Nagasaki Day: The High Price of WW 2

Posted on August 8, 2003 in War

This blogging is part of the Nagasaki Day Blogwave.

Mass slaughter in a can:
Little Boy on the left; Fat Man on the right

Today is Nagasaki Day in the United States. As I write this, it is August 9th which is also Nagasaki Day in Japan. “Fat Man” was dropped at 11:02 am on August 9. Here in the United States it was the evening of the 8th.

Two days ago, I addressed one of the logical fallacies connected with the bombing of these two Japanese cities. Today, I shall address a second.

As I have watched events unfolding around the world in my forty five years, I’ve been scornfully impressed with the rationale for overlooking atrocity. Whether it has been Serbs conducting ethnic cleansings in Bosnia, Israelis bloodily repressing the Palestinian intifada, General Rios-Montt murdering hundreds of thousands of Mayans in the Guatemalan highlands — to name a few — two legacies of World War II are held over our heads: the Holocaust and the dropping of the A-Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

I have been told not to mind Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, for example, because now it is the Jews who commit acts of ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians: the fact that they have not set up concentration camps and gas ovens, I have heard it argued, means that their approach to the self-declared “problem” of Palestinians living in Israel does not deserve the slightest comment from the rest of us. Similar logic has been used in Bosnia and in Guatemala. The Holocaust has become like a record set in the pole vault for architects of atrocity. As long as you keep well under the 8 million killed, you can walk under the crossbar laughing, getting away with it.

The creation of and the dropping of the two A-Bombs provided cover for those who have used lesser weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein certainly compared the numbers and the long term effects when he elected to use poison gas against the Kurds. It wouldn’t surprise me if Bin Laden rationalizes the thousands killed at the World Trade Center by pointing to the many more deaths achieved in a single day by the United States, first at Hiroshima, then at Nagasaki.

The worst invoker of the legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been the United States itself. As we backed off from nuclear weapons a step at a time, we developed a new generation of conventional weapons that included napalm, high-explosives, spent-uranium shell casings, and more precise means to deliver them to the target. Now we hear that “civilian deaths happen”, that the upwards to 12,000 who have died so far in Iraq are nothing. Here we have the crossbar of the Holocaust leveled against the statistics coming out of the Iraqi adventure. We’re well-below that, apologists for Resident Bush aver, so what’s the fuss?

Consider this contradiction: the government can kill thousands with its high tech and high explosive weaponry, but if one woman kills one man, she may be sentenced to death*.

Casualties come under the Holocaust crossbar. There’s another cross-bar: mega-tonnage. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki blasts represent the most powerful weapons ever used in war. All other weapons, now — including the new generation of “bunker busting” nuclear weapons that the Bush Administration is keen to develop — are considered small and of no consequence. Little Boy and Fat Man set a high mark under which arms manufacturers and despots (including the elected, the selected, and the pole-vaulted into power) can excuse themselves.

The creation and storage of any weapon, I feel, is an atrocity waiting to happen. Bullets may be used for sport shooting at targets or hunting, but there is no civil rationale at all for keeping high explosives except to commit mass murder. When we start talking about atomic bombs, we’re talking genocide.

The blast at Nagasaki should not blind us to the consequences of the other arms race, to the great profits being made off these holocausts in a can. I said ten years ago in a Hiroshima Day speech that I gave in Szeged, Hungary:

We cannot wait for the politicians to lead. We must say to them, this is what we want: an end to the manufacture and sale of all the artifacts of war. And we need many leaders — every one of you if it is possible. We must raise our voices for the men, women, and children….of every place where people are dying in war. We must stop allowing men and women to grow rich off of death and destruction. In this way — and only in this way — can we best remember and honor the lives that were lost when a city disappeared in a blinding flash of light forty-seven [now fifty eight] years ago.

It’s still true. It’s still true. It’s still true because very little has been done to stop the surge of the rhetoric and the actions that support the war supplies rich, the dealings of the merchants of death.

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*I oppose the Death Penalty, incidentally.