Te gast: John Pilger
\nAug 06, 2008 <\/p>\n
When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was
\nstill there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at
\nease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting
\nfor a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6,
\n1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at
\nthe shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a
\nman called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the
\nshirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.
\n
\nHe and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an
\natomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, “a bluish
\nlight, something like an electrical short”, after which wind blew like
\na tornado and black rain fell. “I was thrown on the ground and noticed
\nonly the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and
\nquiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything.
\nSome of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead.” Nine years
\nlater, when I returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.<\/p>\n
In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation
\nauthorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that
\npeople had been killed or injured only by the bomb’s blast. It was the
\nfirst big lie. “No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin” said the front page
\nof the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic
\nabdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right
\nwith his scoop of the century. “I write this as a warning to the
\nworld,” reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached
\nHiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He
\ndescribed hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries
\nbut who were dying from what he called “an atomic plague”. For telling
\nthis truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and
\nsmeared – and vindicated.<\/p>\n
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an
\nepic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of
\nintrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought
\nrefuge in the mythology of the ultimate “good war”, whose “ethical
\nbath”, as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to
\nexpiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious
\nwar, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.<\/p>\n
The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the
\nwar in the Pacific and save lives. “Even without the atomic bombing
\nattacks,” concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946,
\n“air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to
\nbring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion.
\nBased on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by
\nthe testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the
\nSurvey’s opinion that … Japan would have surrendered even if the
\natomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the
\nwar and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”<\/p>\n
The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents
\nthat chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued.
\nA cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and
\nintercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were
\ndesperate to sue for peace, including “capitulation even if the terms
\nwere hard”. Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told
\nPresident Truman he was “fearful” that the US air force would have
\nJapan so “bombed out” that the new weapon would not be able “to show
\nits strength”. He later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was
\nseriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have
\nto use the bomb”. His foreign policy colleagues were eager “to browbeat
\nthe Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip”.
\nGeneral Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the
\nbomb, testified: “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia
\nwas our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.” The
\nday after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his
\nsatisfaction with the “overwhelming success” of “the experiment”.<\/p>\n
Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the brink of
\nusing nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging their bogus “war
\non terror”, the present governments in Washington and London have
\ndeclared they are prepared to make “pre-emptive” nuclear strikes
\nagainst non-nuclear states. With each stroke toward the midnight of a
\nnuclear Armageddon, the lies of justification grow more outrageous.
\nIran is the current “threat”. But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the
\ndisinformation that it is planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from
\na discredited CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK – just as
\nthe lies about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction originated
\nwith the Iraqi National Congress, set up by Washington.<\/p>\n
The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical.
\nThat America’s Defence Intelligence Estimate says “with high
\nconfidence” that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 has
\nbeen consigned to the memory hole. That Iran’s president Mahmoud
\nAhmadinejad never threatened to “wipe Israel off the map” is of no
\ninterest. But such has been the mantra of this media “fact” that in his
\nrecent, obsequious performance before the Israeli parliament, Gordon
\nBrown alluded to it as he threatened Iran, yet again.<\/p>\n
This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous
\nnuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost
\nunmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the
\nmedia. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and
\nthat is Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in
\n1986 when he smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as
\n200 nuclear warheads. In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today
\nclearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new American
\nadministration might, just might, conduct genuine negotiations with a
\nnation the west has defiled since Britain and America overthrew Iranian
\ndemocracy in 1953.<\/p>\n
In the New York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny Morris,
\nonce considered a liberal and now a consultant to his country’s
\npolitical and military establishment, threatened “an Iran turned into a
\nnuclear wasteland”. This would be mass murder. For a Jew, the irony
\ncries out.<\/p>\n
The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming,
\nas good Germans did, that “we did not know”? Do we hide ever more
\nbehind what Richard Falk has called “a self-righteous, one-way,
\nlegal\/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and
\ninnocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of
\nunrestricted violence”? Catching war criminals is fashionable again.
\nRadovan Karadzic stands in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and
\nBlair do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Te gast: John Pilger Aug 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 … Lees verder