{"id":260445,"date":"2016-08-07T12:36:07","date_gmt":"2016-08-07T12:36:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/71th-anniversary-of-the-a-bombing-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki\/"},"modified":"2016-08-07T12:36:07","modified_gmt":"2016-08-07T12:36:07","slug":"71th-anniversary-of-the-a-bombing-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/71th-anniversary-of-the-a-bombing-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki\/","title":{"rendered":"71th Anniversary of the A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Saturday marked the 71st anniversary of U.S. President Harry Truman\u2019s atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. The atomic bombing of Nagasaki took place three days later in 1945. Some 90,000-166,000<\/a> individuals were killed in Hiroshima. The Nagasaki bombing killed 39,000-80,000 human beings. (It has come to my attention that the U.S. military bombed Tokyo<\/b><\/a> on Aug. 14 \u2013 after destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki and after Emperor Hirohito expressed his readiness to surrender.)<\/p>\n

There isn\u2019t much to be said about those unspeakable atrocities against civilians that hasn\u2019t been said many times before. The U.S. government never needed atomic bombs to commit mass murder, but it dropped them anyway. (Remember this when judging the official U.S. moralistic stance toward Iran<\/a>.) Its \u201cconventional\u201d weapons have been potent enough. (See the earlier firebombing of Tokyo<\/a>.) Nor did it need the bombs to persuade Japan to surrender; the Japanese government had been suing for peace. The U.S. government may not have used atomic weapons since 1945, but it has not yet given up mass murder as a political\/military tactic. Presidents and presidential candidates are still expected to say that, with respect to nuclear weapons, \u201cno options are off the table.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mario Rizzo has pointed out that Americans were upset by the murder of 3,000 people on 9\/11 yet seem not to be bothered that \u201ctheir\u201d government murdered many more Japanese civilians in two days. Many more died as a consequence of the bombings. Conservatives, ironically, were among the earliest critics<\/a> of Truman\u2019s mass murder. It\u2019s also worth noting that the top military leaders of the day opposed the use of atomic bombs.<\/p>\n

As Harry Truman once said, \u201cI don\u2019t give \u2019em hell. I just drop A-bombs on their cities and they think it\u2019s hell.\u201d (Okay, he didn\u2019t really say that, but he might as well have.)<\/p>\n

Some people still see the A-bombs as the only alternative to invasion<\/a>, which would have cost many more civilian lives. Now there\u2019s the fallacy of the false alternative in dying color. Why couldn\u2019t the U.S. military have called it a day and gone home? Why the assumption that the state must destroy and conquer its \u201cenemy\u201d? Why demand unconditional surrender? (To back up a step, why go to war against Japan at all? Pearl Harbor was the result of systematic, intentional provocation \u2013 as Herbert Hoover and others pointed out at the time) \u2013 perhaps with Roosevelt\u2019s foreknowledge. A government less concerned with a rival for its and its allies\u2019 colonial possessions might have not gotten involved.)<\/p>\n

Rad Geek People\u2019s Daily has a poignant post here<\/b><\/a>. Rad says: \u201cAs far as I am aware, the atomic bombing of the Hiroshima city center, which deliberately targeted a civilian center and killed over half of the people living in the city, remains the deadliest act of terrorism in the history of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Other things to read: Anthony Gregory\u2019s \u201cHiroshima, Nagasaki, and the US Terror…<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Saturday marked the 71st anniversary of U.S. President Harry Truman\u2019s atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Japan. The atomic bombing of Nagasaki took place three days later in 1945. Some 90,000-166,000 individuals were killed in Hiroshima. The Nagasaki bombing killed 39,000-80,000 human beings. (It has come to my attention that the U.S. military bombed Tokyo on Aug. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-260445","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=260445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260445\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=260445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=260445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=260445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}