HIROSHIMA: A LOST MEMORY

HIROSHIMA:
A
LOST
MEMORY

an essay by Delmas Parker

Friends,

As I write this on the evening of August 6th, my thoughts are fixed on the events of
August 6th and 9th,1945, when for the first time in recorded history, nuclear bombs
were used and destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. We know more
people died in the fire-bombing of Tokyo than died in Hiroshima-but the the ruins
left in Tokyo did not emit radiation from which survivors continued to die for
decades. The danger of nuclear war today is that it poses the danger of suicide for
the human race. Would that our leadership today lead the way by beginning the
process of nuclear disarmament, unilaterally.The human race looking from all parts
of the earth would respect and celebrate such a decision.

I realize that few will agree with my arguments here, but this summarizes my
thoughts on a subject that is almost lost in the fog of memory although very
relevant today. A memory from long ago while still a young child.

It was very "discomforting" (such a "wrong word") to see it last night on the HBO
cable channel, to see the bombing, to see and hear the survivors, to try to
understand the pain (or, let's be honest, to be very grateful we couldn't understand
it) of the survivors who begged the doctors treating them to simply kill them, so
great was the pain.

As I write this, in my upstairs air conditoned room, here in a warmish Clemmons, NC,
late on August 6th, 2010, it is already a day later in Japan. Sixty four years ago,
I was nine years old, the people of Hiroshima, those who survived, were stunned and
in agony.Nagasaki, the old Christian center in Japan, still stood, three days would
pass before it, too, melted in an instant of fire.

That summer, on that hot day in August, I was attending a Baptist youth camp at my
church near Long Island on the Catawba River in Iredell County, North Carolina. We
heard Word of the bombing on the camp radio tuned to CBS on radio station WBT in
Charlotte and I knew about a weapon from an item that had been carried some time
earlier in the old "Ripley’s Believe It or Not", a popular journal years ago,
which had reported that,"believe it or not" a weapon is being devised, based on
uranium, that is so powerful than one pound of it would destroy an entire city. Wow
- straight from Captain Marvel or Space Cadet!

Let me pause for a moment to deal with why the bombs were used, since Americans have
been very reluctant to confront this- I never understand why as Americans we dismiss
the history which bothers us. Despite substantial evidence that the nuclear bombs
were not needed. This part of the blog is very controversial: we have been told by
some who write our history that the sad choice of nuclear bombs saved perhaps a
million lives - our own men and the Japanese who would have died in a final conflict
for Japan.Certainly the Japanese troops were absolutely fierce in battle. (I’d
recommend the remarkable film by Clint Eastwood - Letters From Iwo Jima - in which
the epic battle for that island is shot entirely from the Japanese point of view,
with English subtitles).

But other historical evidence suggest (most researchers in this field of study
confirm that the Japanese government was willing to negoiate surrender by 1945) that
Japan, allowing the Emperor to remain in power and he did, that the Japanese
government was willing to surrender and sending out peace feelers to the Allies.
But, at any rate, the world still owes a special debt to the Japanese peace movement
which has never let us forget,which has reached out, year after year, to remind us
of what nuclear weapons really mean and the human misery that they can inflict on
innocent peoples.. While US political leaders - in collaboration with the worst part
of the Japanese political establishment - has pressed Japan to end the "Article
Nine" of its constitution,which forbids Japan from making war. The Japanese people
have seen the horrific effects of war-much the same way a defeated South in this
country viewed war in the aftermath of the Civil War- and they are having none of
it. I sometimes think the reason that we view war so lightly is that we’ve never
seen ,save the Civil War ,widespread destruction across our nation. It astonishes me
that my friends in the progressive movement embrace presidential candidates who
without thinking indorse the use of nuclear weapons against other peoples, or that
some embrace the absolute militarization of our society( to me the greatest danger
along with global weather change)-ROTC in high schools, military industrial
contracts in every congressional district, military grants to institutions of higher
learning.

We have seen other nations acquire these weapons - Russia, France, Britain,
China,Israel, India, Pakistan, South Africa (briefly - the only nation thus far to
test a nuclear weapon and then discard the program) - and still other nations(Iran
,N. Korea) hunger for them.

But the non-nuclear wars we have seen since 1945 - particularly the war in Indo
China in which over three million people lost their lives in Vietnam alone, or the
current US and British occupation of Iraq which has destroyed a nation - remind us
of the fact that even the most "conventional" wars can destroy nations. And, we are
the world’s leading exporters of convention weapons-yes, weapons used to inflict
such suffering in Darfur.

The danger is always there that nuclear powers will be tempted, in a time of
tension, to attempt a first strike (are there any among us who have not seen Dr.
Strangelove?). The lesson from the ruins of those two cities destroyed in the middle
of the last century is not that nuclear weapons must be banned (though indeed they
should be!) but that it is war as an institution which must be dismantled, and
alternative means found to resolve the deepest conflicts between nations. Until that
lesson is learned, the terrible pain of those days in a distant August will lack
meaning. For those of us who call ourselves Christians and who value the Gospels,
the way is clear: we must solve our conflicts through non-violent means.

Where do we go now? I don't know. I realize for those my age the world is viewed
differently from those of subsequent generations.But I know that we all share the
blame, and that I wish the peace groups (truly, a tiny fringe group now)would have
some informal off-the-record caucus to take up this question. This used to happen as
a matter of course. I don't think (let's hope I'm just out of touch and am wrong) we
have done it lately.

Delmas