[Vision2020] Oslo 12-10-17: Nobel Peace Prize speech by ICAN campaigner, Hiroshima survivor Setsuko Thurlow

[Ted Moffett]

Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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I listened/watched to this speech live at about 5 AM this Sunday morning.
Words fail to capture the impact.

Assuming humanity survives the barbaric age we are living through, future
generations will be aghast at the horrors we have and continue to inflict
on each other, and the living planet as a whole.
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Nobel Peace Prize speech by ICAN campaigner, Hiroshima survivor Setsuko
Thurlow

December 11, 2017 (Mainichi Japan)
http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20171211/p2a/00m/0na/005000c

International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), activist and
Hiroshima survivor Setsuko Thurlow speaks in Oslo City Hall, Norway, Sunday
Dec. 10, 2017, after ICAN officially received the Nobel Peace Prize 2017.
(Terje Bendiksby/ NTB scanpix via AP)

The following is a speech delivered by Setsuko Thurlow, a survivor of the
August 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima, on behalf of the International
Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace
Prize, as released by the Nobel Foundation.

Your Majesties,

Distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee,

My fellow campaigners, here and throughout the world,

Ladies and gentlemen,

It is a great privilege to accept this award, together with Beatrice, on
behalf of all the remarkable human beings who form the ICAN movement. You
each give me such tremendous hope that we can -- and will -- bring the era
of nuclear weapons to an end.

I speak as a member of the family of hibakusha -- those of us who, by some
miraculous chance, survived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
For more than seven decades, we have worked for the total abolition of
nuclear weapons.

We have stood in solidarity with those harmed by the production and testing
of these horrific weapons around the world. People from places with
long-forgotten names, like Moruroa, Ekker, Semipalatinsk, Maralinga,
Bikini. People whose lands and seas were irradiated, whose bodies were
experimented upon, whose cultures were forever disrupted.

We were not content to be victims. We refused to wait for an immediate
fiery end or the slow poisoning of our world. We refused to sit idly in
terror as the so-called great powers took us past nuclear dusk and brought
us recklessly close to nuclear midnight. We rose up. We shared our stories
of survival. We said: humanity and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.

Today, I want you to feel in this hall the presence of all those who
perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I want you to feel, above and around
us, a great cloud of a quarter million souls. Each person had a name. Each
person was loved by someone. Let us ensure that their deaths were not in
vain.

I was just 13 years old when the United States dropped the first atomic
bomb, on my city Hiroshima. I still vividly remember that morning. At 8:15,
I saw a blinding bluish-white flash from the window. I remember having the
sensation of floating in the air.

As I regained consciousness in the silence and darkness, I found myself
pinned by the collapsed building. I began to hear my classmates' faint
cries: "Mother, help me. God, help me."

Then, suddenly, I felt hands touching my left shoulder, and heard a man
saying: "Don't give up! Keep pushing! I am trying to free you. See the
light coming through that opening? Crawl towards it as quickly as you can."
As I crawled out, the ruins were on fire. Most of my classmates in that
building were burned to death alive. I saw all around me utter,
unimaginable devastation.

Processions of ghostly figures shuffled by. Grotesquely wounded people,
they were bleeding, burnt, blackened and swollen. Parts of their bodies
were missing. Flesh and skin hung from their bones. Some with their
eyeballs hanging in their hands. Some with their bellies burst open, their
intestines hanging out. The foul stench of burnt human flesh filled the
air.

Thus, with one bomb my beloved city was obliterated. Most of its residents
were civilians who were incinerated, vaporized, carbonized -- among them,
members of my own family and 351 of my schoolmates.

In the weeks, months and years that followed, many thousands more would
die, often in random and mysterious ways, from the delayed effects of
radiation. Still to this day, radiation is killing survivors.

Whenever I remember Hiroshima, the first image that comes to mind is of my
four-year-old nephew, Eiji - his little body transformed into an
unrecognizable melted chunk of flesh. He kept begging for water in a faint
voice until his death released him from agony.

To me, he came to represent all the innocent children of the world,
threatened as they are at this very moment by nuclear weapons. Every second
of every day, nuclear weapons endanger everyone we love and everything we
hold dear. We must not tolerate this insanity any longer.

Through our agony and the sheer struggle to survive -- and to rebuild our
lives from the ashes -- we hibakusha became convinced that we must warn the
world about these apocalyptic weapons. Time and again, we shared our
testimonies.

But still some refused to see Hiroshima and Nagasaki as atrocities -- as
war crimes. They accepted the propaganda that these were "good bombs" that
had ended a "just war". It was this myth that led to the disastrous nuclear
arms race -- a race that continues to this day.

Nine nations still threaten to incinerate entire cities, to destroy life on
earth, to make our beautiful world uninhabitable for future generations.
The development of nuclear weapons signifies not a country's elevation to
greatness, but its descent to the darkest depths of depravity. These
weapons are not a necessary evil; they are the ultimate evil.

On the seventh of July this year, I was overwhelmed with joy when a great
majority of the world's nations voted to adopt the Treaty on the
Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Having witnessed humanity at its worst, I
witnessed, that day, humanity at its best. We hibakusha had been waiting
for the ban for seventy-two years. Let this be the beginning of the end of
nuclear weapons.

All responsible leaders will sign this treaty. And history will judge
harshly those who reject it. No longer shall their abstract theories mask
the genocidal reality of their practices. No longer shall "deterrence" be
viewed as anything but a deterrent to disarmament. No longer shall we live
under a mushroom cloud of fear.

To the officials of nuclear-armed nations -- and to their accomplices under
the so-called "nuclear umbrella" -- I say this: Listen to our testimony.
Heed our warning. And know that your actions are consequential. You are
each an integral part of a system of violence that is endangering
humankind. Let us all be alert to the banality of evil.

To every president and prime minister of every nation of the world, I
beseech you: Join this treaty; forever eradicate the threat of nuclear
annihilation.

When I was a 13-year-old girl, trapped in the smouldering rubble, I kept
pushing. I kept moving toward the light. And I survived. Our light now is
the ban treaty. To all in this hall and all listening around the world, I
repeat those words that I heard called to me in the ruins of Hiroshima:
"Don't give up! Keep pushing! See the light? Crawl towards it."

Tonight, as we march through the streets of Oslo with torches aflame, let
us follow each other out of the dark night of nuclear terror. No matter
what obstacles we face, we will keep moving and keep pushing and keep
sharing this light with others. This is our passion and commitment for our
one precious world to survive.
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