has called "a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with]
positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened,
validating a campaign of unrestricted violence"? Catching war criminals
is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic
stands in the dock, but Sharon
and Olmert, Bush and Blair
do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer. The
lies of Hiroshima live on, props in the war crimes of the 20th century.
