70 years ago today, the US brought nuclear annihilation to Hiroshima. Dropped on a people near surrender, the A-bomb was unleashed simply to scare the Soviets, believes John Ellison.
FOR democratically minded and peace-loving people of this country, the defeat of Hitler’s Germany and of Hirohito’s Japan in WWII was an essential task, however bloody and protracted.
But it was essential only because these profoundly anti-democratic, militarist-expansionist regimes had been stroked, pampered and assisted to become more powerful aggressors.
Britain under “national” governments, its vast empire still intact, played a key role in fostering nazi Germany’s re-armament plans, having already, in 1931, given an unequivocal blessing to imperial Japan’s occupation of Manchuria.
“Appeasement” of friendly fascism and militarism abroad was thus in its early stages a gift from the British government from a position of strength, not a concession from weakness, while the option of making a security alliance with the internationally isolated but rapidly industrialising Soviet Union was scorned.
Such is the tragic history which anti-fascists of the time were unable to reverse — a history which incubated, and finally gave birth to, a second global conflict.
The war in the West ended on May 8 1945. The Soviet Union had played the largest part in this war, defending itself against the nazi onslaught and then advancing to Berlin — with some 25 million of its citizens sacrificed in the process.
Stalin’s government had undertaken to enter the war against Japan three months later, and did so on August 8, attacking Japan’s forces in Manchuria immediately.
But already, on August 6, a single atomic bomb had been dropped by a US aircraft on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and another (this time the “big laboratory” experiment was with a plutonium bomb) was to fall on Nagasaki three days later.
Vast areas of both cities, and their largely civilian populations, were incinerated. The casualty figures can never be more than estimates, but if the numbers of those immediately killed are enlarged by those dying of burns and irradiation before the end of the year, the estimated Hiroshima death toll is around 140,000 and that of Nagasaki is around 70,000.
By 1950 many more delayed deaths had lifted the combined total to around 300,000, and there have been many more since, especially through varieties of cancer.
Read more: http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-fea4-The-Atomic-Plague#.VcSmQPPtlBd
The comment to the article (by Anastacia Promskaya: https://www.facebook.com/anastacia.promskaya)
The strangest thing in this situation is that Japanese authorities have never accused the Americans of their crimes, committed 70 years ago in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Furthermore, they have never tried to put the Americans to justice or claim for compensation. Apparently the U.S. are not going to recognize their crimes and take at least moral responsibility for what they have done. This is terrifying. That is one more template of American indifference to the destinies of other countries and people. It also shows the core of their “double standard” policy, when under the pretence of defending democratic values and principles all over the world, they only bring death, sufferings and torture. Unspoken acceptance of Japan of what happened 70 years ago with them, and their approval (though not always apparent) of the modern foreign policy of the U.S., indirectly puts the American goverment into a privileged position in comparison with other countries and nations. Perhaps the U.S. impunity made them too self-assured, and as a result they are convinced that they can commit further crimes of all sorts either inside or outside. I admit the fact that a current situation with American military invasion into the states of Near East, North Africa, economic and political support of any destructive actions in Latin America, post-Soviet space and even Europe, may result from the situation that appeared after Japan had denied to blame on the U.S. of their horrible crimes.