from www.aworldtowin.org;
- From John Hersey's
Hiroshima
Sixty-eight years
ago, on 6 August 1945, the United States committed the worst terrorist bombing
ever – the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.
On 9 August, another American A-bomb destroyed the Japanese
city of Nagasaki. The two blasts were each the equivalent of tens of thousands
of tons of dynamite. The heat reached 1,000° C. The explosions and the
radiation cloud they created killed more than 200,000 people, either
immediately or over the next few months. Many years of suffering from cancer
and other ills caused by radiation poisoning lay ahead for the survivors and
their children.
The destruction of these two cities was not the first time
major urban centres had been destroyed, but the scale of killing was unlike
anything the world had ever seen before. No one else, before or since, has ever
used nuclear weapons.
The US unleashed the nuclear era in the closing days of the
Second World War. Germany had already surrendered. Japan's economy had been
destroyed and its capital firebombed into ashes; its military had been dealt
decisive defeats. Many historians – although not all – believe that Japan would
have surrendered without the atomic bombing. The purpose of the bombing was not
just to make sure that the US and its allies won the war, but even more, to make
sure that the US and the US alone would benefit from Japan's surrender. In
Washington at that time, "There was a belief that dropping the bomb could
accelerate the end of the war in ways that would greatly strengthen the
American strategic position in Asia," US historian and sociology professor
Mark Selden told a conference organised in London by Greenpeace to mark the
sixtieth anniversary in 2005.
America was determined not to let the Soviet Union prevent
it from stepping into Japan's shoes as the top colonial power in Asia. The USSR
was still a socialist country then. It had been allied with the US during the
war against Germany and Japan, but even before the war was over the US was
baring its teeth to the USSR and setting out to dominate much of the world.
The bombing of these two cities is as relevant today as it
has ever been, although the world has changed a great deal.
The US is still brandishing its weapons of mass destruction
to forcibly reshape the world according to its imperialist interests. At a time
when US President Barack Obama and other representatives of those interests try
to further and justify their criminal enterprise with fake outrage about
chemical weapons in Syria and threats to use atomic weapons to stop Iran's
nuclear programme, the world's people need to remember the US's heartless
bombing of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to pursue those same interests.
Further, the struggle between those who perpetuate and
defend such crimes and those who oppose and expose them is even sharper
today.
After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the American
authorities denied the reports about radiation sickness. The first Western
journalist on the scene, the progressive Australian Wilfred Burchett, wrote,
"In Hiroshima, 30 days after the first atomic bomb destroyed the city and
shook the world, people are still dying, mysteriously and horribly – people who
were uninjured in the cataclysm from an unknown something which I can only
describe as an atomic plague. Hiroshima does not look like a bombed city. It
looks as if a monster steamroller had passed over it and squashed it out of
existence. I write these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that
they will act as a warning to the world." The American occupation authorities
confiscated his camera but failed to stop his telex. When the article appeared,
the US accused Burchett of simply mouthing false Japanese propaganda. Burchett
later went on to report on the war in Vietnam from the viewpoint of the
liberation forces.
US military censors were more successful in killing the
articles written by the first American journalist to reach Nagasaki after the
bombing. George Weller, who considered himself very patriotic, initially wrote
in praise of the atomic bomb as if it were simply a more powerful kind of
explosive. His early articles show great scepticism about the existence of
"disease x", as radiation sickness was called at first, but he later
saw unmistakable evidence that convinced him otherwise. Only after Weller's
death were these pieces finally published, by Japan's Mainichi Newspapers in
2005.
The New York Times reporter in Hiroshima, on whose dispatches much of the
world relied, parroted the official lies. He denied the existence of radiation
sickness and downplayed the seriousness and special nature of the devastation
caused by atomic weapons – which the US government was then considering using
on the USSR. Later it turned out that this journalist, who won the Pulitzer
Prize for his work, was on the Pentagon payroll. A Yale Global Online article
by Mark Selden calls this an early example "of what we now call embedded
journalism".
It is worth noting that almost sixty years later, American
and British authorities and their media mouthpieces, including the New York Times, used the same kind of deception in connection with the
war against Iraq, first about that country's non-existent weapons of mass
destruction and later to conceal the death and devastation caused by the
invasion and occupation. The Times also led the pack of the government's media dogs in trying
to discredit Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier who leaked secret military
footage of an American helicopter crew deliberately murdering Iraqi civilians,
including children.
The video Collateral Damage brought Manning severe
punishment in a military brig even before his current trial, where he faces
life in prison. It also enraged the Obama government and its partners against
Julian Assange, whose WikiLeaks organization distributed these materials. The
Obama government, currently at war against truth-teller Edward Snowden, would
almost undoubtedly have done everything it could to silence and punish those
who spoiled American attempts to cover up the consequences of the atomic
bombing of Japan and threatened to ruin the US's "good guy" image
attained through hypocrisy, secrecy and coercion.
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