Showing posts with label Hiroshima. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hiroshima. Show all posts
Thursday, November 22, 2012
“Flatten” Gaza like Hiroshima
“Flatten” Gaza like Hiroshima and “mow” the population, Israeli public figures urge
Ali Abunimah on Sun, 11/18/2012
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/flatten-gaza-hiroshima-and-mow-population-israeli-public-figures-urge
Among the latest horrifying examples of incitement to mass murder by Israeli public figures, Gilad Sharon, the son of former prime minister and notorious war criminal Ariel Sharon, has called for the Israeli army to “flatten” Gaza as the US flattened the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945 with an atomic bomb.
“The residents of Gaza are not innocent, they elected Hamas. The Gazans aren’t hostages; they chose this freely, and must live with the consequences,” wrote Sharon in the extremist publication The Jerusalem Post. Sharon elaborated:
We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.
There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they’d really call for a ceasefire.
Were this to happen, the images from Gaza might be unpleasant – but victory would be swift, and the lives of our soldiers and civilians spared.
Sharon added that “There is no middle path here – either the Gazans and their infrastructure are made to pay the price, or we reoccupy the entire Gaza Strip.”
As of Sunday night, the end of the fifth day of Israel’s air assault on Gaza, more than 70 Palestinians, half of them civilians, had been killed in hundreds of Israeli airstrikes.
“Don’t give a hoot about Goldstone”
Meanwhile in a message to soldiers, Knesset member Michael Ben-Ari of the National Union party exhorted soldiers to kill without thought or mercy.
“Brothers! Beloved soldiers and commanders - preserve your lives! Don’t give a hoot about Goldstone! There are no innocents in Gaza, don’t let any diplomats who want to look good in the world endanger your lives[;] at any tiniest concern for your lives - Mow them!,” Ben-Ari was quoted as saying by the website HaKol HaYehudi.
Ben-Ari was referring to the UN-commissioned Goldstone report that documented war crimes and crimes against humanity during Israel’s 2008-2009 invasion of Gaza which left more than 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, dead.
“We love you alive and smiling, not, heaven forefend, ‘just’ and dead in Gaza - Sodom [-] there are no righteous men, turn it into rubble. Paint it red! We are worried about you and rely on you. We all do, all of the Nation of Israel,” Ben-Ari added.
The phrase “the Nation of Israel” refers to all members of the Jewish religion, not to citizens of the State Israel, notes Dena Shunra who translated Ben-Ari’s comments.
On 15 November, the second day of an Israeli assault, Ben-Ari addressed a hate rally in Tel Aviv, calling for more bloodshed in Gaza. New video of that rally, which this blog reported on previously, shows Ben-Ari in action.
Ben-Ari is also notorious for his incitement against Africans and for his hatred of Christians. In July he tore up a New Testament, calling it “abominable” and threw it in the trash.
Read more examples of incitement to violence by Israeli public figures, for example the prominent rabbi who says the Israeli army “must learn from the Syrians how to slaughter the enemy.”
All of these inciters will no doubt be pleased that in the bloodiest attack of Israel’s assault so far, 11 Palestinians from a single family, including four young children and an 81-year-old woman, were killed on Sunday when an Israeli bomb flattened their home.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Why did Japan surrender?
Sixty-six years ago, we dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima. Now, some historians say that’s not what ended the war. Gareth Cook
August 7, 2011
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08/07/why_did_japan_surrender
What ended World War II?
For nearly seven decades, the American public has accepted one version of the events that led to Japan’s surrender. By the middle of 1945, the war in Europe was over, and it was clear that the Japanese could hold no reasonable hope of victory. After years of grueling battle, fighting island to island across the Pacific, Japan’s Navy and Air Force were all but destroyed. The production of materiel was faltering, completely overmatched by American industry, and the Japanese people were starving. A full-scale invasion of Japan itself would mean hundreds of thousands of dead GIs, and, still, the Japanese leadership refused to surrender.
But in early August 66 years ago, America unveiled a terrifying new weapon, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a matter of days, the Japanese submitted, bringing the fighting, finally, to a close.
On Aug. 6, the United States marks the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing’s mixed legacy. The leader of our democracy purposefully executed civilians on a mass scale. Yet the bombing also ended the deadliest conflict in human history.
In recent years, however, a new interpretation of events has emerged. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa - a highly respected historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara - has marshaled compelling evidence that it was the Soviet entry into the Pacific conflict, not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that forced Japan’s surrender. His interpretation could force a new accounting of the moral meaning of the atomic attack. It also raises provocative questions about nuclear deterrence, a foundation stone of military strategy in the postwar period. And it suggests that we could be headed towards an utterly different understanding of how, and why, the Second World War came to its conclusion.
“Hasegawa has changed my mind,” says Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” “The Japanese decision to surrender was not driven by the two bombings.”
President Truman’s decision to go nuclear has long been a source of controversy. Many, of course, have argued that attacking civilians can never be justified. Then, in the 1960s, a “revisionist school” of historians suggested that Japan was in fact close to surrendering before Hiroshima - that the bombing was not necessary, and that Truman gave the go-ahead primarily to intimidate the Soviet Union with our new power.
Hasegawa - who was born in Japan and has taught in the United States since 1990, and who reads English, Japanese, and Russian - rejects both the traditional and revisionist positions. According to his close examination of the evidence, Japan was not poised to surrender before Hiroshima, as the revisionists argued, nor was it ready to give in immediately after the atomic bomb, as traditionalists have always seen it. Instead, it took the Soviet declaration of war on Japan, several days after Hiroshima, to bring the capitulation.
Both the American and Japanese public have clung to the idea that the mushroom clouds ended the war. For the Japanese, Hiroshima is a potent symbol of their nation as victim, helping obscure their role as the aggressors and in atrocities that include mass rapes and beheading prisoners of war. For the Americans, Hiroshima has always been a means justified by the end.
“This seems to touch a nerve,” observes Hasegawa.
That may help explain why Hasegawa’s thesis, which he first detailed in an award-winning 2005 book and has continued to bolster with new material, is still little known outside of academic circles, says Ward Wilson, a nuclear weapons scholar who has drawn on Hasegawa’s insights in his own recent work. Measured against the decades of serious and settled thinking about World War II, Hasegawa’s scholarship feels radical. But another reason, Wilson argues, is that to look at history in this new light is to entertain what seem like shocking ideas. That the destruction of cities does not sway leaders. That what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not overly remarkable. And, strangest of all: That nuclear explosives may not be particularly effective weapons of war.
The Pacific War began in 1941 with the violent humiliation at Pearl Harbor. Japan already held parts of China, and quickly invaded New Guinea, the Dutch East Indies, Burma, and Singapore. Manila fell. The country enjoyed air supremacy across most of Southeast Asia; in February 1942, it even attacked Australia. Japan’s control was tightening, and it appeared unstoppable.
After the epic Battle of Midway in the summer of 1942, however, the United States and its allies gained the momentum. Still, progress was slow as Marines hopped from atoll to island to atoll: wading through bloody coral shallows under a rain of shelling, engaging an enemy that was dug in, highly trained, and willing to fight to the death. The names of these tropical hells - Gaudalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa - have become Marine Corps legend. The casualties were heavy.
By the summer of 1945, the Americans had cornered Japan and assembled a final invasion plan, codenamed Operation Downfall. The first stage was scheduled for the fall, and would have opened with the landing of more than 700,000 troops on Kyushu, the southernmost of the big four islands. It would have been a larger operation than D-Day, certain to result in a bloody slaughter.
Americans, then and today, have tended to assume that Japan’s leaders were simply blinded by their own fanaticism, forcing a catastrophic showdown for no reason other than their refusal to acknowledge defeat. This was, after all, a nation that trained its young men to fly their planes, freighted with explosives, into the side of American naval vessels.
But Hasegawa and other historians have shown that Japan’s leaders were in fact quite savvy, well aware of their difficult position, and holding out for strategic reasons. Their concern was not so much whether to end the conflict, but how to end it while holding onto territory, avoiding war crimes trials, and preserving the imperial system. The Japanese could still inflict heavy casualties on any invader, and they hoped to convince the Soviet Union, still neutral in the Asian theater, to mediate a settlement with the Americans. Stalin, they calculated, might negotiate more favorable terms in exchange for territory in Asia. It was a long shot, but it made strategic sense.
On Aug. 6, the American bomber Enola Gay dropped its payload on Hiroshima, leaving the signature mushroom cloud and devastation on the ground, including something on the order of 100,000 killed. (The figures remain disputed, and depend on how the fatalities are counted.)
As Hasegawa writes in his book “Racing the Enemy,” the Japanese leadership reacted with concern, but not panic. On Aug. 7, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo sent an urgent coded telegram to his ambassador in Moscow, asking him to press for a response to the Japanese request for mediation, which the Soviets had yet to provide. The bombing added a “sense of urgency,” Hasegawa says, but the plan remained the same.
Very late the next night, however, something happened that did change the plan. The Soviet Union declared war and launched a broad surprise attack on Japanese forces in Manchuria. In that instant, Japan’s strategy was ruined. Stalin would not be extracting concessions from the Americans. And the approaching Red Army brought new concerns: The military position was more dire, and it was hard to imagine occupying communists allowing Japan’s traditional imperial system to continue. Better to surrender to Washington than to Moscow.
By the morning of Aug. 9, the Japanese Supreme War Council was meeting to discuss the terms of surrender. (During the meeting, the second atomic bomb killed tens of thousands at Nagasaki.) On Aug. 15, the Japanese surrendered unconditionally.
How is it possible that the Japanese leadership did not react more strongly to many tens of thousands of its citizens being obliterated?
One answer is that the Japanese leaders were not greatly troubled by civilian causalities. As the Allies loomed, the Japanese people were instructed to sharpen bamboo sticks and prepare to meet the Marines at the beach.
Yet it was more than callousness. The bomb - horrific as it was - was not as special as Americans have always imagined. In early March, several hundred B-29 Super Fortress bombers dropped incendiary bombs on downtown Tokyo. Some argue that more died in the resulting firestorm than at Hiroshima. People were boiled in the canals. The photos of charred Tokyo and charred Hiroshima are indistinguishable.
In fact, more than 60 of Japan’s cities had been substantially destroyed by the time of the Hiroshima attack, according to a 2007 International Security article by Wilson, who is a senior fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. In the three weeks before Hiroshima, Wilson writes, 25 cities were heavily bombed.
To us, then, Hiroshima was unique, and the move to atomic weaponry was a great leap, military and moral. But Hasegawa argues the change was incremental. “Once we had accepted strategic bombing as an acceptable weapon of war, the atomic bomb was a very small step,” he says. To Japan’s leaders, Hiroshima was yet another population center leveled, albeit in a novel way. If they didn’t surrender after Tokyo, they weren’t going to after Hiroshima.
Hasegawa’s work is an important new entry into the scholarly conversation, reconstructing the conflicting perspectives of Russians, Americans, and Japanese, and concluding that the bomb played a secondary role. Barton Bernstein, a professor of history emeritus at Stanford University, is the unofficial dean of American atomic bomb scholarship and counts himself as both a fan and a critic of Hasegawa. Hasegawa’s ability to read three languages, Bernstein says, gives him a unique advantage over other scholars. Hasegawa spent years working through primary documents, with a deep understanding of linguistic and cultural nuance. His knowledge was especially valuable because historians of the period face such fragmentary and contradictory evidence, in part because the Japanese destroyed many documents.
But therein lies the weakness of the Hasegawa interpretation as well, Bernstein says. After a long war and in the space of a few days, the Japanese leadership was hit with two extraordinary events - Hiroshima and the Soviet invasion - and sorting out cause and effect, based on incomplete documentation, may prove impossible.
“When you look through all the evidence, I think it is hard to weigh one or the other more heavily,” Bernstein said. “The analysis is well intentioned, but more fine-grained than the evidence comfortably allows.”
Yet Bernstein, Hasegawa, and many historians agree on one startling point. The public view that the atomic bomb was the decisive event that ended World War II is not supported by the facts.
What happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has framed the world’s thinking about nuclear weapons. Those days in August remain the only instance of nuclear war. The sheer horrors of the destruction, and the lingering poison of radioactivity, inform what has come to be called nuclear deterrence: No sane nation would bring a nuclear attack on itself, and so having nuclear weapons deters your enemies from attacking. When two rival nations have nuclear weapons, as during the Cold War, the result is stalemate.
