The Lies Of Hiroshima Are The Lies Of Today
By John Pilger
06/08/08 "ICH"
-- - On the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on
Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, John Pilger describes the
'progression of lies' from the dust of that detonated city, to
the wars of today - and the threatened attack on Iran.
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 hand by her side as
she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on
the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were
burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or
more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio,
whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he
was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.
He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust
of an atomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, "a
bluish light, something like an electrical short", after which
wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. "I was thrown on
the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left.
Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were
people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or
hair. I was certain I was dead." Nine years later, when I
returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.
In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation
authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and
insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the
bomb's blast. It was the first big lie. "No radioactivity in
Hiroshima ruin" said the front page of the New York Times, a
classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the
Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of
the century. "I write this as a warning to the world," reported
Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a
perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described
hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but
who were dying from what he called "an atomic plague". For
telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he
was pilloried and smeared - and vindicated.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act
on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed
a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its
apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate
"good war", whose "ethical bath", as Richard Drayton called it,
has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial
past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath
the shadow of The Bomb.
The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end
the war in the Pacific and save lives. "Even without the atomic
bombing attacks," concluded the United States Strategic Bombing
Survey of 1946, "air supremacy over Japan could have exerted
sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and
obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation
of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the
surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion
that ... Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs
had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and
even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."
The National Archives in Washington contain US government
documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943.
None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German
ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt
that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including
"capitulation even if the terms were hard". Instead, the US
secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was
"fearful" that the US air force would have Japan so "bombed out"
that the new weapon would not be able "to show its strength". He
later admitted that "no effort was made, and none was seriously
considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to
use the bomb". His foreign policy colleagues were eager "to
browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously
on our hip". General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan
Project that made the bomb, testified: "There was never any
illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the
project was conducted on that basis." The day after Hiroshima
was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with
the "overwhelming success" of "the experiment".
Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the
brink of using nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging
their bogus "war on terror", the present governments in
Washington and London have declared they are prepared to make
"pre-emptive" nuclear strikes against non-nuclear states. With
each stroke toward the midnight of a nuclear Armageddon, the
lies of justification grow more outrageous. Iran is the current
"threat". But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation
that it is planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a
discredited CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK -
just as the lies about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction originated with the Iraqi National Congress, set up
by Washington.
The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is
critical. That America's Defence Intelligence Estimate says
"with high confidence" that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons
programme in 2003 has been consigned to the memory hole. That
Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never threatened to "wipe
Israel off the map" is of no interest. But such has been the
mantra of this media "fact" that in his recent, obsequious
performance before the Israeli parliament, Gordon Brown alluded
to it as he threatened Iran, yet again.
This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most
dangerous nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat
remains almost unmentionable in western establishment circles
and therefore in the media. There is only one rampant nuclear
power in the Middle East and that is Israel. The heroic
Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in 1986 when he
smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as 200
nuclear warheads. In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today
clearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new American
administration might, just might, conduct genuine negotiations
with a nation the west has defiled since Britain and America
overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953.
In the New York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny
Morris, once considered a liberal and now a consultant to his
country's political and military establishment, threatened "an
Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland". This would be mass
murder. For a Jew, the irony cries out.
The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders,
claiming, as good Germans did, that "we did not know"? Do we
hide ever more behind what Richard Falk has called "a
self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive
images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened,
validating a campaign of unrestricted violence"? Catching war
criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands in the
dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not? The
memory of Hiroshima requires an answer.
www.johnpilger.com
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