By Avi Landau August 6th. The date that will truly “live on in infamy” – despite President Roosevelt’s insisting on that being the destiny of …
Showings of the Hiroshima “Atomic Bomb Testimony Paintings” – A Collaboration Between Aging HIBAKUSHA Survivors and Local High School Students – Held…
This heartbreaking blog post doesn’t need my words mucking it up. All I will add is my grandfather’s words which he told me when were visiting a memorial for the victims of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. He said that the atomic weapons were necessary to end the war because it was estimated a million more allied soldiers would have died invading Japan. I could understand his reasoning because I already knew my own biological grandfather had died retaking a small island in New Guinea and my grandfathers best friend had died in Northern Africa and my grandfather had almost died many times in his own combat missions. Now my grandfather is gone though as is his brother who was also in The Pacific Theater on a Battleship. I respect their trauma and I fully absorb the trauma of Aging Hibakusha survivors of WWII. That little boy and his peach will never leave my memory either nor will the dates of Aug 6th and 9th.
I will add that my grandfather believed in his bones that all war was Hell unleashed on Earth. He could not watch fireworks or Saving Private Ryan or Pearl Harbor without suffering a panic attack, all he saw was flack metal. His wounds never fully healed. War wounds are too egregious to heal.
The same goes for atomic weapons. Leaders today are too naive about armaments and nuclear power, so are their supporters. We go to gun range and think we could handle watching our friend lose their face to shrapnel or our family to radiation contamination.
The military industrial complex is real too. My grandfather often complained about this. He hated war and yet he saw these merchants of death constantly beckoning us forward onto an endless battlefield. His response was I will never fight in another war again, and he didn’t want his grandchildren to fight either.
Everyone must make their own decisions though. However civilians are a different matter entirely. The only decision when it comes to civilians is “thou shall not kill”. This blog post reminds us that war is continuing murder of innocents. War unwinds Natural Selection’s ability to create life, and disintegrates our common humanity.
War is engine of death, disease , and disaster that we all must dismantle except in the instances where it’s the only way to avoid the extinction of our civilization. There is a difference, there is always a distinction towards peace that should be made.