Hasegawa’s scholarship disturbs this simple logic. If the atomic bomb alone could not compel the Japanese to submit, then perhaps the nuclear deterrent is not as strong as it seems. In fact, Wilson argues, history suggests that leveling population centers, by whatever method, does not force surrender. The Allied firebombing of Dresden in February of 1945 killed many people, but the Germans did not capitulate. The long-range German bombing of London did not push Churchill towards acquiescence. And it is nearly impossible to imagine that a bomb detonated on American soil, even one that immolated a large city, would prompt the nation to bow in surrender.
If killing large numbers of civilians does not have a military impact, then what, Wilson asks, is the purpose of keeping nuclear weapons? We know they are dangerous. If they turn out not to be strategically effective, then nuclear weapons are not trump cards, but time bombs beneath our feet.
Whatever the merits of this position, it suffers the great handicap of trying to change, fundamentally, how several generations have thought about the atomic age, says Linton Brooks, who has served in arms control and nuclear policy positions in several administrations. “Fifty years of telling ourselves that these things are different has sort of made them different,” says Linton. “That is the mystique of nuclear weapons.”
Hasegawa’s own relationship to the events of August of 1945 testifies to the degree to which, all these years later, they resist clear appraisal. As a child, Hasegawa watched the Tokyo firebombing from his roof, and he can still recall the eerie orange glow on the horizon. Growing up, he felt anger at the Japanese government for bringing the conflict onto its people. Later, working as a scholar in America, he accepted the position that the atomic bombing was necessary to end the war. Today he views America’s bombings of Japan’s cities - Hiroshima and Tokyo included - as war crimes. Yet, he adds, they are crimes America should not apologize for until Japan comes to terms with war crimes of its own. These are the evolving views of a man who has mustered the courage to look at an ugly period of history without flinching - something that most people, Americans and Japanese alike, have found themselves unable to do.
Gareth Cook is a Globe columnist and former editor of Ideas.
August 7, 2011
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08/07/why_did_japan_surrender
What ended World War II?
For nearly seven decades, the American public has accepted one version of the events that led to Japan’s surrender. By the middle of 1945, the war in Europe was over, and it was clear that the Japanese could hold no reasonable hope of victory. After years of grueling battle, fighting island to island across the Pacific, Japan’s Navy and Air Force were all but destroyed. The production of materiel was faltering, completely overmatched by American industry, and the Japanese people were starving. A full-scale invasion of Japan itself would mean hundreds of thousands of dead GIs, and, still, the Japanese leadership refused to surrender.
But in early August 66 years ago, America unveiled a terrifying new weapon, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a matter of days, the Japanese submitted, bringing the fighting, finally, to a close.
On Aug. 6, the United States marks the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing’s mixed legacy. The leader of our democracy purposefully executed civilians on a mass scale. Yet the bombing also ended the deadliest conflict in human history.
In recent years, however, a new interpretation of events has emerged. Tsuyoshi Hasegawa - a highly respected historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara - has marshaled compelling evidence that it was the Soviet entry into the Pacific conflict, not Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that forced Japan’s surrender. His interpretation could force a new accounting of the moral meaning of the atomic attack. It also raises provocative questions about nuclear deterrence, a foundation stone of military strategy in the postwar period. And it suggests that we could be headed towards an utterly different understanding of how, and why, the Second World War came to its conclusion.
“Hasegawa has changed my mind,” says Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” “The Japanese decision to surrender was not driven by the two bombings.”
President Truman’s decision to go nuclear has long been a source of controversy. Many, of course, have argued that attacking civilians can never be justified. Then, in the 1960s, a “revisionist school” of historians suggested that Japan was in fact close to surrendering before Hiroshima - that the bombing was not necessary, and that Truman gave the go-ahead primarily to intimidate the Soviet Union with our new power.
Hasegawa - who was born in Japan and has taught in the United States since 1990, and who reads English, Japanese, and Russian - rejects both the traditional and revisionist positions. According to his close examination of the evidence, Japan was not poised to surrender before Hiroshima, as the revisionists argued, nor was it ready to give in immediately after the atomic bomb, as traditionalists have always seen it. Instead, it took the Soviet declaration of war on Japan, several days after Hiroshima, to bring the capitulation.
Both the American and Japanese public have clung to the idea that the mushroom clouds ended the war. For the Japanese, Hiroshima is a potent symbol of their nation as victim, helping obscure their role as the aggressors and in atrocities that include mass rapes and beheading prisoners of war. For the Americans, Hiroshima has always been a means justified by the end.
“This seems to touch a nerve,” observes Hasegawa.
That may help explain why Hasegawa’s thesis, which he first detailed in an award-winning 2005 book and has continued to bolster with new material, is still little known outside of academic circles, says Ward Wilson, a nuclear weapons scholar who has drawn on Hasegawa’s insights in his own recent work. Measured against the decades of serious and settled thinking about World War II, Hasegawa’s scholarship feels radical. But another reason, Wilson argues, is that to look at history in this new light is to entertain what seem like shocking ideas. That the destruction of cities does not sway leaders. That what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not overly remarkable. And, strangest of all: That nuclear explosives may not be particularly effective weapons of war.
The Pacific War began in 1941 with the violent humiliation at Pearl Harbor. Japan already held parts of China, and quickly invaded New Guinea, the Dutch East Indies, Burma, and Singapore. Manila fell. The country enjoyed air supremacy across most of Southeast Asia; in February 1942, it even attacked Australia. Japan’s control was tightening, and it appeared unstoppable.
After the epic Battle of Midway in the summer of 1942, however, the United States and its allies gained the momentum. Still, progress was slow as Marines hopped from atoll to island to atoll: wading through bloody coral shallows under a rain of shelling, engaging an enemy that was dug in, highly trained, and willing to fight to the death. The names of these tropical hells - Gaudalcanal, Iwo Jima, Okinawa - have become Marine Corps legend. The casualties were heavy.
By the summer of 1945, the Americans had cornered Japan and assembled a final invasion plan, codenamed Operation Downfall. The first stage was scheduled for the fall, and would have opened with the landing of more than 700,000 troops on Kyushu, the southernmost of the big four islands. It would have been a larger operation than D-Day, certain to result in a bloody slaughter.
Americans, then and today, have tended to assume that Japan’s leaders were simply blinded by their own fanaticism, forcing a catastrophic showdown for no reason other than their refusal to acknowledge defeat. This was, after all, a nation that trained its young men to fly their planes, freighted with explosives, into the side of American naval vessels.
But Hasegawa and other historians have shown that Japan’s leaders were in fact quite savvy, well aware of their difficult position, and holding out for strategic reasons. Their concern was not so much whether to end the conflict, but how to end it while holding onto territory, avoiding war crimes trials, and preserving the imperial system. The Japanese could still inflict heavy casualties on any invader, and they hoped to convince the Soviet Union, still neutral in the Asian theater, to mediate a settlement with the Americans. Stalin, they calculated, might negotiate more favorable terms in exchange for territory in Asia. It was a long shot, but it made strategic sense.
On Aug. 6, the American bomber Enola Gay dropped its payload on Hiroshima, leaving the signature mushroom cloud and devastation on the ground, including something on the order of 100,000 killed. (The figures remain disputed, and depend on how the fatalities are counted.)
As Hasegawa writes in his book “Racing the Enemy,” the Japanese leadership reacted with concern, but not panic. On Aug. 7, Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo sent an urgent coded telegram to his ambassador in Moscow, asking him to press for a response to the Japanese request for mediation, which the Soviets had yet to provide. The bombing added a “sense of urgency,” Hasegawa says, but the plan remained the same.
Very late the next night, however, something happened that did change the plan. The Soviet Union declared war and launched a broad surprise attack on Japanese forces in Manchuria. In that instant, Japan’s strategy was ruined. Stalin would not be extracting concessions from the Americans. And the approaching Red Army brought new concerns: The military position was more dire, and it was hard to imagine occupying communists allowing Japan’s traditional imperial system to continue. Better to surrender to Washington than to Moscow.
By the morning of Aug. 9, the Japanese Supreme War Council was meeting to discuss the terms of surrender. (During the meeting, the second atomic bomb killed tens of thousands at Nagasaki.) On Aug. 15, the Japanese surrendered unconditionally.
How is it possible that the Japanese leadership did not react more strongly to many tens of thousands of its citizens being obliterated?
One answer is that the Japanese leaders were not greatly troubled by civilian causalities. As the Allies loomed, the Japanese people were instructed to sharpen bamboo sticks and prepare to meet the Marines at the beach.
Yet it was more than callousness. The bomb - horrific as it was - was not as special as Americans have always imagined. In early March, several hundred B-29 Super Fortress bombers dropped incendiary bombs on downtown Tokyo. Some argue that more died in the resulting firestorm than at Hiroshima. People were boiled in the canals. The photos of charred Tokyo and charred Hiroshima are indistinguishable.
In fact, more than 60 of Japan’s cities had been substantially destroyed by the time of the Hiroshima attack, according to a 2007 International Security article by Wilson, who is a senior fellow at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. In the three weeks before Hiroshima, Wilson writes, 25 cities were heavily bombed.
To us, then, Hiroshima was unique, and the move to atomic weaponry was a great leap, military and moral. But Hasegawa argues the change was incremental. “Once we had accepted strategic bombing as an acceptable weapon of war, the atomic bomb was a very small step,” he says. To Japan’s leaders, Hiroshima was yet another population center leveled, albeit in a novel way. If they didn’t surrender after Tokyo, they weren’t going to after Hiroshima.
Hasegawa’s work is an important new entry into the scholarly conversation, reconstructing the conflicting perspectives of Russians, Americans, and Japanese, and concluding that the bomb played a secondary role. Barton Bernstein, a professor of history emeritus at Stanford University, is the unofficial dean of American atomic bomb scholarship and counts himself as both a fan and a critic of Hasegawa. Hasegawa’s ability to read three languages, Bernstein says, gives him a unique advantage over other scholars. Hasegawa spent years working through primary documents, with a deep understanding of linguistic and cultural nuance. His knowledge was especially valuable because historians of the period face such fragmentary and contradictory evidence, in part because the Japanese destroyed many documents.
But therein lies the weakness of the Hasegawa interpretation as well, Bernstein says. After a long war and in the space of a few days, the Japanese leadership was hit with two extraordinary events - Hiroshima and the Soviet invasion - and sorting out cause and effect, based on incomplete documentation, may prove impossible.
“When you look through all the evidence, I think it is hard to weigh one or the other more heavily,” Bernstein said. “The analysis is well intentioned, but more fine-grained than the evidence comfortably allows.”
Yet Bernstein, Hasegawa, and many historians agree on one startling point. The public view that the atomic bomb was the decisive event that ended World War II is not supported by the facts.
What happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has framed the world’s thinking about nuclear weapons. Those days in August remain the only instance of nuclear war. The sheer horrors of the destruction, and the lingering poison of radioactivity, inform what has come to be called nuclear deterrence: No sane nation would bring a nuclear attack on itself, and so having nuclear weapons deters your enemies from attacking. When two rival nations have nuclear weapons, as during the Cold War, the result is stalemate.
Hasegawa’s scholarship disturbs this simple logic. If the atomic bomb alone could not compel the Japanese to submit, then perhaps the nuclear deterrent is not as strong as it seems. In fact, Wilson argues, history suggests that leveling population centers, by whatever method, does not force surrender. The Allied firebombing of Dresden in February of 1945 killed many people, but the Germans did not capitulate. The long-range German bombing of London did not push Churchill towards acquiescence. And it is nearly impossible to imagine that a bomb detonated on American soil, even one that immolated a large city, would prompt the nation to bow in surrender.
If killing large numbers of civilians does not have a military impact, then what, Wilson asks, is the purpose of keeping nuclear weapons? We know they are dangerous. If they turn out not to be strategically effective, then nuclear weapons are not trump cards, but time bombs beneath our feet.
Whatever the merits of this position, it suffers the great handicap of trying to change, fundamentally, how several generations have thought about the atomic age, says Linton Brooks, who has served in arms control and nuclear policy positions in several administrations. “Fifty years of telling ourselves that these things are different has sort of made them different,” says Linton. “That is the mystique of nuclear weapons.”
Hasegawa’s own relationship to the events of August of 1945 testifies to the degree to which, all these years later, they resist clear appraisal. As a child, Hasegawa watched the Tokyo firebombing from his roof, and he can still recall the eerie orange glow on the horizon. Growing up, he felt anger at the Japanese government for bringing the conflict onto its people. Later, working as a scholar in America, he accepted the position that the atomic bombing was necessary to end the war. Today he views America’s bombings of Japan’s cities - Hiroshima and Tokyo included - as war crimes. Yet, he adds, they are crimes America should not apologize for until Japan comes to terms with war crimes of its own. These are the evolving views of a man who has mustered the courage to look at an ugly period of history without flinching - something that most people, Americans and Japanese alike, have found themselves unable to do.
