Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki [Archives:2005/866/Opinion]

Many people tend to have a two-sided coin view of the world, in which there is evil and there is good. That is all very simplistic, but nevertheless it reassures them that people do not have to decide between so many different alternatives on which to embark as we try to give meaning to our life, on the assumption that we are on the good side. Most people cling to the belief that they are the manifestation of the good side. Realistically, however, this would leave very few people, who would then deserve to be confronted by the majority of self proclaimed do-gooders. If indeed the majority of people are on the good side of the coin, then there would be very few problems in the world, there will not be a need for armies and WMD and all the destructive machinery made under legal licenses, to supposedly protect good from whoever dares to uphold evil in this world.

Sixty years ago two Japanese cities became the first victims of the most destructive weapons mankind has ever devised. Hundreds of thousands were killed and many more were injured as the people of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were within seconds no more to be the residents of two humming urban metropolises. They saw their cities hit by a fireball the likes of which could not be visualized by any of them. One can imagine how terrifying for the survivors of these two holocausts to have to live with this horrible nightmare all their lives. For some, the psychological repercussions were so great, that death would have been a merciful escape from the ugly visions that constantly raced through their minds.

The Japanese at the time were supposedly fighting on the evil side of the coin in the most destructive war that human history has ever seen and the battles of which literally circled the globe. But was the evil that they represented the embryo of the people of Nagasaki and Hiroshima? It is always a tragic consequence of war that it is always the civilians whose casualty meters run at tens of times the casualty meters of those manning the guns on any conflict. For the most part these civilian casualties are the victims of attacking armies that take pleasure in taking some revenge from the civilians of their defeated enemies. Or, they are caught in the cross-fire of combating armies, whose ordnance launchers for the most part miss their intended marks and land on civilian homes, work places, schools, parks and thoroughfares. They are simply collateral damage. Imagine they are not even casualties- they are collateral damage! World War Two introduced aerial bombardment on a massive scale and many millions of people have just then recently rushed to the cities. Rural life was unable to sustain but a small proportion of the population, in those countries that have adopted the mass production technologies evolving from the Industrial Revolution. In war, these massive agglomerations of people turn into sitting ducks, as rows upon rows of bombers hover above them to release their payload, with the pilot not having the faintest idea where any of his arsenal of bombs of different weights and destructive force really landed. It does not matter, when the pilots return to the base, they will all get together and celebrate their direct hits. They will also be consoled by the knowledge that the planes that were shot down during the raids have already been replaced by brand new bombers, with added perfection, such as bigger and more destructive payloads of TNT. But the climax was to be brought on by the Manhattan Project, a top secret operation, by which Washington was to make sure that its world supremacy would be underlined with a lesson to the sponsors of evil, who dared to challenge the White Man's Burden, and actually thought they were a world power to be reckoned with. The Manhattan Project was over and the war was drawing to a close it seems. The output of the Manhattan Project needed to be tested. This is not so much because scientists wanted to see exactly how much destruction can be made by these new determinants of world power in the new age of peace that was to follow the defeat of the evil Axis Powers. Scientists had a fairly good idea of how much destruction is packed into each bomb, depending on its weight, size and destructive material. The politicians were the ones doing the testing this time. Power needed to be emphasized as the safeguard against evil and if the world was sold on the premonition that the United States and her allies were representing the good side of the coin, then an opportunity should not be allowed to slip away. Power is with the good side and proof to the world is in order that it is the good side that will safeguard all the good things that humanity has been yearning for, for centuries.

So, what if a few hundred thousand yellow skins loose their lives, their children, their homes, as long as the world learns the lesson that challenging the White Man's Burden is an unforgivable sin, which calls for a taste of purgatory now and not in the hereafter. There was no plan to ever use the A- Bomb on say Italy and Germany, because these states are in the epicenter of western culture and their blood is made of heavier protoplasm. Besides their kamikaze (remember the word for suicide bomber then) were a real pain in Pearl Harbor. Can you imagine, not letting these yellow skins get punished for having the audacity to send their suicide bombers on the naval base that represented the extent of white supremacy in the Pacific Ocean? That is out of the question. For the Italians and the Germans, what they did was normal for white people to do and thus could never be considered candidates for such a massacre of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki genre. A lot of white folks would even suggest the very names of the cities are enough grounds for giving them a taste of real white man destructive power. They are not only hard to pronounce, most whites would have a fit trying to spell them. So, it was bombs away and General Macarthur took over Japan without loosing a man for conquering the Land of the Rising Sun. The Japanese generals knew full well that even twenty thousand kamikazes could never outdo the destructive capabilities that whitey has in his stores. Moreover, the honor codes of warfare have long ago been shelved, but for whitey honor only comes with what your bombers can deliver and not how they deliver their payloads. So, now good will be dictated by whitey for sometime to come until the Heavens decide otherwise and then God Al-Mighty will tell everybody, Whites, Blacks, Yellows, Pagans, Christians, Jews and even Moslems, you got it all wrong folks!
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