Today is the 80th 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.
Gaza looks no different (+ it looks black and white despite the use of colour technology).
in photos. 80 Years Ago, Nuclear Annihilation Came to Japan
What the world’s only atomic bombings, carried out by Americans, did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (NYT). These photos captured the bombings’ excruciating aftermath in stark black and white.
Hiromichi Matsuda, via Shutterstock; Stanley Troutman, via Associated Press; Gonichi Kimura, courtesy of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum; Eiichi Matsumoto/The Asahi Shimbun, via Getty Images; Yasuo Tomishige/The Asahi Shimbun, via Getty Images; Shunkichi Kikuchi, courtesy of Harumi Tago; Bernard Hoffman/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Shutterstock
Can we zoom out beyond the endless trap of victims and perpetrators?
“…”world champions” in recognizing their own genocidal guilt and yet they now also lustily help Israel commit the GazaGenocide.”
What use is it looking for culprits? Does this not distract from the central issue that you also mention: “The anti-morality of this type of air “warfare…”
It is not this type, however. Any warfare is immoral. The fact that Gaza now looks like Hiroshima proves that the atomic bomb is but a paradigmatic example at best. There is an issue with the modern state form, an issue which a global organism, a glogal conscience, one not based on nation-states like UN, must address. It must not be an inter-national system. It must be a supra-national system addressing this. One which transcends the very idea of nation.
Is it not worth dedicating our scarce writing and publishing resources (time, mind-space) to work this out?
Finding perpetrators can shed a level of light by way of the logical rhetorical strategy of opposites, the good and the bad, but it falls short of the clarity that is urgently needed. That clarity requires a non-dialectical logic that transcends opposition, just as it does the end of warfare: without a logic of opposition there is no reason for war. The opposition / comparison logic systematically turns the good into the bad, the victim into the next perpetrator as we witness right now since October 7th 2023 but not only.
If the aim of dropping atomic bombs on Japan was to persuade the Japanese Emperor to capitulate and stop his war immediately, a single atomic bomb dropped in Tokyo Bay would have sufficed. The damage would have been limited but impressive: riparine blast effects, some ships obliterated, and a destructive tsunami. Radiation effects on living beings would have followed, but not taken into consideration at the time. The inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were genocided for no military or political purpose - they were not responsible or culpable for any of the war.
America's obsessive-compulsive belligerence which it has manifested ever since, alongside its rulers' sociopathic need to torture its imperial subjects [also present in European Empires of the 19th and 20th centuries] has the consequence of committing atrocities whenever opportunities arise. Colonial settlers' power to torment and exterminate the original inhabitants of the lands they take over as an invasive species seems universal. Israel currently fits the paradigm.
We think in generalities but live and act in particulars - think in vague impressions, live through specific instances. Our mental impressions are often impossible mental objects - ideas unmanifestable in actual phenomena, but we use them as if they were real.
So with the idea of 'nuclear holocaust'.
The superstition is that nuclear war is potentially real and taken to be complete destruction world-wide, globally.
But detonations are singular, constrained to particular locations with relatively limited radii of destruction.
But even in the target areas of North America, Europe, and northern Asia, the pinpoints won’t extend everywhere.
Africa, South America, Southern Asia, Oceania will probably have no detonation points.
There will be global knock-on effects to climate and transferred radiation causing interference to ecosystems virtually everywhere. Oceanic life will be minimally damaged. Waters won't be totally toxic - poisoning will be to species vulnerable to it, and initially only to the upper layers.
Human destruction will be in the dense population areas, inside the blast radius, but not much elsewhere in those regions.
It will be very bad, but not universally terminal.
A nuclear holocaust connotes ‘totally burned up”. Nuclear explosions can only be in multiple particulars, not comprehensive generality.
what is both general and real (as continually witnessed) is the potential for destruction and suffering that certain political ideas (such as the modern nation-state) and certain scientific ideas (such as atomic fusion) possess. Isn't this enough of a reason to begin to monitor , and also intervene, the causal relation as it evolves in real time?
I haven't seen Oppenheimer and I'm in no rush to do so, but from what I've heard it goes to great lengths to make him a sympathetic character. So I think you actually meant "could a film like Oppenheimer get away with NOT giving a fuck about the victims"
Gaza looks no different (+ it looks black and white despite the use of colour technology).
in photos. 80 Years Ago, Nuclear Annihilation Came to Japan
What the world’s only atomic bombings, carried out by Americans, did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (NYT). These photos captured the bombings’ excruciating aftermath in stark black and white.
