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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 25 Aug 2010 12:04 am |
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I was looking at the forecast for Tokyo yesterday and it said something like "Thunder. 28-34 degrees." Today it says "Thunder. 27-34 degrees". What on earth made me think I could go there in summer? I must have been crazy.
"Where do the Japanese go to escape such weather?" one asks oneself, and the obvious answer is: if this is 1931, they go to Manchuria.
They go to Manchuria, thereby starting a process which leads to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not that anyone in Japan has ever made any connection between those two events, 14 years apart.
Last month the 65th anniversary of the Hiroshima blast was commemorated in that city. The mayor, a man named Tadatoshi Akiba, said that the message to be drawn from the terrible events of August 1945 was that nuclear weapons must be abolished. "Clearly, the urgency of nuclear weapons abolition is permeating our global conscience," he is reported to have said.
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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Posted: 25 Aug 2010 12:09 am |
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Words cannot express the disgust and contempt I feel for people like Tadatoshi Akiba, who discuss the Hiroshima blast as if it was an obscenity unconnected to anything which preceded it. In the 14 years leading up to Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Japanese government and military - actively encouraged by the emperor and warmly supported by the vast majority of the Japanese people - committed murder millions of times over. The number of deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is trivial - miniscule - by comparison.
Yes, those deaths were tragic.
Yes, nuclear weapons should be abolished (although I doubt whether Israel would agree, since its nuclear arsenal is the only thing standing between it and annihilation).
Yes, it was one of the great tragedies of the 20th century that nuclear weapons were ever used, especially on civilian targets.
But the fact remains that the people of Japan were responsible for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as surely as if they had detonated the weapons involved themselves.
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 25 Aug 2010 12:12 am |
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This is not something which you will ever hear said in Japan.
It is in fact something which I suspect very few Japanese are capable of beginning to understand (which is why, incidentally, the progressive rearmament of Japan is something which is a proper matter of concern for us all).
In the 14 years leading to Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Japanese people lacked the moral courage to resist militarism to the smallest degree.
Where were the Japanese resisters, like Sophie Scholl and the other members of the White Rose in Germany?
Where were their Stauffenbergs, Rommels and others who opposed the Nazi regime?
Despite their fanatical physical courage during the War years, the Japanese at all times lacked moral courage. It is for this reason that the world needs to look to China, not Japan, for leadership in the Third Millenium.
The Japanese simply do not have what it takes to lead anyone, including themselves.
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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 31 Dec 1969 |
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| Posts: | 1127 |
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Posted: 2 Sep 2010 10:04 pm |
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What prompted this thread, as I have noted above, was the fact that the Mayor of Hiroshima, in reminding the world about the obscenity of nuclear weapons, said nothing about the reasons for their use in 1945. The fact that the number of deaths caused by Japanese militarism was a thousand or more times greater than those caused by the two bombs which abruptly brought a halt to it was never mentioned, and will always go unsaid in Japan, the land of lies.
Now, in Anthony Beevor's D-Day [2009] I find this, referring to events in August 1944:
"[Field Marshal] Kluge accepted his fate with dignity...He finally argued, like Rommel before him, that with little chance of victory the war should be ended: 'The German people have borne such untold suffering that it is time to put an end to this frightfulness.' Although Kluge had finally come to see the terrible folly of this vast conflict, there was still no thought of the suffering they had caused by their invasions. That consideration simply did not register in the German army Weltanschauung, with its fundamental confusion of cause and effect."
But at least there were some Germans who resisted. I'd like to believe I would have had the courage to do so, but I doubt it.
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