Press TV – by Finnian Cunningham
Sixty-eight years ago this week, the United States wiped out more than 200,000 people when it dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Tens of thousands more victims were to die over the ensuing years due to slow, painful deaths from cancers and birth defects.
Yet the US – the only state to have ever used atomic weapons – has never apologized or made any atonement for this singularly horrific crime. Officially, the US justifies it as a legitimate attack during war even though many historical sources show that there was absolutely no military necessity for the bombings.
Even former president and top military commander Dwight Eisenhower would later go on record as saying that the A-bomb attacks on Japan in August 1945 were completely unnecessary.
The unleashing of the atomic infernos on mostly civilian populations was simply this: an act of supreme terrorism. It was an act of barbarity callously calculated by the US planners to demonstrate their country’s demonic power to the rest of the world – and the Soviet Union in particular. This premeditated rationale makes it an unpardonable crime of the highest order.
Fast-forward sixty-eight years on, the US government has this week issued a global terror alert, closing down more than 20 diplomatic sites across the world and vacating staff from various countries. Following suit are the British and French governments who have shut their embassies in Yemen on the basis of an unspecified, secret terror alert issued by Washington.
The rest of the world is thus obliged to believe the word of Washington over this unverifiable warning.
Of course, it is a propaganda stunt, aimed at renewing the whole fraudulent ‘war on terror’ charade and distracting from recent politically embarrassing developments, such as the vast scope of illegal surveillance against US citizens and the rest of the world; or the increasing public awareness of the collusion between American and Western intelligence and regime-change terrorism in Syria.
This is the same American political establishment that launched wars on Afghanistan and Iraq on the back of spurious and outright mendacious claims over the alleged 9/11 terror attacks and weapons of mass destruction.
This is the same government, along with Britain and France, that secretly claims the Syrian armed forces of President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons – when the hard evidence is that it is actually the US-backed foreign mercenaries who have launched these weapons to kill civilians.
This week, the US military killed more people in Yemen with its assassination drones under presidential executive orders, just as it has done every week over the past 10 years as it wages covert and overt criminal wars in several countries simultaneously.
These US-led wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, Libya and Syria have caused as many as two million, mainly civilian, deaths.
And yet ludicrously, the US government is putting the world on alert against terrorism. Even more ludicrously, the Western news media are amplifying this warning from the world’s biggest terrorist state as if it is a benign service to international public safety.
In this awful anniversary week of Hiroshima and Nagasaki it is rather astounding that the perpetrator of that genocide is still strutting the globe as if it is God almighty. On a global terrorist offender list, the United States is the paramount offender without compare.
In a saner world, the US should be a pariah state, shunned and sanctioned, its government leaders past and present locked away for life.
Perhaps, the world is finally beginning to wake up from the illusory spell that it has been kept under till now, to realize that humanity’s security is threatened not by states such as Iran or North Korea, but by the one whose president is a Nobel Peace laureate.
The US terror state slaps sanctions on Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Syria, Zimbabwe and others, causing women and children to die from medial and other basic deprivations. But what we should realize is that this is not depraved double standards or hypocrisy. No, such criminality is simply consistent with the actions of American state terrorism.
Iran does not have any nuclear weapons, yet it is being strangled with illegal trade sanctions by the world’s number-one nuclear terrorist – the US – and its rogue partners, Britain, France and Israel.
Today, there are some 17,000 total nuclear weapons in the world. About half of them are possessed by the US. The other major holder of such weapons is Russia.
In Russia’s defense, it would most likely not have this atomic stockpile if it were not for the fact that the US embarked on the Cold War with its act of genocide at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
Stalin knew that that act of terror by US President Truman was aimed at Moscow by way of demarcating the post-war lines of global hegemony. By 1948, the Soviet Union had acquired the A-bomb and the world was then well on the road to mutually assured destruction – in direct consequence of the US original act of nuclear terrorism on Japan.
Perhaps more frightening than the planet-destroying power of US-held nuclear weapons is the monstrous mentality of the American ruling class that wields them, including its mass media propaganda system.
In the same week that the world should be mourning the dead of Hiroshima,
Nagasaki and many other victims of US state terrorism, we are instead expected to pander to the “terror warnings” of American politicians and their media as if they should be taken seriously and virtuously.
These American leaders should be in prison, not promulgating to the rest of the world.
The truly appalling thing is that the world’s number-one terror state is still at large.
