Brighter than a Thousand Suns

Listening to Maiden's "Brighter than a Thousand Suns," a gripping song about the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yesterday was the 62nd anniversary of a wholly gratuitous, unnecessary, and damning act of genocide by the American government against the people of Nagasaki and Japan. While Hiroshima is the "bomb" that more people speak of, and its dropping has been damned since the news of its horror spread, it is the dropping of the second bomb, three days later, that provides the most telling evidence that this was no mere military tactic that they would have initiated against any enemy.

There was enough time for the military to report back what the devastation and impact on more than 100,000 civilians who were killed instantaneously on August 6th in Hiroshima, to give Truman and the powers in the military to think about what the impact of a second bomb would be on the people of Japan and on the world itself. Also, it was not enough time for the people of Japan to raise their voices above the din of Japan's dying war machine to the world community, to notify and show what had happened in Hiroshima. At a time before instant communication, no one really knew what was happening out there, the horror of it all, beyond the madmen pulling the strings for the American and Japanese military.

And there is a lot of literature that claims that Japan was weakened and close to surrender at the time of the dropping of the bombs. I'm not going to get into the argument, but clearly, the point can and should be made that if the U.S. was trying to "make a point" to the Russians at the time, was it really necessary to drop a second bomb? Wasn't it overkill? Were the estimated 40,000 - 70,000 civilians killed in Nagasaki collateral damage that the U.S. was willing to take on, for the sake of putting an exclamation point at the end of Hiroshima?

And of course, I can't even fathom the decision to begin with. The way that the American government has been able to perpetrate this kind of wholesale genocide unchecked by the world community... to the point where people don't think about the human cost of these bombs, in both lives and innocence. To the point where the American people, a scant 30 years later, were able to openly, viciously, "Japan bash" because the nation's economy was on the rise and car imports were threatening the Detroit metal machines. Don't you think the bombs were enough bashing for more than a generation?

Combine utter ignorance and no sense of history, and you get the traditional American bravado about how the world should always love us. No clue about what horror people had at the atrocities, once they were able to digest what had happened. It took three days to effectively kill more than 200,000 people. When you put that scale to just a year, the U.S. numbers could outpace anything that Hitler's SS could have done in its prime.

Anyway, to read more about how the decision was made to drop the bombs from original documents, check out this link.

And think peace.