Gareth Cook is a Globe columnist and former editor of Ideas.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Vexing Mess: Experts perplexed, citizens stop sex
Ace Hoffman 3/21/11
Dear Readers,
Fukushima Dai-ichi may still be getting worse, not better.
The birth rate is bound to decline in Northern Japan. Whether by choice or by biological influence, no one will be sure. Sperm counts will drop and spontaneous abortions will rise. Many people will not WANT to have babies. It happened after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It happened after Chernobyl. It will happen here to. We're only human.
Radiation monitors were blown out when the buildings exploded, or simply stopped working at some point. Readings at the plant are generally unknown, and whatever is known is seldom presented to the public.
Today, spinach, milk, and water were all reported poisoned with radiation in various places in Japan. Radiation readings 1,600 times normal were detected TWENTY KILOMETERS from the plant, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Levels were reported to be over 160 microsieverts per hour.
No one should ever believe that a ten-mile evacuation planning zone is good enough anymore. Or that evacuation zones are the answer.
The truth of what's coming over the U.S. border, here where I live, is hard to know. I finally ordered my very own radiation detector -- but it's not scheduled to be shipped until the middle of May!
Dr. Conrad Miller recommends people in California start taking KI and says he's prescribed it "more than a thousand times" for other reasons as a doctor, and has never seen a side effect in anyone. He points out that the accident has already happened, the radioactive isotopes are in the air and falling now, and the side effects of taking KI (if they happen), are typical for any allergic reaction, and will presumably go away when you stop taking the KI.
Dr. Miller additionally say's he'll "probably" take it soon himself (he lives on Long Island, New York). Dr. Miller's videos are available online here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/conradmillermd
But I should point out that as far as I know, readings are NOT elevated in California... yet...
The following are the four main barriers to radioactive releases in these types of nuclear power plants, from the outermost layer to the innermost:
1) Outer walls of a fairly airtight building. These have been blown away at three reactors.
2) Primary Containment Vessel (large steel structure with cement base and large posts inside to hold the Reactor Pressure Vessel). Hopefully these are all intact but it seems unlikely.
3) Reactor Pressure Vessel. At least one of these may be damaged. All are still in danger of catastrophic failures, especially if they run out of boron or if seaweed plugs up the reactor's water channels. "We're not out of the woods yet" is a common pronouncement from the talking heads on television today.
4) The last barrier to prevent fission products and fuel (uranium and plutonium) escaping is the fuel cladding, made of zirconium, in steel rods with hundreds of pellets in each rod. It's presumably what been burning, when things burn at the site. When that happens, fission products are released, which gathered between fuel and the inner wall of the cladding.
Keeping fission products from escaping is what the cladding is there for: To keep the Cesium-137, Iodine-131, Strontium-90 and an ugly rainbow of other isotopes isolated from the human environment. Those deadly elements -- the ones they talk about in science fiction movies -- are being released at Fukushima Dai-ichi.
Everything that breaks off is undoubtedly being washed out to sea, to enter life's many food chains. What doesn't burn or oxidize and go up in smoke or steam, that is.
Fuel claddings are never perfect, and fuel clad cracking has been a recurrent problem for the nuclear industry.
Plutonium in the fuel is another problem. The cladding burns at one temperature, the uranium / plutonium burns at another, higher temperature. MOX fuel has plutonium but of course, so does uranium-based fuel: It builds up in the reactor at the rate of about 500 pounds per year. So any fuel that has melted, has probably released plutonium into the environment, whether it was from the MOX reactor or not.
When all is said and done -- and who knows when that will be -- a perfect accounting of what's missing from the reactor site will be impossible. TEPCO records can't be trusted, and employees who might know the truth are very likely to be too sick to testify, or dead.
The spent fuel pools appeared to be burning again today. Smoke or -- hopefully -- only steam has been seen rising from two reactors at the site. Workers were pulled away because of high radiation levels -- again. Things are still very out of control.
Regarding exposure levels here in America: It's probably still true that if you smoke cigarettes, stopping smoking today will still make more of a difference for your overall health and life expectancy than the radiation plume now descending all around us will make to you as an individual.
Smoking, of course, kills tens of millions of people every year. Japan has a very high rate of smoking, which will probably increase the effect of the radiation on their bodies, since the smoking already weakens their lungs. This will be true for anyone experiencing any chemical assault or other biological assault at the same time as this "little" wave of radiation passes by and through us, falls on our food... This will tip some people over the edge. The authorities might blame increased deaths on a late flu, on some virus that's might be going around. And it might be true that such a thing caught hold and DID spread around -- because of weakened immune systems!
And then, later... cancer. This accident is something no expert who understands the dangers ever wanted to see. And yet so many activists and experts alike have said to me in the past, "IT WILL TAKE AN ACCIDENT." Well, here it is, folks. If we don't use this incident to shut down nuclear power, then there will be another incident. And another. And another.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Using my HEPA filters in...
Carlsbad, CA
The author has been studying nuclear disasters, real or imagined, for many decades. This one was easily imagined.
----------------------------------------------
Interactive live map of cross-referenced radiation readings:
http://www.rdtn.org/
-----------------------------------------
Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Phone: (760) 720-7261
Address: PO Box 1936, Carlsbad, CA 92018
Subscribe to my free newsletter today!
Email: ace@acehoffman.org
Dear Readers,
Fukushima Dai-ichi may still be getting worse, not better.
The birth rate is bound to decline in Northern Japan. Whether by choice or by biological influence, no one will be sure. Sperm counts will drop and spontaneous abortions will rise. Many people will not WANT to have babies. It happened after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It happened after Chernobyl. It will happen here to. We're only human.
Radiation monitors were blown out when the buildings exploded, or simply stopped working at some point. Readings at the plant are generally unknown, and whatever is known is seldom presented to the public.
Today, spinach, milk, and water were all reported poisoned with radiation in various places in Japan. Radiation readings 1,600 times normal were detected TWENTY KILOMETERS from the plant, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Levels were reported to be over 160 microsieverts per hour.
No one should ever believe that a ten-mile evacuation planning zone is good enough anymore. Or that evacuation zones are the answer.
The truth of what's coming over the U.S. border, here where I live, is hard to know. I finally ordered my very own radiation detector -- but it's not scheduled to be shipped until the middle of May!
Dr. Conrad Miller recommends people in California start taking KI and says he's prescribed it "more than a thousand times" for other reasons as a doctor, and has never seen a side effect in anyone. He points out that the accident has already happened, the radioactive isotopes are in the air and falling now, and the side effects of taking KI (if they happen), are typical for any allergic reaction, and will presumably go away when you stop taking the KI.
Dr. Miller additionally say's he'll "probably" take it soon himself (he lives on Long Island, New York). Dr. Miller's videos are available online here:
http://www.youtube.com/user/conradmillermd
But I should point out that as far as I know, readings are NOT elevated in California... yet...
The following are the four main barriers to radioactive releases in these types of nuclear power plants, from the outermost layer to the innermost:
1) Outer walls of a fairly airtight building. These have been blown away at three reactors.
2) Primary Containment Vessel (large steel structure with cement base and large posts inside to hold the Reactor Pressure Vessel). Hopefully these are all intact but it seems unlikely.
3) Reactor Pressure Vessel. At least one of these may be damaged. All are still in danger of catastrophic failures, especially if they run out of boron or if seaweed plugs up the reactor's water channels. "We're not out of the woods yet" is a common pronouncement from the talking heads on television today.
4) The last barrier to prevent fission products and fuel (uranium and plutonium) escaping is the fuel cladding, made of zirconium, in steel rods with hundreds of pellets in each rod. It's presumably what been burning, when things burn at the site. When that happens, fission products are released, which gathered between fuel and the inner wall of the cladding.
Keeping fission products from escaping is what the cladding is there for: To keep the Cesium-137, Iodine-131, Strontium-90 and an ugly rainbow of other isotopes isolated from the human environment. Those deadly elements -- the ones they talk about in science fiction movies -- are being released at Fukushima Dai-ichi.
Everything that breaks off is undoubtedly being washed out to sea, to enter life's many food chains. What doesn't burn or oxidize and go up in smoke or steam, that is.
Fuel claddings are never perfect, and fuel clad cracking has been a recurrent problem for the nuclear industry.
Plutonium in the fuel is another problem. The cladding burns at one temperature, the uranium / plutonium burns at another, higher temperature. MOX fuel has plutonium but of course, so does uranium-based fuel: It builds up in the reactor at the rate of about 500 pounds per year. So any fuel that has melted, has probably released plutonium into the environment, whether it was from the MOX reactor or not.
When all is said and done -- and who knows when that will be -- a perfect accounting of what's missing from the reactor site will be impossible. TEPCO records can't be trusted, and employees who might know the truth are very likely to be too sick to testify, or dead.
The spent fuel pools appeared to be burning again today. Smoke or -- hopefully -- only steam has been seen rising from two reactors at the site. Workers were pulled away because of high radiation levels -- again. Things are still very out of control.
Regarding exposure levels here in America: It's probably still true that if you smoke cigarettes, stopping smoking today will still make more of a difference for your overall health and life expectancy than the radiation plume now descending all around us will make to you as an individual.
Smoking, of course, kills tens of millions of people every year. Japan has a very high rate of smoking, which will probably increase the effect of the radiation on their bodies, since the smoking already weakens their lungs. This will be true for anyone experiencing any chemical assault or other biological assault at the same time as this "little" wave of radiation passes by and through us, falls on our food... This will tip some people over the edge. The authorities might blame increased deaths on a late flu, on some virus that's might be going around. And it might be true that such a thing caught hold and DID spread around -- because of weakened immune systems!
And then, later... cancer. This accident is something no expert who understands the dangers ever wanted to see. And yet so many activists and experts alike have said to me in the past, "IT WILL TAKE AN ACCIDENT." Well, here it is, folks. If we don't use this incident to shut down nuclear power, then there will be another incident. And another. And another.
Sincerely,
Ace Hoffman
Using my HEPA filters in...
Carlsbad, CA
The author has been studying nuclear disasters, real or imagined, for many decades. This one was easily imagined.
----------------------------------------------
Interactive live map of cross-referenced radiation readings:
http://www.rdtn.org/
-----------------------------------------
Ace Hoffman
Author, The Code Killers:
An Expose of the Nuclear Industry
Free download: acehoffman.org
Blog: acehoffman.blogspot.com
YouTube: youtube.com/user/AceHoffman
Phone: (760) 720-7261
Address: PO Box 1936, Carlsbad, CA 92018
Subscribe to my free newsletter today!
Email: ace@acehoffman.org
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Nuclear Power Madness
Norman Solomon Monday, March 14, 2011
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/14-5
Like every other president since the 1940s, Barack Obama has promoted nuclear power. Now, with reactors melting down in Japan, the official stance is more disconnected from reality than ever.
Political elites are still clinging to the oxymoron of “safe nuclear power.” It’s up to us -- people around the world -- to peacefully and insistently shut those plants down.
There is no more techno-advanced country in the world than Japan. Nuclear power is not safe there, and it is not safe anywhere.
As the New York Times reported on Monday, “most of the nuclear plants in the United States share some or all of the risk factors that played a role at Fukushima Daiichi: locations on tsunami-prone coastlines or near earthquake faults, aging plants and backup electrical systems that rely on diesel generators and batteries that could fail in extreme circumstances.”
Nuclear power -- from uranium mining to fuel fabrication to reactor operations to nuclear waste that will remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years -- is, in fact, a moral crime against future generations.
But syrupy rhetoric has always marinated the nuclear age. From the outset -- even as radioactive ashes were still hot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- top officials in Washington touted atomic energy as redemptive. The split atom, we were to believe, could be an elevating marvel.
President Dwight Eisenhower pledged “to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma” by showing that “the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.”
Even after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 -- and now this catastrophe in Japan -- the corporate theologians of nuclear faith have continued to bless their own divine projects.
Thirty years ago, when I coordinated the National Citizens Hearings for Radiation Victims on the edge of Capitol Hill, we heard grim testimony from nuclear scientists, workers, downwinders and many others whose lives had been forever ravaged by the split atom. Routine in the process was tag-team deception from government agencies and nuclear-invested companies.
By 1980, generations had already suffered a vast array of terrible consequences -- including cancer, leukemia and genetic injuries -- from a nuclear fuel cycle shared by the “peaceful” and military atom. Today, we know a lot more about the abrupt and slow-moving horrors of the nuclear industry.
