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20th Century - USA Genocide?

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The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nuclear attacks at the end of World War II against the Empire of Japan by the United States at the order of the U.S. President Harry S. Truman on August 6 and 9, 1945. After six months of intense firebombing of 67 other Japanese cities, the nuclear weapon “Little Boy” was dropped on the city of Hiroshima on Monday, August 6, 1945, followed on August 9 by the detonation of the “Fat Man” nuclear bomb over Nagasaki.  These are to date the only attacks with nuclear weapons in the history of warfare.

The bombs killed as many as 140,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 in Nagasaki by the end of 1945, roughly half on the days of the bombings. Since then, thousands more have died from injuries or illness attributed to exposure to radiation released by the bombs. In both cities, the overwhelming majority of the dead were civilians. –http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki 

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The Lies of Hiroshima Live On, Props in the War Crimes of the 20th Century by John Pilger

Published on Wednesday, August 6, 2008 by The Guardian/UK Common Dreams

The 1945 attack was murder on an epic scale. In its victims. names, we

must not allow a nuclear repeat in the Middle East

When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still

there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs

splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to

open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and

her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an

hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio,

whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing

when the atomic bomb was dropped.

He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an

atomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, “a bluish light,

something like an electrical short”, after which wind blew like a tornado

and black rain fell. “I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the

stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I

got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no

skin or hair. I was certain I was dead”. Nine years later, when I returned

to look for him, he was dead from leukemia.

In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities

banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had

been killed or injured only by the bomb’s blast. It was the first big lie.

“No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin” said the front page of the New York

Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the

Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the

century. “I write this as a warning to the world,” reported Burchett in

the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the

first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with

people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called “an

atomic plague”. For telling this truth, his press accreditation was

withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared - and vindicated.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic

scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of

intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge

in the mythology of the ultimate “good war”, whose “ethical bath”, as

Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its

bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always

beneath the shadow of The Bomb.

The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war

in the Pacific and save lives. “Even without the atomic bombing attacks,”

concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, “air

supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about

unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a

detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of

the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that

“Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been

dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion

had been planned or contemplated”.

The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that

chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable

sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by

the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for

peace, including “capitulation even if the terms were hard”. Instead, the

US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was “fearful”

that the US air force would have Japan so “bombed out” that the new weapon

would not be able “to show its strength”. He later admitted that “no

effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender

merely in order not to have to use the bomb”. His foreign policy

colleagues were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather

ostentatiously on our hip”. General Leslie Groves, director of the

Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: “There was never any

illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was

conducted on that basis”. The day after Hiroshima was obliterated,

President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the “overwhelming success”

of “the experiment”.

Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the brink of

using nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging their bogus “war on

terror”, the present governments in Washington and London have declared

they are prepared to make “pre-emptive” nuclear strikes against

non-nuclear states. With each stroke toward the midnight of a nuclear

Armageddon, the lies of justification grow more outrageous. Iran is the

current “threat”. But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation

that it is planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a discredited

CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK - just as the lies about

Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction originated with the Iraqi

National Congress, set up by Washington.

The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical.

That America’s Defense Intelligence Estimate says “with high confidence”

that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons program in 2003 has been consigned

to the memory hole. That Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never

threatened to “wipe Israel off the map” is of no interest. But such has

been the mantra of this media “fact” that in his recent, obsequious

performance before the Israeli parliament, Gordon Brown alluded to it as

he threatened Iran, yet again.

This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous

nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost

unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the media.

There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and that is

Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in 1986 when

he smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as 200 nuclear

warheads. In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today clearly itching

to attack Iran, fearful that a new American administration might, just

might, conduct genuine negotiations with a nation the west has defiled

since Britain and America overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953.

In the New York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, once

considered a liberal and now a consultant to his country’s political and

military establishment, threatened “an Iran turned into a nuclear

wasteland”. This would be mass murder. For a Jew, the irony cries out.

The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming, as

good Germans did, that “we did not know”? Do we hide ever more behind what

Richard Falk has called “a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen

[with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as

threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence”? Catching war

criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands in the dock, but

Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima

requires an answer.

johnpilger.com