Today is the 61st anniversary of Hiroshima bombing

[NNN0LHI]

http://www.ndtv.com/morenews/showmorestory.asp?slug=61st+anniversary+of+Hiroshima+bombing&id=91088

Sunday, August 6, 2006 (Hiroshima):



<snip>Survivors and families of victims assembled at the Peace Memorial Park near "ground zero", the spot where the bomb detonated on August 6, 1945, killing thousands and levelling the city. snip

At 8:15 am, the time when the US B-29 warplane Enola Gay dropped the bomb, people throughout the city observed a minute's silence in memory of those who died in the attack.

The Hiroshima bomb killed thousands instantly. By the end of 1945, the toll had risen to over 140,000 out of an estimated population of 350,000.

Thousands more died of illness and injuries later.

On August 9, 1945, three days after the Hiroshima attack, another atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

A total of 259,556 atomic bomb survivors were living in and outside of Japan as of March 31, many of them battling cancer and other long-term effects of the atom bomb.

[sweetheart]

1. Peacefully falling, the fattest of men

Another gift falls down from the givers,
a package of firey sunshine to make it right,
incinerating the place gives uz shivers,
a threat to the human race, a fight.

Whatever dreams the oven makers had
truman's outdone in the giving of the light,
a billion deaths to make us all sad,
a fat man open oven, sets the town alight.

Vapourized in an atomic frienzy of protons,
the barbarian gift keeps giving its might,
everyone wants one, so they can vote on,
looking strong in mass murder by nuclear light.
More brown victems of the neoliberal gift,
enola's bane of corporate war to uplift.

[mcscajun]

2. Excerpt from "Hiroshima" by John Hersey (GRAPHIC)

in which Hersey describes some of what went on the night after the dropping of the atomic bomb:

The night was hot, and it seemed even hotter because of the fires against the sky, but the younger of the two girls Mr. Tanimoto and the priests had rescued complained to Father Kleinsorge that she was cold. He covered her with his jacket. She and her older sister had been in the salt water of the river for a couple of hours before being rescued. The younger one had huge, raw flash burns on her body; the salt water must have been excruciatingly painful to her. She began to shiver heavily, and again said it was cold. Father Kleinsorge borrowed a blanket from someone nearby and wrapped her up, but she shook more and more, and said again, "I am so cold," and then she suddenly stopped shivering and was dead.

Mr. Tanimoto found about twenty men and women in the sandpit. He drove the boat onto the bank and urged them to get aboard. They did not move and he realized that they were too weak to lift themselves. He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glovelike pieces. He was so sickened by this that he had to sit down for a moment. Then he got out into the water and, though a small man, lifted several of the men and women, who were naked, into his boat. Their backs and breasts were clammy, and he remembered uneasily what the great burns he had seen during the day had been like: yellow at first, then red and swollen, with the skin sloughed off, and finally, in the evening, suppurated and smelly. With the tide risen, his bamboo pole was now too short and he had to paddle most of the way across with it. On the other side, at a higher spit, he lifted the slimy living bodies out and carried them up the slope away from the tide. He had to keep consciously repeating to himself, "These are human beings."

[malaise]

3. And as we remember do not forget

that those with power have learnt even more cruel ways of killing innocent human beings.

[pretzel4gore]

4. why aren't more people aware of this?

........
taken from Gore Vidal’s ‘Dreaming War, Blood For Oil and the Bush-Cheney Junta pg 77/78:
“…But let me quote from a letter by the historian Kai Bird, which, to my amazement, the New York Times published (usually they suppress anything too critical of themselves or their Opinion makers):
‘Twice the reviewer dismisses as “silly’ Vidal’s assertion that Harry Truman’s use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was unnecessary because Japan had been trying for some months to surrender.
Such assertions are neither silly nor….a product of Vidal’s ‘cranky politics’ Rather Vidal has cleverly drawn on a rich and scholarly literature published in the last decade to remind his readers that much of what orthodox court historians have written about the Cold War was simply wrong. With regard to Hiroshima, perhaps Vidal had in mind Truman’s July 1945 handwritten diary reference to a ‘telegram from Jap emperor asking for peace’
--------------
note: truman famously is quoted as saying he 'never lost a night's sleep' thinking about A-bombing japan; he'd 'do it again under same circumstances' etc (paraphrase)...yet, anyone who has read any books on truman knows he thought about that atrocity all the time, and he was probably thinking about it on his deathbed....

[Wednesdays]

5. "Such a weapon has the power to make everything into nothing"

(An excerpt from "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes.)

Not human beings alone died at Hiroshima. Something else was destroyed as well, the Japanese study explains--that shared life Hannah Arendt calls the common world:

In the case of an atomic bombing...a community does not merely receive an impact; the community itself is destroyed. Within 2 kilometers of the atomic bomb's hypocenter all life and property were shattered, burned, and buried under ashes. The visible forms of the city where people once carried on their daily lives vanished without a trace. The destruction was sudden and thorough; there was virtually no chance to escape... Citizens who had lost no family members in the holocaust were as rare as stars at sunrise...

The atomic bomb had blasted and burned hospitals, schools, city offices, police stations, and every other kind of human organization... Family, relatives, neighbors, and friends relied on a broad range of interdependent organizations for everything from birth, marriage, and funerals to firefighting, productive work, and daily living. These traditional communities were completely demolished in an instant.

Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children, but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys' clubs, girls' clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses--120 war-horses--musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art. "The whole of society," concludes the Japanese study, "was laid waste to its very foundations." Lifton's history professor saw not even foundations left. "Such a weapon," he told the American psychiatrist, "has the power to make everything into nothing."