Hiromichi Matsuda, via Shutterstock; Stanley Troutman, via Associated Press; Gonichi Kimura, courtesy of Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum; Eiichi Matsumoto/The Asahi Shimbun, via Getty Images; Yasuo Tomishige/The Asahi Shimbun, via Getty Images; Shunkichi Kikuchi, courtesy of Harumi Tago; Bernard Hoffman/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Shutterstock
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/05/world/asia/hiroshima-nagasaki-japan-nuclear-photos.html
“The anti-morality of this type of air “warfare…”
Can we zoom out beyond the endless trap of victims and perpetrators?
“…”world champions” in recognizing their own genocidal guilt and yet they now also lustily help Israel commit the GazaGenocide.”
What use is it looking for culprits? Does this not distract from the central issue that you also mention: “The anti-morality of this type of air “warfare…”
It is not this type, however. Any warfare is immoral. The fact that Gaza now looks like Hiroshima proves that the atomic bomb is but a paradigmatic example at best. There is an issue with the modern state form, an issue which a global organism, a glogal conscience, one not based on nation-states like UN, must address. It must not be an inter-national system. It must be a supra-national system addressing this. One which transcends the very idea of nation.
Is it not worth dedicating our scarce writing and publishing resources (time, mind-space) to work this out?
Finding perpetrators can shed a level of light by way of the logical rhetorical strategy of opposites, the good and the bad, but it falls short of the clarity that is urgently needed. That clarity requires a non-dialectical logic that transcends opposition, just as it does the end of warfare: without a logic of opposition there is no reason for war. The opposition / comparison logic systematically turns the good into the bad, the victim into the next perpetrator as we witness right now since October 7th 2023 but not only.
Thank you for this piece, translated in French here : https://zanzibar.substack.com/p/il-y-a-80-ans-hiroshima-and-nagasaki
https://archive.org/details/Hiroshima_revisited
R U still pushing that mind fuck
606675
If the aim of dropping atomic bombs on Japan was to persuade the Japanese Emperor to capitulate and stop his war immediately, a single atomic bomb dropped in Tokyo Bay would have sufficed. The damage would have been limited but impressive: riparine blast effects, some ships obliterated, and a destructive tsunami. Radiation effects on living beings would have followed, but not taken into consideration at the time. The inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were genocided for no military or political purpose - they were not responsible or culpable for any of the war.
America's obsessive-compulsive belligerence which it has manifested ever since, alongside its rulers' sociopathic need to torture its imperial subjects [also present in European Empires of the 19th and 20th centuries] has the consequence of committing atrocities whenever opportunities arise. Colonial settlers' power to torment and exterminate the original inhabitants of the lands they take over as an invasive species seems universal. Israel currently fits the paradigm.
We think in generalities but live and act in particulars - think in vague impressions, live through specific instances. Our mental impressions are often impossible mental objects - ideas unmanifestable in actual phenomena, but we use them as if they were real.
So with the idea of 'nuclear holocaust'.
The superstition is that nuclear war is potentially real and taken to be complete destruction world-wide, globally.
But detonations are singular, constrained to particular locations with relatively limited radii of destruction.
But even in the target areas of North America, Europe, and northern Asia, the pinpoints won’t extend everywhere.
Africa, South America, Southern Asia, Oceania will probably have no detonation points.
There will be global knock-on effects to climate and transferred radiation causing interference to ecosystems virtually everywhere. Oceanic life will be minimally damaged. Waters won't be totally toxic - poisoning will be to species vulnerable to it, and initially only to the upper layers.
Human destruction will be in the dense population areas, inside the blast radius, but not much elsewhere in those regions.
It will be very bad, but not universally terminal.
A nuclear holocaust connotes ‘totally burned up”. Nuclear explosions can only be in multiple particulars, not comprehensive generality.
what is both general and real (as continually witnessed) is the potential for destruction and suffering that certain political ideas (such as the modern nation-state) and certain scientific ideas (such as atomic fusion) possess. Isn't this enough of a reason to begin to monitor , and also intervene, the causal relation as it evolves in real time?
I haven't seen Oppenheimer and I'm in no rush to do so, but from what I've heard it goes to great lengths to make him a sympathetic character. So I think you actually meant "could a film like Oppenheimer get away with NOT giving a fuck about the victims"