Bucharest Diary

Saturday, August 06, 2005

60 years ago, Hiroshima

Funny watching anglo-saxon news (I tried BBC and CNN) on Hiroshima, at the 60 year commemoration. There is no talk about the destruction or about the victims.
After 60 years it's still victors speaking like victors. Like the war never ended. It's still us against them, or self justifying and self congratulatory speech.

Here are the main topics:
1) Did Japan recognised its culpability for the war in Asia? (their answer is no, of course). BBC weighs the more profound care and acknowledgement of war crimes by the germans compared to the japanese.
2) Old justifications: The japanese were punished because they were so mean/ it ended the war/ they started it.
3)" We told them we make them pay for Pearl Harbour and we did!" (that's CNN, of course)

Nothing on how the japanese are commemorating the day (no image from Japan at all), or on the crime of bombing civilians like that.
No talk on proliferation helped by a US administration that threatens to "nuke" other countries, or on China's recent threat to use the bomb against the US. Nothing on North Koreea.

No word on how likely we are to keep our promise to never do it again.

(P.S. Today I saw images from Japan on BBC. The coverage is still focused on Japan's past sins).

1 Comments:

At 06 August, 2005 14:42, Blogger Lew Scannon said...

Japan was planning to surrender at the time the nukes were dropped, Truman wanted to kick start the Cold War with Russia by letting them know we had the bomb.
A scary thought than China is the fact that Vice President Dick Cheney had STRATCOM draw up plans to nuke Iran if there is another terrorist attck in the US, even if Iran had no part in it.

 

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