[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The lies of Hiroshima live on ...

[Bill Totten]

... props in the war crimes of the 20th century

The 1945 attack was murder on an epic scale. In its victims' names, we
must not allow a nuclear repeat in the Middle East

by Jon Pilger

The Guardian (August 06 2008)


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 leukaemia.

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press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared - and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 sixty 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 Defence Intelligence Estimate says "with high confidence"
that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons programme 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

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/06/secondworldwar.warcrimes


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