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The American narrative of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki-which are by definition, war crimes-focuses entirely on the perpetrators. If Morley could say this in 1945, right after the liberation of the camps, American patriotism at its highest point, we should be able to think about the implications of the comparison now.īut we rarely do. We are still refusing to look at the crimes we committed during our last good war.
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There, as at Buchenwald, there are plenty of unburied dead.” We still have not heeded Morley’s advice. Already in August 1945, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Felix Morley, not exactly a Marxist firebrand, wrote “At Nazi concentration camps, we have paraded horrified German civilians before the piled bodies of tortured Nazi victims…It would be equally salutary to send groups of representative Americans to Hiroshima. The comparison with the Holocaust is problematic for contemporary Americans. Historian Mark Selden called these, somewhat provocatively, a forgotten Holocaust. The fire raids are completely obscured by the A-bombs in American and Japanese memory. That is if we think about them at all.Ĭity sign as you enter Los Alamos (CC BY 2.0) by M McBey. Yet, we treat the people who executed these raids as tortured souls who hated what they were doing. Hiroshima was the culmination of a campaign that saw up to 350,000 civilians bombed, burned and strafed by the US 20 th Air Force.
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In its practice of “urbacide” the US military turned human urban settlements, which were full of innocent civilians, into “kill zones,” “target areas,” and “workers dwellings,” or simply equations or statistics of burned area and bomb tonnage. This is a continuation of the war time erasure of Japanese humanity. It is a story of the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of human beings in which those murdered are a footnote. Japanese people are included only as statistics: how many dead how many wounded. But the central players in the story are Americans, there are no Japanese people in the story. Others find “inspiring” angles of inclusiveness such as gender, or of minority racial groups, leaving unmentioned the enforcement of Jim Crow style discrimination in employment practices in the Manhattan Project production workforce. Some tell the story of children expressing pride in their parents involvement in creating this weapon.
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It seems that every year someone finds another way to tell the story that celebrates the inclusiveness prioritized in modern American narration. The American telling of the nuclear attacks focuses on the astonishing accomplishments of scientists involved in developing the weapons, on industrial manufacturers producing the weapons, politicians “deciding” what to do with the revolutionary technology, and the highly trained military personnel who “dropped” the bombs (always a passive construction) on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He actually wrote that the use of weapons of mass destruction against urban centers saved lives. Stimson wrote that the use of nuclear weapons ended the war, and in making an invasion of the Japanese home islands unnecessary, saved millions of lives on both sides. The American narrative of the nuclear attacks was formalized in a piece written by former Secretary of War Henry Stimson in Harper’s in 1947. The US used weapons of mass destruction against a primarily civilian population, instantly killing over 100,000 human beings, with tens of thousands of wounded and irradiated people who would die in the subsequent months and years. In August 1945, the United States attacked two cities in Japan with nuclear weapons in the last days of World War Two. A photograph of Hiroshima seen from a US airplane after the attack, autographed by Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets.