[Vision2020] Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and 60 years for reflection

[joanopyr at earthlink.net]

Pat Kraut writes:

"This is all very easy for you sitting here in the USA at a time when we are not expecting anyone to drop bombs on us daily. Neither are we reading daily of our men and women dying ALL over the world for many years. You cannot base your judgment on this time in history on reading the newspapers and magazines of the time. Every family was touched by the death and destruction daily for years as was Wilson. The horror of his position and trying to get it to an end that brought less to us and more to them must have weighted heavily...everyday for years. It is grossly unreasonable to try and go back and second guess Wilson or anyone else at this point."

She then adds (in a second post): 

"OPPs I ment to say that you MUST base your judgement on the news of the 1940's...not the rewrites of today."

Why not base our assessment of America's nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the "rewrites" of today?  Hindsight, reflection, and a cooler, less heated understanding of Japan's situation at the end of the war ought to prompt a reassessment of our actions.  Japan's morale, its economic devastation, and the fact that its people, who were starving and had been continuously fire-bombed for more than two years, does suggest that Japan, like Germany, would have surrendered without our dropping two nuclear bombs on two civilian cities.

I must also take issue, Pat, with your glib assertion that it's easy for us to criticize the Truman Administration and the America of 1945 because we candy-assed moderns are not expecting to have bombs dropped on us daily.  Aren't we?  Isn't this what we spent the whole of the post-1945 through end of the Cold War period expecting -- the H-bombs from Russia with love?  And now, isn't our primary justification for the war in Iraq that if we don't act in Baghdad we might see a "mushroom cloud" over Washington, DC?  That's what Condoleeza Rice told me; I don't know what she told you.

I talk to my 83 year-old grandmother at least three times a week.  She votes Republican; she clings to old Southern bigotries; sometimes, I think she's as nutty as a fruitcake (and she thinks the same of me).  But our relationship is based upon mutual affection, if not understanding, and when I talked to her just this morning, I mentioned the anniversary of the first bombing that passed on August 6th.  My grandmother still insists on referring to the Japanese as "the Japs," which makes me cringe, but even she has come to see that racism might have played some part in our decision to go nuclear on Japan.  Just as we interned Japanese Americans in camps for the duration, but not German Americans, who "looked like us," we incinerated hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians and subjected others to the ongoing horrors of radiation poisoning for generations to come.  

It's sixty years later.  Why not pause and reflect on this?  Why not consider the fact that we are the only nation ever to use not one but two nuclear bombs on real, live human beings?  Is it too much to consider that this issue, like so many others, isn't as black and white as you and Phil clearly wish to believe?     
 
Finally, Pat says:

"My opinion is that if you don't like the way a war might end...don't start one."

Amen, sister.  That's exactly why I think we made such a grotesque and irretrievable mistake in invading Iraq.  This is going to end badly . . . 

Joan Opyr/Auntie Establishment
www.auntie-establishment.com
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