And we keep learning, by the minute, as nuclear catastrophe goes exponential in Japan. But government leaders don’t seem to be learning much of anything.
On Sunday, even while nuclear-power reactors were melting down, the White House issued this statement: “The president believes that meeting our energy needs means relying on a diverse set of energy sources that includes renewables like wind and solar, natural gas, clean coal and nuclear power. Information is still coming in about the events unfolding in Japan, but the administration is committed to learning from them and ensuring that nuclear energy is produced safely and responsibly here in the U.S.”
Yet another reflexive nuclear salute.
When this year’s State of the Union address proclaimed a goal of “clean energy sources” for 80 percent of U.S. electricity by 2035, Obama added: “Some folks want wind and solar. Others want nuclear, clean coal and natural gas. To meet this goal, we will need them all -- and I urge Democrats and Republicans to work together to make it happen.”
Bipartisan for nuclear power? You betcha. On Sunday morning TV shows, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell voiced support for nuclear power, while Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer offered this convoluted ode to atomic flackery: “We are going to have to see what happens here -- obviously still things are happening -- but the bottom line is we do have to free ourselves of independence from foreign oil in the other half of the globe. Libya showed that. Prices are up, our economy is being hurt by it, or could be hurt by it. So I'm still willing to look at nuclear. As I’ve always said it has to be done safely and carefully.”
Such behavior might just seem absurd or pathetic -- if the consequences weren’t so grave.
Nuclear power madness is so entrenched that mainline pundits and top elected officials rarely murmur dissent. Acquiescence is equated with prudent sagacity.
In early 2010, President Obama announced federal loan guarantees -- totaling more than $8 billion -- to revive the construction of nuclear power plants in this country, where 110 nuclear-power reactors are already in operation.
“Investing in nuclear energy remains a necessary step,” he said. “What I hope is that, with this announcement, we’re underscoring both our seriousness in meeting the energy challenge and our willingness to look at this challenge, not as a partisan issue, but as a matter that’s far more important than politics because the choices we make will affect not just the next generation but many generations to come.”
Promising to push for bigger loan guarantees to build more nuclear power plants, the president said: “This is only the beginning.”
Norman Solomon is president of the Institute for Public Accuracy and a senior fellow at RootsAction. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/14-5
Like every other president since the 1940s, Barack Obama has promoted nuclear power. Now, with reactors melting down in Japan, the official stance is more disconnected from reality than ever.
Political elites are still clinging to the oxymoron of “safe nuclear power.” It’s up to us -- people around the world -- to peacefully and insistently shut those plants down.
There is no more techno-advanced country in the world than Japan. Nuclear power is not safe there, and it is not safe anywhere.
As the New York Times reported on Monday, “most of the nuclear plants in the United States share some or all of the risk factors that played a role at Fukushima Daiichi: locations on tsunami-prone coastlines or near earthquake faults, aging plants and backup electrical systems that rely on diesel generators and batteries that could fail in extreme circumstances.”
Nuclear power -- from uranium mining to fuel fabrication to reactor operations to nuclear waste that will remain deadly for hundreds of thousands of years -- is, in fact, a moral crime against future generations.
But syrupy rhetoric has always marinated the nuclear age. From the outset -- even as radioactive ashes were still hot in Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- top officials in Washington touted atomic energy as redemptive. The split atom, we were to believe, could be an elevating marvel.
President Dwight Eisenhower pledged “to help solve the fearful atomic dilemma” by showing that “the miraculous inventiveness of man shall not be dedicated to his death, but consecrated to his life.”
Even after the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 -- and now this catastrophe in Japan -- the corporate theologians of nuclear faith have continued to bless their own divine projects.
Thirty years ago, when I coordinated the National Citizens Hearings for Radiation Victims on the edge of Capitol Hill, we heard grim testimony from nuclear scientists, workers, downwinders and many others whose lives had been forever ravaged by the split atom. Routine in the process was tag-team deception from government agencies and nuclear-invested companies.
By 1980, generations had already suffered a vast array of terrible consequences -- including cancer, leukemia and genetic injuries -- from a nuclear fuel cycle shared by the “peaceful” and military atom. Today, we know a lot more about the abrupt and slow-moving horrors of the nuclear industry.
And we keep learning, by the minute, as nuclear catastrophe goes exponential in Japan. But government leaders don’t seem to be learning much of anything.
On Sunday, even while nuclear-power reactors were melting down, the White House issued this statement: “The president believes that meeting our energy needs means relying on a diverse set of energy sources that includes renewables like wind and solar, natural gas, clean coal and nuclear power. Information is still coming in about the events unfolding in Japan, but the administration is committed to learning from them and ensuring that nuclear energy is produced safely and responsibly here in the U.S.”
Yet another reflexive nuclear salute.
When this year’s State of the Union address proclaimed a goal of “clean energy sources” for 80 percent of U.S. electricity by 2035, Obama added: “Some folks want wind and solar. Others want nuclear, clean coal and natural gas. To meet this goal, we will need them all -- and I urge Democrats and Republicans to work together to make it happen.”
Bipartisan for nuclear power? You betcha. On Sunday morning TV shows, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell voiced support for nuclear power, while Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer offered this convoluted ode to atomic flackery: “We are going to have to see what happens here -- obviously still things are happening -- but the bottom line is we do have to free ourselves of independence from foreign oil in the other half of the globe. Libya showed that. Prices are up, our economy is being hurt by it, or could be hurt by it. So I'm still willing to look at nuclear. As I’ve always said it has to be done safely and carefully.”
Such behavior might just seem absurd or pathetic -- if the consequences weren’t so grave.
Nuclear power madness is so entrenched that mainline pundits and top elected officials rarely murmur dissent. Acquiescence is equated with prudent sagacity.
In early 2010, President Obama announced federal loan guarantees -- totaling more than $8 billion -- to revive the construction of nuclear power plants in this country, where 110 nuclear-power reactors are already in operation.
“Investing in nuclear energy remains a necessary step,” he said. “What I hope is that, with this announcement, we’re underscoring both our seriousness in meeting the energy challenge and our willingness to look at this challenge, not as a partisan issue, but as a matter that’s far more important than politics because the choices we make will affect not just the next generation but many generations to come.”
Promising to push for bigger loan guarantees to build more nuclear power plants, the president said: “This is only the beginning.”
Norman Solomon is president of the Institute for Public Accuracy and a senior fellow at RootsAction. His books include “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”
Japan's Apocalyptic Cinema
Not to make light of what is happening, but in no small part due to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan's artistic sensibility in film has long been obsessed with megadoom. Here's some greatest hits, courtesy of Salon.com:
Astro Boy
The plucky little robot warrior who pioneered the anime genre (and the manga, or Japanese comic book, genre before that) represents one side of Japan's confrontation with nuclear disaster: An attempt to accentuate the positive. (See also Gamera, the nuked-out chelonian defender of children.) But there's also a tragic back story to Astro Boy's adventures, since the scientist who invented him originally meant him as a replacement for his dead son, one who turns out to be incapable of human feeling. (Any resemblance to the Pinocchio legend, and to the Kubrick-via-Spielberg film "A.I.," is probably no accident.) As any anime fan already knows, Astro Boy's Japanese name translates as "Mighty Atom."
Godzilla, Gamera, Mothra and their friends
Every article ever written about Godzilla cites the big lizard as a nuclear fable or allegory, especially in his original mid-'50s incarnation, when he was at his angriest and most destructive. But until I read Oxford professor Peter Wynn Kirby's recent online New York Times post, I hadn't realized that the original 1954 "Gojira" (often packaged as such to differentiate it from the later, American-friendly version with Raymond Burr) was a response to a specific disaster -- not the Hiroshima bombings but the poisoning of a Japanese trawler crew by an American thermonuclear device tested near Bikini Atoll. It's fair to suggest that the later Japanese movie monsters of the '60s and '70s put a vastly friendlier spin on nuclear power, and even the Big G ultimately becomes a misunderstood, almost tragic, kid-friendly figure, bearing a suspicious resemblance to a battered Siamese tomcat.
Grave of the Fireflies and Barefoot Gen
Japanese postwar culture devoted tremendous energy to forgetting about what had happened in August 1945, but you know what they say about the return of the repressed. Anime was pretty well established by the '80s, and wasn't entirely for kids, but the genre got a violent jolt with the unforgettable wartime fables "Grave of the Fireflies" (1983) and "Barefoot Gen" (1988), among the first efforts in Japanese pop culture to depict the firebombing of Tokyo and other major cities (in the first film) and the history-shaking Hiroshima nuke (in the second). Those films spoke to and for a postwar generation that couldn't personally remember the events in question, and their effects have been far-reaching.
Akira
Katsuhiro Otomo's now-legendary anime film (based on his own manga) appeared the same year as "Barefoot Gen," and has nothing specifically to do with Hiroshima or the A-bomb. But its slick and sinister vision of a dystopian city of the future called Neo-Tokyo, dominated by secret government projects, vain and corrupt scientists and underground biker gangs, drew as much on the apocalyptic collective unconscious of Japan as it did on "Blade Runner." Along the way, Otomo established a kind of cultural template -- in which today's orderly Japan will be replaced by the nightmarish chaos of the future -- that's been a running theme of manga and anime ever since.
Tetsuo the Iron Man
Shinya Tsukamoto's low-budget 1989 cult classic pretty much introduced cyberpunk to Japan, long before the general public had ever heard the word, but this David Lynch-influenced nightmare about a man who turns into a machine also embodies the distinctive pathologies of post-Hiroshima Japanese pop culture. Tsukamoto might be outraged by the suggestion that his movie is the result of some post-nuclear hangover, but to me the formal disorientation and technological-psychological terror of "Tetsuo" speak for a generation marked by a national trauma. Like "Akira," this movie launched a zillion imitators (including Tsukamoto's various wacked-out sequels), establishing the techno-Kafka nightmare transformation as one of recent Japanese pop's favorite themes.
Princess Mononoke
Aficionados can argue about whether Hayao Miyazaki is indeed the greatest exponent of Japan's anime tradition (my vote: yes) or whether this dark and spectacular environmental fable is his best film (yes again). You can't reduce "Princess Mononoke" to a post-Hiroshima allegory, and I'm not trying to. This 1997 film weaves Japanese fairy tale and myth, the influence of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, and a highly contemporary eco-consciousness into a work with all the complexity and texture of a masterpiece. "Princess Mononoke" isn't about the A-bomb any more than "The Lord of the Rings" is about World War I, and maybe a bit less than that. But it's a distinctively Japanese work of art, imbued with the sense of human arrogance and folly, and the sense that the precarious balance of ordinary life is always poised on the brink of destruction.
Eureka
Shinji Aoyama's black-and-white, minimalist near-masterpiece from 2000 runs almost four hours and has been described by the director as a remake of John Ford's "The Searchers" inspired by the Sonic Youth album "Daydream Nation." It begins with a bus kidnapping -- which we see only as a few fragmented images -- but that episode of violence is over almost as soon as it begins, and the rest of the film is concerned with its survivors. "Eureka" has been highly influential in formal terms, inspiring a new generation of lo-fi, naturalistic filmmakers around the world. But beyond that, it's difficult for non-Japanese viewers to avoid seeing it as a partly conscious allegory -- diagnosis might be a better word -- about a nation haunted by its traumatic past and paralyzed by dread of the future.
Pulse
Arguably the greatest film of the so-called J-horror wave of the late '90s and early 2000s, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Pulse" brought the current of apocalyptic dread that runs through Japanese pop culture into the Internet age with a vengeance. Part mournful art film, part techno-paranoia and part creeped-out ghost thriller, "Pulse" is an imperfect but memorably haunting experience, which recalls the nuclear disaster (and suggests the original "Godzilla" film) while spinning a contemporary film about a soul-sucking website that makes people disappear.
Fish Story
I guess Yoshihiro Nakamura's crackpot, "Donnie Darko"-style fable about how a forgotten mid-'70s punk single saves the earth from destruction in this century was just too weird and specific and Japanese to reach an American audience. (As far as I know, "Fish Story" was never released in this country, and isn't available on Region 1 DVD.) For me, at least, it's one of the seminal works of Japan's post-post-Hiroshima cultural moment and one of the most enjoyable unknown films of recent years. Oddly but perfectly balanced between pitch-perfect period farce, romantic tragedy and sci-fi mock-apocalypse, "Fish Story" is fueled by the faith that stupid and pointless dreams are worth pursuing and that Japan's perverse culture will outlast all destructive forces. I only wish that cheesy but wonderful punk single, with the mysterious mid-song silence that spawned so many terrible rumors, could do something to help the Japanese people right now.
