America Celebrates Mass Murder (No, Not in Iraq)

This weekend was the anniversary of the American atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Conservative hawks and the uninformed celebrate the bombings as the charitable “ending of the war” that, in the end, “saved lives.” Pure rubbish. For those of us under 60, we can take heart that propaganda didn’t begin with the Iraq war. The atomic bombings, which killed 120,000 civilians in an instant, and at least another 100,000 over time, were condemned as barbaric and unnecessary by high American military officers, including Eisenhower and MacArthur.

“Still, Truman’s multiple deceptions and self-deceptions are understandable, considering the horror he unleashed. It is equally understandable that the U.S. occupation authorities censored reports from the shattered cities and did not permit films and photographs of the thousands of corpses and the frightfully mutilated survivors to reach the public. Otherwise, Americans – and the rest of the world – might have drawn disturbing comparisons to scenes then coming to light from the Nazi concentration camps.”

TheStateOf…Nukes. For all of America’s huffing and puffing about weapons of mass destruction and terror against “innocent civilians,” we are still the only nation to use nuclear weapons. “I don’t know about you, I ain’t going to study war anymore.” –Martin Luther King, Jr.