Hiroshima and Nagasaki

A few months ago a Japanese couple living in Hiroshima came to our home. They voluntarily accompany visitors to the museum and to the city centre, where one of the greatest atrocities of the 20^th century took place. It was an experience to spend a few days with survivors of Hiroshima who show the horror and support the physical, but above all the moral regeneration of the inhabitants of Hiroshima. They do not forget, they inform, and they do this with serenity and a moral greatness that is catching. Peace should make it impossible for the horror to be repeated.
    Each year on the anniversary, the events in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are commemorated, and emotional events are organised to commemorate the victims – as if everything had been an accident of history. In doing so, it is forgotten that it was a deliberate act committed with full knowledge of the damage it would cause and with absolute disregard for human suffering. The United States justified this monstrous act of terrorism by blaming the Japanese and presenting it as a necessary evil for a better future. However, neither the people who were in their homes were guilty, nor was a better world achieved; on the contrary, it brought terrible pain and unnecessary suffering to millions of people, and some of them are still suffering the consequences and dying from the late effects of radiation.
    When I read and listen to the usual comments in the media, I find them so biased and unintelligible that I feel obliged to represent other, completely different views.
    I was lucky to meet the American historian Gabriel Jackson on his visit to Gijón and hear him comment on one of his most interesting and best documented books: “Civilisation and Barbarity in 20^th century Europe”. I thought his reflections on this terrible event were very important. They inspired me to take a very different view from the one prevailing today, which has been and still is held by the US Administration.
    The first thing that stands out is that the media talk about the anniversary of Hiroshima, but barely mention that three days later the second atomic bomb was dropped on the civilian population of Nagasaki without giving the Japanese government even the slightest chance to reconsider its position in the face of such unprecedented atrocious actions.
    For Jackson, the most barbaric acts of the century were those perpetrated by Nazism and Stalinism and the two atomic bombs dropped on cities. The cruel nuclear weapon was deliberately used against the civilian population in order to achieve the greatest possible effect, i.e. the greatest possible number of civilian deaths (today there are already more than two million people), in order to create the greatest possible terror. Jackson makes a detailed critical analysis of the various official justifications for this genocide and presents alternative options for a deterrent nuclear operation that could have been carried out without civilian casualties. The demand for the unconditional surrender which served as the American justification for the use of the nuclear bomb did not prevent the United States from finally accepting the main condition on which the Japanese had insisted: that the Emperor should not be forced to abdicate and that he should not be brought to justice as a war criminal. If this condition had been accepted beforehand, the Japanese government would have capitulated without the atomic bomb being dropped.
    But to blame the American people for such a decision would be unfair and wrong. The American democracy, as Eisenhower himself warned, is dominated by the military industrial complex. I quote the impressive thoughts with which Jackson ends his analysis:
    “To me, as an American serving as a military cartographer at the time, it seemed like a ‘war crime’, and in the (more than) half century since then I have never read a convincing explanation why a test could not be carried out in an uninhabited or sparsely populated area to save human lives, and not just those of American soldiers.
    Under the specific circumstances of August 1945, the use of the atomic bomb showed that a psychologically very normal and democratically elected chief executive could use the weapon just as the Nazi dictator would have used it. In this way, the United States – for anyone concerned with moral distinctions in the conduct of different types of government – blurred the difference between fascism and democracy.”
    A second observation on the central notions disseminated in official and ruling leading media is that of the threat to humanity from the possible use of nuclear weapons by other countries, especially those of the Third World. There is talk of the nuclear threat that assumes that Russia, Pakistan, India or above all North Korea or Iran are in possession of the nuclear weapon. The country that, irrespective of international agreements, is most likely to threaten the use of nuclear weapons, namely Israel, is often not mentioned. And nothing is said about the views and inclination of high-placed political and military officials in the United States to even use nuclear weapons as a deterrent. And above all, the government that deliberately and intentionally took the decision to commit the appalling genocide is not called to account, either legally or morally.
    It is not enough to remember the victims; the executioners cannot be forgiven either, as long as they continue to justify what cannot be justified, as long as they do not ask the victims for forgiveness and acknowledge the horrible and unnecessary nature of their actions. For the future of humanity, justice and peace.     •

(Translation Current Concerns)