Japan's cinema of disaster, from Godzilla to J-horror
Andrew O'Hehir
Tuesday, Mar 15, 2011
http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2011/03/15/japan_disaster/index.html
Astro Boy
The plucky little robot warrior who pioneered the anime genre (and the manga, or Japanese comic book, genre before that) represents one side of Japan's confrontation with nuclear disaster: An attempt to accentuate the positive. (See also Gamera, the nuked-out chelonian defender of children.) But there's also a tragic back story to Astro Boy's adventures, since the scientist who invented him originally meant him as a replacement for his dead son, one who turns out to be incapable of human feeling. (Any resemblance to the Pinocchio legend, and to the Kubrick-via-Spielberg film "A.I.," is probably no accident.) As any anime fan already knows, Astro Boy's Japanese name translates as "Mighty Atom."
Godzilla, Gamera, Mothra and their friends
Every article ever written about Godzilla cites the big lizard as a nuclear fable or allegory, especially in his original mid-'50s incarnation, when he was at his angriest and most destructive. But until I read Oxford professor Peter Wynn Kirby's recent online New York Times post, I hadn't realized that the original 1954 "Gojira" (often packaged as such to differentiate it from the later, American-friendly version with Raymond Burr) was a response to a specific disaster -- not the Hiroshima bombings but the poisoning of a Japanese trawler crew by an American thermonuclear device tested near Bikini Atoll. It's fair to suggest that the later Japanese movie monsters of the '60s and '70s put a vastly friendlier spin on nuclear power, and even the Big G ultimately becomes a misunderstood, almost tragic, kid-friendly figure, bearing a suspicious resemblance to a battered Siamese tomcat.
Grave of the Fireflies and Barefoot Gen
Japanese postwar culture devoted tremendous energy to forgetting about what had happened in August 1945, but you know what they say about the return of the repressed. Anime was pretty well established by the '80s, and wasn't entirely for kids, but the genre got a violent jolt with the unforgettable wartime fables "Grave of the Fireflies" (1983) and "Barefoot Gen" (1988), among the first efforts in Japanese pop culture to depict the firebombing of Tokyo and other major cities (in the first film) and the history-shaking Hiroshima nuke (in the second). Those films spoke to and for a postwar generation that couldn't personally remember the events in question, and their effects have been far-reaching.
Akira
Katsuhiro Otomo's now-legendary anime film (based on his own manga) appeared the same year as "Barefoot Gen," and has nothing specifically to do with Hiroshima or the A-bomb. But its slick and sinister vision of a dystopian city of the future called Neo-Tokyo, dominated by secret government projects, vain and corrupt scientists and underground biker gangs, drew as much on the apocalyptic collective unconscious of Japan as it did on "Blade Runner." Along the way, Otomo established a kind of cultural template -- in which today's orderly Japan will be replaced by the nightmarish chaos of the future -- that's been a running theme of manga and anime ever since.
Tetsuo the Iron Man
Shinya Tsukamoto's low-budget 1989 cult classic pretty much introduced cyberpunk to Japan, long before the general public had ever heard the word, but this David Lynch-influenced nightmare about a man who turns into a machine also embodies the distinctive pathologies of post-Hiroshima Japanese pop culture. Tsukamoto might be outraged by the suggestion that his movie is the result of some post-nuclear hangover, but to me the formal disorientation and technological-psychological terror of "Tetsuo" speak for a generation marked by a national trauma. Like "Akira," this movie launched a zillion imitators (including Tsukamoto's various wacked-out sequels), establishing the techno-Kafka nightmare transformation as one of recent Japanese pop's favorite themes.
Princess Mononoke
Aficionados can argue about whether Hayao Miyazaki is indeed the greatest exponent of Japan's anime tradition (my vote: yes) or whether this dark and spectacular environmental fable is his best film (yes again). You can't reduce "Princess Mononoke" to a post-Hiroshima allegory, and I'm not trying to. This 1997 film weaves Japanese fairy tale and myth, the influence of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, and a highly contemporary eco-consciousness into a work with all the complexity and texture of a masterpiece. "Princess Mononoke" isn't about the A-bomb any more than "The Lord of the Rings" is about World War I, and maybe a bit less than that. But it's a distinctively Japanese work of art, imbued with the sense of human arrogance and folly, and the sense that the precarious balance of ordinary life is always poised on the brink of destruction.
Eureka
Shinji Aoyama's black-and-white, minimalist near-masterpiece from 2000 runs almost four hours and has been described by the director as a remake of John Ford's "The Searchers" inspired by the Sonic Youth album "Daydream Nation." It begins with a bus kidnapping -- which we see only as a few fragmented images -- but that episode of violence is over almost as soon as it begins, and the rest of the film is concerned with its survivors. "Eureka" has been highly influential in formal terms, inspiring a new generation of lo-fi, naturalistic filmmakers around the world. But beyond that, it's difficult for non-Japanese viewers to avoid seeing it as a partly conscious allegory -- diagnosis might be a better word -- about a nation haunted by its traumatic past and paralyzed by dread of the future.
Pulse
Arguably the greatest film of the so-called J-horror wave of the late '90s and early 2000s, Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Pulse" brought the current of apocalyptic dread that runs through Japanese pop culture into the Internet age with a vengeance. Part mournful art film, part techno-paranoia and part creeped-out ghost thriller, "Pulse" is an imperfect but memorably haunting experience, which recalls the nuclear disaster (and suggests the original "Godzilla" film) while spinning a contemporary film about a soul-sucking website that makes people disappear.
Fish Story
I guess Yoshihiro Nakamura's crackpot, "Donnie Darko"-style fable about how a forgotten mid-'70s punk single saves the earth from destruction in this century was just too weird and specific and Japanese to reach an American audience. (As far as I know, "Fish Story" was never released in this country, and isn't available on Region 1 DVD.) For me, at least, it's one of the seminal works of Japan's post-post-Hiroshima cultural moment and one of the most enjoyable unknown films of recent years. Oddly but perfectly balanced between pitch-perfect period farce, romantic tragedy and sci-fi mock-apocalypse, "Fish Story" is fueled by the faith that stupid and pointless dreams are worth pursuing and that Japan's perverse culture will outlast all destructive forces. I only wish that cheesy but wonderful punk single, with the mysterious mid-song silence that spawned so many terrible rumors, could do something to help the Japanese people right now.
Japan's cinema of disaster, from Godzilla to J-horror
Andrew O'Hehir
Tuesday, Mar 15, 2011
http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/andrew_ohehir/2011/03/15/japan_disaster/index.html
Friday, August 6, 2010
THE SUFFERING OF FALLUJAH
ROBERT C. KOEHLER
7/29/10
THE SUFFERING OF FALLUJAH
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fallujah . . .
And so it turns out that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, though not until we arrived and started using them.
Along with whatever else we did to Fallujah — exacted collective punishment on a defiant city (a war crime) in November 2004, killed thousands of civilians, shattered the infrastructure (nearly six years later, the sewage system hasn’t been repaired and waste flows in the streets) — we also, apparently, nuked the city, leaving a legacy of cancer, leukemia, infant mortality and genetic abnormality.
Freedom isn’t free. Remember when that was the go-to phrase of the citizen war zealots among us, their all-purpose rebuttal when those of us appalled by this insane war cited civilian casualty stats? Discussion over. Thought stops here.
This is the power of language. Call it “war” and along come glory, duty, courage, sacrifice: the best of humanity writ large. The word is impenetrable; it sets the heart in motion; God makes an appearance, blesses the troops, blesses the weapons. Operation Iraqi Freedom: They’ll greet us with open arms.
At what point do we learn our lesson, that “war” is a moral cesspool of horrific consequences, especially, and most troublingly, unintended ones?
Thus last November, a group of British and Iraqi doctors petitioned the U.N. to investigate the alarming rise in birth defects at Fallujah’s hospitals. “Young women in Fallujah,” they wrote, “. . . are terrified of having children because of the increasing number of babies born grotesquely deformed, with no heads, two heads, a single eye in their foreheads, scaly bodies or missing limbs. In addition, young children in Fallujah are now experiencing hideous cancers and leukemias.”
The official U.S. response was that the doctors’ letter was anecdotal: There have been no studies to verify that anything is truly amiss in Fallujah, beyond the devastation caused by U.S. troops and bombs. Now that has changed.
The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health has just published an epidemiological study, “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005-2009,” which has found, among much else, that Fallujah is experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia and infant mortality than Hiroshima and Nagasaki did in 1945.
Perhaps most eerily, the study, conducted by a team of 11 researchers this past January and February, in 711 households, found a radical shift in the ratio of female-to-male births. Under normal circumstances, the human constant is approximately 1,050 boys born for every 1,000 girls. In post-invasion Fallujah, 860 boys have been born for every 1,000 girls — similar to a shift seen in Hiroshima after the atom bomb was dropped.
Dr. Chris Busby, one of the study’s authors, said only “some very major mutagenic exposure” could account for such an aberration. The most likely culprit, he said, is depleted uranium, a dense metal with extraordinary penetrating ability used in the manufacture of missiles, shells and bombs. DU explodes on impact into an extremely fine, radioactive dust that settles on the ground or is carried by the wind. While the U.S. military continues to deny that breathing it is harmful, many scientists insist that it is highly toxic and a likely contributor to Gulf War Syndrome — that it is, in short, a nuclear weapon, with fallout as dangerous as a nuclear bomb.
To read about this is to grow increasingly sickened and disturbed at who we are and what we are doing: still debating “the war,” still dignifying this ongoing hemorrhage of national values with the term; still murdering civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and resolutely fleeing from any responsibility for the ecocide we have committed in Iraq; and still silently, inevitably, preparing for the next one.
Would that we could bring the suffering of Fallujah to the heart of America, or at least to the heart of Congress, which just OK’d another $59 billion to “fund the troops” (notice the delicacy of the Pentagon’s phrasing) in Afghanistan.
Enormous, future-devouring numbers turn over in Congress with such ease, if the money is demanded by the war machine. Money dedicated to building the future, or repairing the damage from old, dead wars, is another matter entirely: Suddenly it’s real, like a pound of flesh, and meted out only with howls of anguish.
To help clean up our legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam, for instance, Congress has appropriated $9 million since 2007. We sprayed 19 million gallons of this highly toxic defoliant on the country between 1962 and 1971, causing harm to at least 3 million Vietnamese in the process. Our sense of responsibility amounts to $3 per person. And such money becomes available only after decades of denial that we have any responsibility at all.
I think again about Fallujah. The city’s suffering will haunt our national dreams for decades to come. It is our future. In a generation or so, our children will face the consequences of what we have done there; but in the meantime, we’ll keep trying to buy “victory” and ultimate justification in multi-billion-dollar increments until our financial bankruptcy equals our moral bankruptcy.
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, contributor to One World, Many Peaces and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is now available for pre-orders. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.
7/29/10
THE SUFFERING OF FALLUJAH
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Fallujah . . .
And so it turns out that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, though not until we arrived and started using them.
Along with whatever else we did to Fallujah — exacted collective punishment on a defiant city (a war crime) in November 2004, killed thousands of civilians, shattered the infrastructure (nearly six years later, the sewage system hasn’t been repaired and waste flows in the streets) — we also, apparently, nuked the city, leaving a legacy of cancer, leukemia, infant mortality and genetic abnormality.
Freedom isn’t free. Remember when that was the go-to phrase of the citizen war zealots among us, their all-purpose rebuttal when those of us appalled by this insane war cited civilian casualty stats? Discussion over. Thought stops here.
This is the power of language. Call it “war” and along come glory, duty, courage, sacrifice: the best of humanity writ large. The word is impenetrable; it sets the heart in motion; God makes an appearance, blesses the troops, blesses the weapons. Operation Iraqi Freedom: They’ll greet us with open arms.
At what point do we learn our lesson, that “war” is a moral cesspool of horrific consequences, especially, and most troublingly, unintended ones?
Thus last November, a group of British and Iraqi doctors petitioned the U.N. to investigate the alarming rise in birth defects at Fallujah’s hospitals. “Young women in Fallujah,” they wrote, “. . . are terrified of having children because of the increasing number of babies born grotesquely deformed, with no heads, two heads, a single eye in their foreheads, scaly bodies or missing limbs. In addition, young children in Fallujah are now experiencing hideous cancers and leukemias.”
The official U.S. response was that the doctors’ letter was anecdotal: There have been no studies to verify that anything is truly amiss in Fallujah, beyond the devastation caused by U.S. troops and bombs. Now that has changed.
