Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and (No) Honesty

Today is the 80^th anniversary of the first, very deliberate use in war of a weapon that can, in principle, and maybe will, in reality, end humanity as a species, if not even the planet as a habitat. That is, of course, the atom bomb, or, as we say, now, nuclear weapons.

The bomb that the US dropped on the essentially defenseless Japanese city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 and the one it dropped on the also defenseless city of Nagasaki only three days later were “small” by comparison with their successors, of which humanity as a whole currently has over 12,000, and counting. Those first nukes could not yet end the world.

But their successors, including their H-bomb cousins, have long been able to do so. Indeed, a small part of them maybe enough to destroy all the life – not counting a few microorganisms – we currently know about in the universe we currently know about: In a global nuclear war, it is likely that the enemies would run out of populations to genocide as well as soldiers to commit the crime before they would run out of nukes. Notwithstanding the possibility that with our usual perverse inventiveness, we may already have made sure that computers will take care of firing the last salvos over our incinerated continents and toxic seas.

There are many things to ponder on a day like this, and they will probably all come up for discussion somewhere. Here, I won’t try to summarize them. But just for instance:

There’s the fact that the single most devastating weapon of mass destruction in World War Two was used by the US, a country leading an alliance claiming to fight for democracy, freedom and, in essence, humanity. You may point out that neither Nazi Germany nor the Soviet Union had this type of weapon in 1945. But that doesn’t answer the obvious question why the US did not only have it but actually use it. And not for demonstration purposes – an option considered (so not “merely” missed) but very quickly disregarded – but to massacre civilians, not once but twice (and quite possibly even more often had Japan not capitulated).

Then there also is the fact that these atomic bombings were “only” the culmination of a type of bombing that had become one systematic, carefully mathematized, and proud atrocity. The anti-morality of this type of air “warfare” (that is, massacring) is, of course, still very much with us, not only in the realm of conventional weapons, but also in the plans for using nuclear ones.

Obvious contemporary reference points include the genocide currently committed by Israel and the West against the Palestinians of Gaza. There, indeed, the perpetrators have shown again, as happened before in, for instance World War II Tokyo, that enough conventional bombs will add up to the same devastation (minus long-term radiation, but still including other, also massive toxic long-term effects) that can be wrought by nuclear weapons. We have various figures, but all are horrendously large, and all leave no doubt that Israel has dropped the explosive equivalent of multiples of the Hiroshima bomb on the Gaza Strip, a territory roughly the size of the medium US city of Philadelphia. But Philadelphia has about 1.5 million inhabitants; on the eve of the current genocide the Gaza Strip used to have about 2.2-2.3 million.

Finally, we are clearly living through a period of nuclear arms escalation. It is as good as certain that the current number of known nuclear powers of nine will soon greatly increase. The absolute lawlessness of the US-Israel complex and its allies alone (witness their recent attack on Iran, for instance) make sure that any government wishing to protect its state from blackmail and annihilation and its people from genocide must acquire nuclear weapons to deter the rogue West.

In addition, the arms control agreements and systems painstakingly assembled during the second half of the Cold War have crumbled even between the current nuclear powers. The consequences are all around us. Just now, the US have shipped fresh “tactical” (a misnomer but a common on) nukes to the UK; and Russia has officially announced that it will no longer observe a self-imposed moratorium on medium and short-range missiles. Those need not carry nuclear warheads, it is true. But their capacity to do so is still a key fact.

We could go on. It is easy to show that on the anniversary of Hiroshima, the world is awful, not only but very much also with regard to nuclear weapons. But I would like to highlight something else that I feel is not receiving enough public attention. Namely, that the elites and publics of the West have never come clean on what the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki actually were: enormous, unforgivable crimes on a scale that Western Centrists readily associate with, for instance, Hitler, Pol Pot, or Stalin but – somehow – not with Harry Truman, Leslie Groves, and James Byrnes, to name only a few of the key perpetrators.

In our world, one can “like” Truman, commiserate with “tragic” Oppenheimer, and still get away with obvious and long refuted lies covering their crimes, such as “Japan wasn’t ready to give up” or “invading the home islands would have been worse.” “Sophisticated” versions of this moral and intellectual garbage, still spread by quite a few academics, are built around perverse speculations about the “ethics” of ending wars. The stuff, in short, is not only sickening but amazingly transparent and hypocritical. And yet, the West is a civilization – if that is the word, really – where that is still good enough for all too many.

Consider two things, one a fresh poll and one a thought experiment: The poll shows us that, at this point, 35 percent of Americans (the bombings’ perpetrator nation, as Germans and Israelis will always have to live with being the perpetrator nations of their respective genocides) “think” these massacres were justified, 31 percent understand they were not, 33 percent are too lazy or confused to have an opinion. In one sense, the poll marks “progress.” Earlier ones used to be worse, and there also is a clear generational trend: Younger Americans are wiser and more normal, as, by the way, also with regard to the crime that is Israel.

Yet here is the thought experiment; call it the Crazy Uncle test: If you had a crazy uncle, for instance, telling you he liked Hitler or denying the Holocaust, odds are that, if you are halfway normal, you won’t speak to him again. Now imagine another crazy uncle insisting that the atomic massacring of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not constitute a crime but was “necessary” and “right.” Odds, in our Western society, are that even if you disagree you somehow won’t break off contact, that, in effect, to one extent or the other, you will tolerate that kind of craziness.

Why is that? Why is the crime and are the criminals of Hiroshima and Nagasaki not as anathematized as those of, say, Baby Yar or Treblinka? To put it differently, the really intriguing question about polls showing us how many accept and do not accept the truth about these US crimes is not the rate of change over time but why they keep co-existing so peacefully. There is no reason for the underlying cultural distinction without a real difference that withstands scrutiny. And yet it lasts and lasts. Is it that we still can only truly at least try to reckon with evil when it’s that of the defeated? That makes their evil no less evil.

But it is a bias that makes all of us deeply, cripplingly dishonest. That is a dishonesty with very real consequences: Would today’s US be its same ultra-violent and rather stupid self if it had ever fully acknowledged the crime of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (among, of course, so many others) and ostracized the criminals? If we had books searching Truman’s childhood, for instance, to uncover the roots of his evil personality? Or if a movie about Oppenheimer could not get away with, in effect, giving a good old American fuck (yes, that is the word) about his victims?

You may object that the question is naïve: After all the Germans pride themselves appallingly on being “world champions” in recognizing their own genocidal guilt and yet they now also lustily help Israel commit the Gaza Genocide, even making perverse links between their own past murderousness and the de facto right and obligation to now participate in that of the Israelis.

True enough, but then the Germans were defeated. And looking back from what we have learned about Germany during the Gaza Genocide, their whole shtick of “Coming to terms with the past” was always a big fat, self-serving lie based on opportunism and hurt vanity.

So, in a way, the Germans don’t count. And, in yet another way, they should not. Because the real question is what would our world look like if the victors, at long last, looked at themselves honestly? We don’t yet know, because it has never been tried.