FC/KA
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/08/06/317493/us-the-real-global-terror-alert/
For sure there was alot going on during WW II that still is trickling out. European and Pacific theaters were both placing the world at war. My father who is 90 and fought WW II in the Pacific theater put it to me this way;
Many American soldiers were training on pacific islands for the invasion of Japan. Japanese were willing to fight to the death every man woman and child. Minimum estimated American casualties for the invasion of Japan was 250,000 and as high as 500,000. As my father described it every man preparing to invade Japan was thanking President Truman and God when the bomb was dropped. Till one has been in that situation with those odds against you it very hard to judge.
250,000 American men x an average of 3 children= 750,000 baby boomers. Many people nay-saying the bombs drop might not be here today had your father or relative been one of the estimated 250,000 casualties. Easy to judge if your weren’t there when the world was at war.
From that perspective, yes, I agree that it is understandable. My grandfather flew B-17 bombers in WWII against the Germans and he basically said the same thing in regards to the bombing of Japan and the war on the Pacific front. Things were tense back then just as they are becoming now. Of course back then, they didn’t have access to the up to date Internet and global communication network that we have now to know what was truly going on. So this time around, it will be our own ignorance if something illegal, immoral and inhumane happens on our watch, as we have the technological means and ability to educate ourselves and know better.
If the Japanese were willing to fight to the death, why had they been attempting to surrender since 1943? More to the point, with 67 of their cites incinerated, their army stranded in Manchuria, and complete U.S. maritime and air dominance, why was in invasion necessary? They could’ve been starved out in three weeks.
I don’t have to have been there because I’m not stupid. They didn’t have to bomb those cities and kill and maim those civilian men, women, and children. All they would have had to do was send a communique to the Japanese high command and tell them that we had developed a nuclear bomb and if they did not surrender we were going to drop it on one of their cities. They could have then been invited to observe the power of the weapon in blowing up a deserted island.
The bomb was dropped on those people for a study of the effects, both immediate and long term, on the population of a city. Once we had the bomb, nobody else had to die, not your grandpa and not those civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Don’t try to treat us here on From the Trenches as if we are stupid. You won’t like how it turns out.
What can I say. War is a dirty game and all warfare is based on deception, which is why we need to keep our heads up, pay attention, make right what is wrong and make sure incidents like Hiroshima and Nagasaki don’t happen again, especially on our watch.
80% of American soldiers were farm boys. 80% of roads in America were still dirt. Most didn’t have access to any form of communication. My father would walk 8 miles to an uncles house on Sunday to listen to the radio. I would agree with NC the American population is 90% more informed but 99% of Americans are weaker mentally so that places America in a very vulnerable position. Less than 1% of the population serves in the military. No I don’t agree with the all the Wars since WW II but I do have respect for people who raise their offspring with a well rounded education and strong backbone.
The fact that the good Americans back then were too ignorant to comprehend what was going on around them, does not change the fact of the matter.
My goal is not to diss on our grandfathers who were duped by the propaganda, I’m just saying nobody needed to die. And the monsters at the top and their lapdogs like Truman could not have cared less whether it was American, Japanese, Chinese, Australians, Germans, Canadians, or Russians that had to die to advance their agenda.
There is no honor in the past unless we correctly identify exactly what happened so that the blame for the deaths ends up on the shoulders of those deserving of it.
“There is no honor in the past unless we correctly identify exactly what happened so that the blame for the deaths ends up on the shoulders of those deserving of it.”
And that is exactly my point and what I agree with you on 100%.
So are we going back to the Post-9/11 color-coded “terror alert” levels? This is complete nonsense to distract from the Bradley Manning verdict and Edward Snowden’s asylum- a simple press release to SCARE everyone back into approving the Surveillance State. Read about the Orwellian Nightmare we’ve woken to at http://dregstudiosart.blogspot.com/2011/09/living-in-society-of-fear-ten-years.html
Hey bamalamadingdong, it is well documented that the Japanese were willing to unconditional surrender in April of 1945. The only sticking point was the Emperor, whom the Japanese people considered a deity. In the end, McCarther allowed the Emperor to retain a “figurehead” position. No, Truman wanted revenge for Pearl Harbor, which at this point it has been proven that FDR had advanced warning of and remained silent to drag us into the war but that’s a whole different debate. We also wanted to send a message to the Russians for post war negotiations. Boy, didn’t we use that trump card effectively by handing over Eastern Europe to the Russians. I also believe we wanted to light the big firecracker to see the explosion in a densely populated area. Even Eisenhower pleaded with Truman to not deploy these weapons.
Too right. If anyone ‘won’ WW2 it was the Soviets.