The International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health has just published an epidemiological study, “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005-2009,” which has found, among much else, that Fallujah is experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia and infant mortality than Hiroshima and Nagasaki did in 1945.
Perhaps most eerily, the study, conducted by a team of 11 researchers this past January and February, in 711 households, found a radical shift in the ratio of female-to-male births. Under normal circumstances, the human constant is approximately 1,050 boys born for every 1,000 girls. In post-invasion Fallujah, 860 boys have been born for every 1,000 girls — similar to a shift seen in Hiroshima after the atom bomb was dropped.
Dr. Chris Busby, one of the study’s authors, said only “some very major mutagenic exposure” could account for such an aberration. The most likely culprit, he said, is depleted uranium, a dense metal with extraordinary penetrating ability used in the manufacture of missiles, shells and bombs. DU explodes on impact into an extremely fine, radioactive dust that settles on the ground or is carried by the wind. While the U.S. military continues to deny that breathing it is harmful, many scientists insist that it is highly toxic and a likely contributor to Gulf War Syndrome — that it is, in short, a nuclear weapon, with fallout as dangerous as a nuclear bomb.
To read about this is to grow increasingly sickened and disturbed at who we are and what we are doing: still debating “the war,” still dignifying this ongoing hemorrhage of national values with the term; still murdering civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and resolutely fleeing from any responsibility for the ecocide we have committed in Iraq; and still silently, inevitably, preparing for the next one.
Would that we could bring the suffering of Fallujah to the heart of America, or at least to the heart of Congress, which just OK’d another $59 billion to “fund the troops” (notice the delicacy of the Pentagon’s phrasing) in Afghanistan.
Enormous, future-devouring numbers turn over in Congress with such ease, if the money is demanded by the war machine. Money dedicated to building the future, or repairing the damage from old, dead wars, is another matter entirely: Suddenly it’s real, like a pound of flesh, and meted out only with howls of anguish.
To help clean up our legacy of Agent Orange in Vietnam, for instance, Congress has appropriated $9 million since 2007. We sprayed 19 million gallons of this highly toxic defoliant on the country between 1962 and 1971, causing harm to at least 3 million Vietnamese in the process. Our sense of responsibility amounts to $3 per person. And such money becomes available only after decades of denial that we have any responsibility at all.
I think again about Fallujah. The city’s suffering will haunt our national dreams for decades to come. It is our future. In a generation or so, our children will face the consequences of what we have done there; but in the meantime, we’ll keep trying to buy “victory” and ultimate justification in multi-billion-dollar increments until our financial bankruptcy equals our moral bankruptcy.
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist, contributor to One World, Many Peaces and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound (Xenos Press) is now available for pre-orders. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.
Friday, July 30, 2010
The consequences of a US war crime
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jul2010/fall-j23.shtml
The consequences of a US war crime
Cancer rate in Fallujah worse than Hiroshima
By Tom Eley
23 July 2010
The Iraqi city of Fallujah continues to suffer the ghastly consequences of a US military onslaught in late 2004.
According to the authors of a new study, “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009,” the people of Fallujah are experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia, infant mortality, and sexual mutations than those recorded among survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the years after those Japanese cities were incinerated by US atomic bomb strikes in 1945.
The epidemiological study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Studies and Public Health (IJERPH), also finds the prevalence of these conditions in Fallujah to be many times greater than in nearby nations.
The assault on Fallujah, a city located 43 miles west of Baghdad, was one of the most horrific war crimes of our time. After the population resisted the US-led occupation of Iraq—a war of neo-colonial plunder launched on the basis of lies—Washington determined to make an example of the largely Sunni city. This is called “exemplary” or “collective” punishment and is, according to the laws of war, illegal.
The new public health study of the city now all but proves what has long been suspected: that a high proportion of the weaponry used in the assault contained depleted uranium, a radioactive substance used in shells to increase their effectiveness.
In a study of 711 houses and 4,843 individuals carried out in January and February 2010, authors Chris Busby, Malak Hamdan, Entesar Ariabi and a team of researchers found that the cancer rate had increased fourfold since before the US attack five years ago, and that the forms of cancer in Fallujah are similar to those found among the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors, who were exposed to intense fallout radiation.
In Fallujah the rate of leukemia is 38 times higher, the childhood cancer rate is 12 times higher, and breast cancer is 10 times more common than in populations in Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait. Heightened levels of adult lymphoma and brain tumors were also reported. At 80 deaths out of every 1,000 births, the infant mortality rate in Fallujah is more than five times higher than in Egypt and Jordan, and eight times higher than in Kuwait.
Strikingly, after 2005 the proportion of girls born in Fallujah has increased sharply. In normal populations, 1050 boys are born for every 1000 girls. But among those born in Fallujah in the four years after the US assault, the ratio was reduced to 860 boys for every 1000 female births. This alteration is similar to gender ratios found in Hiroshima after the US atomic attack of 1945.
The most likely reason for the change in the sex ratio, according to the researchers, is the impact of a major mutagenic event—likely the use of depleted uranium in US weapons. While boys have one X-chromosome, girls have a redundant X-chromosome and can therefore absorb the loss of one chromosome through genetic damage.
“This is an extraordinary and alarming result,” said Busby, a professor of molecular biosciences at the University of Ulster and director of scientific research for Green Audit, an independent environmental research group. “To produce an effect like this, some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks happened. We need urgently to find out what the agent was. Although many suspect uranium, we cannot be certain without further research and independent analysis of samples from the area.”
Busby told an Italian television news station, RAI 24, that the “extraordinary” increase in radiation-related maladies in Fallujah is higher than that found in the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the US atomic strikes of 1945. “My guess is that this was caused by depleted uranium,” he said. “They must be connected.”
The US military uses depleted uranium, also known as spent nuclear fuel, in armor-piercing shells and bullets because it is twice as dense as lead. Once these shells hit their target, however, as much as 40 percent of the uranium is released in the form of tiny particles in the area of the explosion. It can remain there for years, easily entering the human bloodstream, where it lodges itself in lymph glands and attacks the DNA produced in the sperm and eggs of affected adults, causing, in turn, serious birth defects in the next generation.
The research is the first systematic scientific substantiation of a body of evidence showing a sharp increase in infant mortality, birth defects, and cancer in Fallujah.
In October of 2009, several Iraqi and British doctors wrote a letter to the United Nations demanding an inquiry into the proliferation of radiation-related sickness in the city:
“Young women in Fallujah in Iraq are terrified of having children because of the increasing number of babies born grotesquely deformed, with no heads, two heads, a single eye in their foreheads, scaly bodies or missing limbs. In addition, young children in Fallujah are now experiencing hideous cancers and leukemias.…
“In September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 newborn babies, 24 percent of whom were dead within the first seven days, a staggering 75 percent of the dead babies were classified as deformed.…
“Doctors in Fallujah have specifically pointed out that not only are they witnessing unprecedented numbers of birth defects, but premature births have also considerably increased after 2003. But what is more alarming is that doctors in Fallujah have said, ‘a significant number of babies that do survive begin to develop severe disabilities at a later stage.’” (See: “Sharp rise in birth defects in Iraqi city destroyed by US military”)
The Pentagon responded to this report by asserting that there were no studies to prove any proliferation of deformities or other maladies associated with US military actions. “No studies to date have indicated environmental issues resulting in specific health issues,” a Defense Department spokesman told the BBC in March. There have been no studies, however, in large part because Washington and its puppet Baghdad regime have blocked them.
According to the authors of “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah,” the Iraqi authorities attempted to scuttle their survey. “[S]hortly after the questionnaire survey was completed, Iraqi TV reportedly broadcast that a questionnaire survey was being carried out by terrorists and that anyone who was answering or administering the questionnaire could be arrested,” the study reports.
The history of the atrocity committed by American imperialism against the people of Fallujah began on April 28, 2003, when US Army soldiers fired indiscriminately into a crowd of about 200 residents protesting the conversion of a local school into a US military base. Seventeen were killed in the unprovoked attack, and two days later American soldiers fired on a protest against the murders, killing two more.
This intensified popular anger, and Fallujah became a center of the Sunni resistance against the occupation—and US reprisals. On March 31, 2004, an angry crowd stopped a convoy of the private security firm Blackwater USA, responsible for its own share of war crimes. Four Blackwater mercenaries were dragged from their vehicles, beaten, burned, and hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River.
The US military then promised it would pacify the city, with one unnamed officer saying it would be turned into “a killing field,” but Operation Vigilant Resolve, involving thousands of Marines, ended in the abandonment of the siege by the US military in May, 2004. The victory of Fallujah’s residents against overwhelming military superiority was celebrated throughout Iraq and watched all over the world.
The Pentagon delivered its response in November 2004. The city was surrounded, and all those left inside were declared to be enemy combatants and fair game for the most heavily equipped killing machine in world history. The Associated Press reported that men attempting to flee the city with their families were turned back into the slaughterhouse.
In the attack, the US made heavy use of the chemical agent white phosphorus. Ostensibly used only for illuminating battlefields, white phosphorus causes terrible and often fatal wounds, burning its way through building material and clothing before eating away skin and then bone. The chemical was also used to suck the oxygen out of buildings where civilians were hiding.
Washington’s desire for revenge against the population is indicated by the fact that the US military reported about the same number of “gunmen” killed (1,400) as those taken alive as prisoners (1,300-1,500). In one instance, NBC News captured video footage of a US soldier executing a wounded and helpless Iraqi man. A Navy investigation later found the Marine had been acting in self-defense.
Fifty-one US soldiers died in 10 days of combat. The true number of city residents who were killed is not known. The city’s population before the attack was estimated to be between 425,000 and 600,000. The current population is believed to be between 250,000 and 300,000. Tens of thousands, mostly women and children, fled in advance of the attack. Half of the city’s building were destroyed, most of these reduced to rubble.
Like much of Iraq, Fallujah remains in ruins. According to a recent report from IRIN, a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Fallujah still has no functioning sewage system six years after the attack. “Waste pours onto the streets and seeps into drinking water supplies,” the report notes. “Abdul-Sattar Kadhum al-Nawaf, director of Fallujah general hospital, said the sewage problem had taken its toll on residents’ health. They were increasingly affected by diarrhea, tuberculosis, typhoid and other communicable diseases.”
The savagery of the US assault shocked the world, and added the name Fallujah to an infamous list that includes My Lai, Sabra-Shatila, Guérnica, Nanking, Lidice, and Wounded Knee.
But unlike those other massacres, the crime against Fallujah did not end when the bullets were no longer fired or the bombs stopped falling.
The US military’s decision to heavily deploy depleted uranium, all but proven by “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah,” was a wanton act of brutality, poisoning an entire generation of children not yet born in 2004.
The Fallujah study is timely, with the US now preparing a major escalation of the violence in Afghanistan. The former head of US Afghanistan operations, General Stanley McChrystal, was replaced last month after a media campaign, assisted by a Rolling Stone magazine feature, accused him, among other things, of tying the hands of US soldiers in their response to Afghan insurgents.
McChrystal was replaced by General David Petraeus, formerly head of the US Central Command. Petraeus has outlined new rules of engagement designed to allow for the use of disproportionate force against suspected militants.
Petraeus, in turn, was replaced at Central Command by General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, who played a key planning role in the US assault on Fallujah in 2004. Mattis revels in killing, telling a public gathering in 2005 “it’s fun to shoot some people.... You know, it’s a hell of a hoot.”
The consequences of a US war crime
Cancer rate in Fallujah worse than Hiroshima
By Tom Eley
23 July 2010
The Iraqi city of Fallujah continues to suffer the ghastly consequences of a US military onslaught in late 2004.
According to the authors of a new study, “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009,” the people of Fallujah are experiencing higher rates of cancer, leukemia, infant mortality, and sexual mutations than those recorded among survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the years after those Japanese cities were incinerated by US atomic bomb strikes in 1945.
The epidemiological study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Studies and Public Health (IJERPH), also finds the prevalence of these conditions in Fallujah to be many times greater than in nearby nations.
The assault on Fallujah, a city located 43 miles west of Baghdad, was one of the most horrific war crimes of our time. After the population resisted the US-led occupation of Iraq—a war of neo-colonial plunder launched on the basis of lies—Washington determined to make an example of the largely Sunni city. This is called “exemplary” or “collective” punishment and is, according to the laws of war, illegal.
The new public health study of the city now all but proves what has long been suspected: that a high proportion of the weaponry used in the assault contained depleted uranium, a radioactive substance used in shells to increase their effectiveness.
In a study of 711 houses and 4,843 individuals carried out in January and February 2010, authors Chris Busby, Malak Hamdan, Entesar Ariabi and a team of researchers found that the cancer rate had increased fourfold since before the US attack five years ago, and that the forms of cancer in Fallujah are similar to those found among the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors, who were exposed to intense fallout radiation.
In Fallujah the rate of leukemia is 38 times higher, the childhood cancer rate is 12 times higher, and breast cancer is 10 times more common than in populations in Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait. Heightened levels of adult lymphoma and brain tumors were also reported. At 80 deaths out of every 1,000 births, the infant mortality rate in Fallujah is more than five times higher than in Egypt and Jordan, and eight times higher than in Kuwait.
Strikingly, after 2005 the proportion of girls born in Fallujah has increased sharply. In normal populations, 1050 boys are born for every 1000 girls. But among those born in Fallujah in the four years after the US assault, the ratio was reduced to 860 boys for every 1000 female births. This alteration is similar to gender ratios found in Hiroshima after the US atomic attack of 1945.
The most likely reason for the change in the sex ratio, according to the researchers, is the impact of a major mutagenic event—likely the use of depleted uranium in US weapons. While boys have one X-chromosome, girls have a redundant X-chromosome and can therefore absorb the loss of one chromosome through genetic damage.
“This is an extraordinary and alarming result,” said Busby, a professor of molecular biosciences at the University of Ulster and director of scientific research for Green Audit, an independent environmental research group. “To produce an effect like this, some very major mutagenic exposure must have occurred in 2004 when the attacks happened. We need urgently to find out what the agent was. Although many suspect uranium, we cannot be certain without further research and independent analysis of samples from the area.”
Busby told an Italian television news station, RAI 24, that the “extraordinary” increase in radiation-related maladies in Fallujah is higher than that found in the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the US atomic strikes of 1945. “My guess is that this was caused by depleted uranium,” he said. “They must be connected.”
The US military uses depleted uranium, also known as spent nuclear fuel, in armor-piercing shells and bullets because it is twice as dense as lead. Once these shells hit their target, however, as much as 40 percent of the uranium is released in the form of tiny particles in the area of the explosion. It can remain there for years, easily entering the human bloodstream, where it lodges itself in lymph glands and attacks the DNA produced in the sperm and eggs of affected adults, causing, in turn, serious birth defects in the next generation.
The research is the first systematic scientific substantiation of a body of evidence showing a sharp increase in infant mortality, birth defects, and cancer in Fallujah.
In October of 2009, several Iraqi and British doctors wrote a letter to the United Nations demanding an inquiry into the proliferation of radiation-related sickness in the city:
“Young women in Fallujah in Iraq are terrified of having children because of the increasing number of babies born grotesquely deformed, with no heads, two heads, a single eye in their foreheads, scaly bodies or missing limbs. In addition, young children in Fallujah are now experiencing hideous cancers and leukemias.…
“In September 2009, Fallujah General Hospital had 170 newborn babies, 24 percent of whom were dead within the first seven days, a staggering 75 percent of the dead babies were classified as deformed.…
“Doctors in Fallujah have specifically pointed out that not only are they witnessing unprecedented numbers of birth defects, but premature births have also considerably increased after 2003. But what is more alarming is that doctors in Fallujah have said, ‘a significant number of babies that do survive begin to develop severe disabilities at a later stage.’” (See: “Sharp rise in birth defects in Iraqi city destroyed by US military”)
The Pentagon responded to this report by asserting that there were no studies to prove any proliferation of deformities or other maladies associated with US military actions. “No studies to date have indicated environmental issues resulting in specific health issues,” a Defense Department spokesman told the BBC in March. There have been no studies, however, in large part because Washington and its puppet Baghdad regime have blocked them.
According to the authors of “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah,” the Iraqi authorities attempted to scuttle their survey. “[S]hortly after the questionnaire survey was completed, Iraqi TV reportedly broadcast that a questionnaire survey was being carried out by terrorists and that anyone who was answering or administering the questionnaire could be arrested,” the study reports.
The history of the atrocity committed by American imperialism against the people of Fallujah began on April 28, 2003, when US Army soldiers fired indiscriminately into a crowd of about 200 residents protesting the conversion of a local school into a US military base. Seventeen were killed in the unprovoked attack, and two days later American soldiers fired on a protest against the murders, killing two more.
This intensified popular anger, and Fallujah became a center of the Sunni resistance against the occupation—and US reprisals. On March 31, 2004, an angry crowd stopped a convoy of the private security firm Blackwater USA, responsible for its own share of war crimes. Four Blackwater mercenaries were dragged from their vehicles, beaten, burned, and hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River.
The US military then promised it would pacify the city, with one unnamed officer saying it would be turned into “a killing field,” but Operation Vigilant Resolve, involving thousands of Marines, ended in the abandonment of the siege by the US military in May, 2004. The victory of Fallujah’s residents against overwhelming military superiority was celebrated throughout Iraq and watched all over the world.
The Pentagon delivered its response in November 2004. The city was surrounded, and all those left inside were declared to be enemy combatants and fair game for the most heavily equipped killing machine in world history. The Associated Press reported that men attempting to flee the city with their families were turned back into the slaughterhouse.
In the attack, the US made heavy use of the chemical agent white phosphorus. Ostensibly used only for illuminating battlefields, white phosphorus causes terrible and often fatal wounds, burning its way through building material and clothing before eating away skin and then bone. The chemical was also used to suck the oxygen out of buildings where civilians were hiding.
Washington’s desire for revenge against the population is indicated by the fact that the US military reported about the same number of “gunmen” killed (1,400) as those taken alive as prisoners (1,300-1,500). In one instance, NBC News captured video footage of a US soldier executing a wounded and helpless Iraqi man. A Navy investigation later found the Marine had been acting in self-defense.
Fifty-one US soldiers died in 10 days of combat. The true number of city residents who were killed is not known. The city’s population before the attack was estimated to be between 425,000 and 600,000. The current population is believed to be between 250,000 and 300,000. Tens of thousands, mostly women and children, fled in advance of the attack. Half of the city’s building were destroyed, most of these reduced to rubble.
Like much of Iraq, Fallujah remains in ruins. According to a recent report from IRIN, a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Fallujah still has no functioning sewage system six years after the attack. “Waste pours onto the streets and seeps into drinking water supplies,” the report notes. “Abdul-Sattar Kadhum al-Nawaf, director of Fallujah general hospital, said the sewage problem had taken its toll on residents’ health. They were increasingly affected by diarrhea, tuberculosis, typhoid and other communicable diseases.”
The savagery of the US assault shocked the world, and added the name Fallujah to an infamous list that includes My Lai, Sabra-Shatila, Guérnica, Nanking, Lidice, and Wounded Knee.
But unlike those other massacres, the crime against Fallujah did not end when the bullets were no longer fired or the bombs stopped falling.
The US military’s decision to heavily deploy depleted uranium, all but proven by “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah,” was a wanton act of brutality, poisoning an entire generation of children not yet born in 2004.
The Fallujah study is timely, with the US now preparing a major escalation of the violence in Afghanistan. The former head of US Afghanistan operations, General Stanley McChrystal, was replaced last month after a media campaign, assisted by a Rolling Stone magazine feature, accused him, among other things, of tying the hands of US soldiers in their response to Afghan insurgents.
McChrystal was replaced by General David Petraeus, formerly head of the US Central Command. Petraeus has outlined new rules of engagement designed to allow for the use of disproportionate force against suspected militants.
Petraeus, in turn, was replaced at Central Command by General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, who played a key planning role in the US assault on Fallujah in 2004. Mattis revels in killing, telling a public gathering in 2005 “it’s fun to shoot some people.... You know, it’s a hell of a hoot.”
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Double Atomic Bomb Survivor Dies In Japan
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122268670
Double Atomic Bomb Survivor Dies In Japan
The Associated Press
TOKYO January 6, 2010
Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only person officially recognized as a survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings at the end of World War II, has died at age 93.
Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip for his shipbuilding company on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in the city.
He then returned to his hometown of Nagasaki, about 300 kilometers (190 miles) to the southwest, which suffered a second U.S. atomic bomb attack three days later.
On Aug. 15, 1945, Japan surrendered, ending the war.
The mayor of Nagasaki said "a precious storyteller has been lost," in a message posted on the city's Web site Wednesday. Yamaguchi died Monday morning of stomach cancer, the mass circulation Mainichi, Asahi and Yomiuri newspapers reported.
Yamaguchi was the only person to be certified by the Japanese government as having been in both cities when they were attacked, although other dual survivors have also been identified.
"My double radiation exposure is now an official government record. It can tell the younger generation the horrifying history of the atomic bombings even after I die," Yamaguchi was quoted as saying in the Mainichi newspaper last year.
In his later years, Yamaguchi gave talks about his experiences as an atomic bomb survivor and often expressed his hope that such weapons would be abolished.
He spoke at the United Nations in 2006, wrote books and songs about his experiences, and appeared in a documentary about survivors of both attacks.
Last month he was visited in the hospital by filmmaker James Cameron, director of "Titanic" and "Avatar," who is considering making a movie about the bombings, according to the Mainichi.
Immediately after the war, Yamaguchi worked as a translator for American forces in Nagasaki and later as a junior high school teacher.
Japan is the only country to have suffered atomic bomb attacks. About 140,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki.
Yamaguchi is one of about 260,000 people who survived the attacks. Some bombing survivors have developed various illnesses from radiation exposure, including cancer and liver illnesses.
Certification as an atomic bomb survivor in Japan qualifies individuals for government compensation, including monthly allowances, free medical checkups and funeral costs.
———
Associated Press researcher Junko Kanayama contributed to this report.
Double Atomic Bomb Survivor Dies In Japan
The Associated Press
TOKYO January 6, 2010
Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only person officially recognized as a survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings at the end of World War II, has died at age 93.
Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip for his shipbuilding company on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in the city.
He then returned to his hometown of Nagasaki, about 300 kilometers (190 miles) to the southwest, which suffered a second U.S. atomic bomb attack three days later.
On Aug. 15, 1945, Japan surrendered, ending the war.
The mayor of Nagasaki said "a precious storyteller has been lost," in a message posted on the city's Web site Wednesday. Yamaguchi died Monday morning of stomach cancer, the mass circulation Mainichi, Asahi and Yomiuri newspapers reported.
Yamaguchi was the only person to be certified by the Japanese government as having been in both cities when they were attacked, although other dual survivors have also been identified.
"My double radiation exposure is now an official government record. It can tell the younger generation the horrifying history of the atomic bombings even after I die," Yamaguchi was quoted as saying in the Mainichi newspaper last year.
In his later years, Yamaguchi gave talks about his experiences as an atomic bomb survivor and often expressed his hope that such weapons would be abolished.
He spoke at the United Nations in 2006, wrote books and songs about his experiences, and appeared in a documentary about survivors of both attacks.
Last month he was visited in the hospital by filmmaker James Cameron, director of "Titanic" and "Avatar," who is considering making a movie about the bombings, according to the Mainichi.
Immediately after the war, Yamaguchi worked as a translator for American forces in Nagasaki and later as a junior high school teacher.
Japan is the only country to have suffered atomic bomb attacks. About 140,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki.
Yamaguchi is one of about 260,000 people who survived the attacks. Some bombing survivors have developed various illnesses from radiation exposure, including cancer and liver illnesses.
Certification as an atomic bomb survivor in Japan qualifies individuals for government compensation, including monthly allowances, free medical checkups and funeral costs.
———
Associated Press researcher Junko Kanayama contributed to this report.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Whitewashing Hiroshima
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5001.shtml
Whitewashing Hiroshima: The uncritical glorification of American militarism
By Gary G. Kohls, MD
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Aug 11, 2009
Back in 1995, the Smithsonian was preparing an honest, historically-accurate display dealing with the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Amid much right-wing reactionary wrangling, from various ultrapatriotic veterans groups all the way up to the Newt Gingrich/GOP-dominated Congress, the Smithsonian was forced to eliminate all of the painful but historically important parts of the story -- the Japanese civilian perspective. So again we had another example of powerful politically conservative groups influencing public policy -- and history -- because they couldn’t handle what was necessary to face up to unpleasant historical truths.
The historians did have a gun to their heads, of course, but in the melee, the mainstream media -- and therefore the public -- ignored a vital historical point. And that is this: The war would have ended soon without the atomic bombs, and thus there would not have been a bloody American land invasion of Japan. American intelligence, with the full knowledge of President Truman, was fully aware of Japan’s desperate search for ways to honorably surrender weeks before the order was given for the mass slaughter of innocent civilians that was Hiroshima.
American intelligence data, revealed in the 1980s, shows that the mythical large-scale US invasion (theoretically planned for no sooner than November 1, 1945) would have been unnecessary. Japan was working on peace negotiations with the Allies through its Moscow ambassador as early as April of 1945. Truman knew of these developments, the US having broken the Japanese code years earlier, and all of Japan’s military and diplomatic messages were being intercepted. On July 13, 1945, Foreign Minister Togo said, “Unconditional surrender (giving up all sovereignty) is the only obstacle to peace.” Truman knew this, and the war could have ended by simply conceding a post-war figurehead position for the emperor -- a leader regarded as a deity in Japan. That concession was refused by the US, the Japanese continued trying to obtain an honorable peace and the bombs were dropped with no regard given to Japan’e attempts to negotiate. And after the war, the emperor remained in place. So what were the real reasons for 1) the refusal to accept Japan’s offer of surrender and 2) the decision to proceed with the bombings?
Shortly after WWII, military analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote, “The Japanese, in a military sense, were in a hopeless strategic situation by the time the Potsdam insistence on Japan’s unconditional surrender was made on July 26, 1945.” Admiral William Leahy, top military aide to President Truman, said in his war memoirs, “I Was There,” “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons. My own feeling is that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.” And General Dwight D. Eisenhower agreed.
Truman proceeded with the plans to use the bombs, but he never officially ordered the Nagasaki bomb that followed Hiroshima by only three days. There are a number of factors that contributed to Truman’s decision.
1) The US had made a huge investment in time, mind and money ($2,000,000,000 in 1940 dollars) to produce three bombs, and there was no inclination -- and no guts -- to stop the momentum.
2) The US military -- as did its citizens -- had a bloodthirsty appetite for revenge because of Pearl Harbor. Mercy wasn’t in the vocabulary of the US military and the war-weary populace, and the missions were accomplished -- with essentially no objections by those who only knew the sanitized and censored-out version of events.
3) Hiroshima’s bomb was uranium and Nagasaki’s was plutonium. Scientific curiosity certainly was a significant factor for the bombing of Nagasaki. The decision to use both bombs had obviously been made well in advance. The three-day interval was unconscionably inadequate -- Japan being in shambles in its communications and transportation capabilities – and besides, no one, not the US military or even the Japanese high command, fully understood what had happened at Hiroshima. General Douglas MacArthur, commanding general of the entire Pacific theatre, was kept out of the loop about the existence of the bombs until five days before Hiroshima.
4) The Russians had proclaimed their intent to enter the war with Japan 90 days after V-E Day (Victory in Europe, May 8), which would have been Aug. 8, two days after Hiroshima was bombed. Indeed, Russia did declare war on August 8 and was marching across Manchuria when Nagasaki was incinerated. The US didn’t want Japan surrendering to anybody else, especially a future enemy, so the first nuclear “messages” of the infantile Cold War were sent. Russia indeed received far less of the spoils of war than they had anticipated, and the two superpowers were mired in the Cold War stalemate that eventually resulted in mutual moral and economic bankruptcy within a couple of generations.
An estimated 80,000 innocent and defenseless civilians -- plus 20,000 essentially weaponless young Japanese conscripts -- died instantly in the Hiroshima bombing. Hundreds of thousands more suffered agonizing bums, radiation sickness, leukemia and infections for the rest of their shortened lives, and generations of the survivor’s progeny inherited horrible radiation-induced illnesses, cancers and premature deaths. What has been covered up is the fact that 12 American Navy pilots, their existence well known to the US command, were incinerated in the Hiroshima jail on Aug. 6.
The 75,000 Nagasaki victims were virtually all innocent civilians, except for the inhabitants of an allied POW camp near Nagasaki’s ground zero. They were incinerated, carbonized and/or vaporized by a scientific experiment carried out by obedient, unaware soldiers and scientists. The War Dept. knew of the existence of the POWs but when informed, simply replied, “Targets previously assigned for Centerboard (code name for the Kokura/Nagasaki mission) remain unchanged.”
So the end of the war in the Pacific was just one more myth in a long list of myths that Americans have been fed by our military and political leaders, war being glorified in the process. A short list of some of the others includes the censored-out military invasions and occupations of countries such as this short list (just in the last 60 years): North Korea, Iran, Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia, Granada, Panama, the Philippines, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, Colombia, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, etc.
But somehow most of us Americans still hang on to our shaky “my country right or wrong” patriotism, desperately wanting to believe the cunningly-orchestrated myths that our nation only works for peace, justice and promoting democracy and not mainly supporting evil dictators or promoting corrupt exploitive capitalism.
While it is true that the US military has faced down occasional despots, with natural heroism and sacrifice from dead and dying American soldiers, more often than not our methods of rationalizing the atrocities of war are identical to those of the “godless communists” or “evil empires” on the other side of the battle line. August 6 and 9, 1945 are just two more examples of the brutalization of “total war,” which is always accompanied by the unforgivable human slaughter called “collateral damage” and “friendly fire.”
The time has come for Americans to stand up for real justice and peace (rather than the unaffordable and self-perpetuating “armed truces” we have all over the world) by acknowledging the whole truth of history and owning up to the numerous international war crimes and crimes against humanity that have been orchestrated by American militarism in the last half-century. And then we need to start acknowledging and speaking out about our nation’s all-too-common military atrocities, as would all courageous people who have high ethical standards.
Doing what is right for the whole of humanity for a change, rather than just what is advantageous for our over-privileged American life-style, would be real honor, real patriotism and an essential start toward real peace.
Dr. Kohls is a recently retired physician from Duluth, Minn., whose holistic mental practice dealt extensively with posttraumatic stress disordered (PTSD) patients, many of whom were military veterans and all of whose serious neurological and psychological disabilities were preventable.
Whitewashing Hiroshima: The uncritical glorification of American militarism
By Gary G. Kohls, MD
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Aug 11, 2009
Back in 1995, the Smithsonian was preparing an honest, historically-accurate display dealing with the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Amid much right-wing reactionary wrangling, from various ultrapatriotic veterans groups all the way up to the Newt Gingrich/GOP-dominated Congress, the Smithsonian was forced to eliminate all of the painful but historically important parts of the story -- the Japanese civilian perspective. So again we had another example of powerful politically conservative groups influencing public policy -- and history -- because they couldn’t handle what was necessary to face up to unpleasant historical truths.
The historians did have a gun to their heads, of course, but in the melee, the mainstream media -- and therefore the public -- ignored a vital historical point. And that is this: The war would have ended soon without the atomic bombs, and thus there would not have been a bloody American land invasion of Japan. American intelligence, with the full knowledge of President Truman, was fully aware of Japan’s desperate search for ways to honorably surrender weeks before the order was given for the mass slaughter of innocent civilians that was Hiroshima.
American intelligence data, revealed in the 1980s, shows that the mythical large-scale US invasion (theoretically planned for no sooner than November 1, 1945) would have been unnecessary. Japan was working on peace negotiations with the Allies through its Moscow ambassador as early as April of 1945. Truman knew of these developments, the US having broken the Japanese code years earlier, and all of Japan’s military and diplomatic messages were being intercepted. On July 13, 1945, Foreign Minister Togo said, “Unconditional surrender (giving up all sovereignty) is the only obstacle to peace.” Truman knew this, and the war could have ended by simply conceding a post-war figurehead position for the emperor -- a leader regarded as a deity in Japan. That concession was refused by the US, the Japanese continued trying to obtain an honorable peace and the bombs were dropped with no regard given to Japan’e attempts to negotiate. And after the war, the emperor remained in place. So what were the real reasons for 1) the refusal to accept Japan’s offer of surrender and 2) the decision to proceed with the bombings?
Shortly after WWII, military analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote, “The Japanese, in a military sense, were in a hopeless strategic situation by the time the Potsdam insistence on Japan’s unconditional surrender was made on July 26, 1945.” Admiral William Leahy, top military aide to President Truman, said in his war memoirs, “I Was There,” “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons. My own feeling is that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.” And General Dwight D. Eisenhower agreed.
Truman proceeded with the plans to use the bombs, but he never officially ordered the Nagasaki bomb that followed Hiroshima by only three days. There are a number of factors that contributed to Truman’s decision.
1) The US had made a huge investment in time, mind and money ($2,000,000,000 in 1940 dollars) to produce three bombs, and there was no inclination -- and no guts -- to stop the momentum.
2) The US military -- as did its citizens -- had a bloodthirsty appetite for revenge because of Pearl Harbor. Mercy wasn’t in the vocabulary of the US military and the war-weary populace, and the missions were accomplished -- with essentially no objections by those who only knew the sanitized and censored-out version of events.
3) Hiroshima’s bomb was uranium and Nagasaki’s was plutonium. Scientific curiosity certainly was a significant factor for the bombing of Nagasaki. The decision to use both bombs had obviously been made well in advance. The three-day interval was unconscionably inadequate -- Japan being in shambles in its communications and transportation capabilities – and besides, no one, not the US military or even the Japanese high command, fully understood what had happened at Hiroshima. General Douglas MacArthur, commanding general of the entire Pacific theatre, was kept out of the loop about the existence of the bombs until five days before Hiroshima.
4) The Russians had proclaimed their intent to enter the war with Japan 90 days after V-E Day (Victory in Europe, May 8), which would have been Aug. 8, two days after Hiroshima was bombed. Indeed, Russia did declare war on August 8 and was marching across Manchuria when Nagasaki was incinerated. The US didn’t want Japan surrendering to anybody else, especially a future enemy, so the first nuclear “messages” of the infantile Cold War were sent. Russia indeed received far less of the spoils of war than they had anticipated, and the two superpowers were mired in the Cold War stalemate that eventually resulted in mutual moral and economic bankruptcy within a couple of generations.
An estimated 80,000 innocent and defenseless civilians -- plus 20,000 essentially weaponless young Japanese conscripts -- died instantly in the Hiroshima bombing. Hundreds of thousands more suffered agonizing bums, radiation sickness, leukemia and infections for the rest of their shortened lives, and generations of the survivor’s progeny inherited horrible radiation-induced illnesses, cancers and premature deaths. What has been covered up is the fact that 12 American Navy pilots, their existence well known to the US command, were incinerated in the Hiroshima jail on Aug. 6.
The 75,000 Nagasaki victims were virtually all innocent civilians, except for the inhabitants of an allied POW camp near Nagasaki’s ground zero. They were incinerated, carbonized and/or vaporized by a scientific experiment carried out by obedient, unaware soldiers and scientists. The War Dept. knew of the existence of the POWs but when informed, simply replied, “Targets previously assigned for Centerboard (code name for the Kokura/Nagasaki mission) remain unchanged.”
So the end of the war in the Pacific was just one more myth in a long list of myths that Americans have been fed by our military and political leaders, war being glorified in the process. A short list of some of the others includes the censored-out military invasions and occupations of countries such as this short list (just in the last 60 years): North Korea, Iran, Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia, Granada, Panama, the Philippines, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras, Haiti, Colombia, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, etc.
But somehow most of us Americans still hang on to our shaky “my country right or wrong” patriotism, desperately wanting to believe the cunningly-orchestrated myths that our nation only works for peace, justice and promoting democracy and not mainly supporting evil dictators or promoting corrupt exploitive capitalism.
While it is true that the US military has faced down occasional despots, with natural heroism and sacrifice from dead and dying American soldiers, more often than not our methods of rationalizing the atrocities of war are identical to those of the “godless communists” or “evil empires” on the other side of the battle line. August 6 and 9, 1945 are just two more examples of the brutalization of “total war,” which is always accompanied by the unforgivable human slaughter called “collateral damage” and “friendly fire.”
The time has come for Americans to stand up for real justice and peace (rather than the unaffordable and self-perpetuating “armed truces” we have all over the world) by acknowledging the whole truth of history and owning up to the numerous international war crimes and crimes against humanity that have been orchestrated by American militarism in the last half-century. And then we need to start acknowledging and speaking out about our nation’s all-too-common military atrocities, as would all courageous people who have high ethical standards.
Doing what is right for the whole of humanity for a change, rather than just what is advantageous for our over-privileged American life-style, would be real honor, real patriotism and an essential start toward real peace.
Dr. Kohls is a recently retired physician from Duluth, Minn., whose holistic mental practice dealt extensively with posttraumatic stress disordered (PTSD) patients, many of whom were military veterans and all of whose serious neurological and psychological disabilities were preventable.
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