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In reply to the discussion: Hiroshima - quit lying to yourselves [View all]freshwest
(53,661 posts)I didn't really grasp what he was saying, it all seemed like a movie, so far removed from my reality. After all, I was in my single digits and that was all I knew.
He finished with telling me how they finally made their way through China, with their road building equipment as the Japanese were forced to retreat.
He described having to bulldoze corpses piled 30 or 40 feet high and bury them in mass graves. It was not out of disrespect, but in that apocalyptic scene, the victims were reduced to nothing more than noisome flesh, the story of their lives and their humanity long gone.
None of that assauged my feelings of horror and guilt over the bombings, as we were regularly shown these on the dates that commemorated these events on PBS. Then one year, watching Bill Moyers with his guest that year, I was shocked out of the familiar self-flagellation ritual.
Because he was interviewing a Japanese general (admiral, whatever) that day. It was apparent Moyers was shocked by his response. Recent news stories of some of these old guys supporting the practice of rape to keep up troop morale, had to have come from this guy's generation that were in charge of things in Japan.
Moyers went into the familiar questions. Then he asked the man if he held the nuclear bombing against the American government, did he see it as a crime against humanity...
It was the elderly man's matter-of-fact answer that chilled me to the bone, and why I never forgot that program:
'If we had gotten the atomic bomb first, we surely would have used it on you.'
That threw Moyers and he had difficulty grasping it, or so I remember it. And me, having been told for years Japan was the victim in that case. But it was about their leaders at the time, not their women and children, and they didn't think the death of their people was too much to pay.
I couldn't imagine that kind of thinking process, but it was a race to destruction, who would get the atomic bomb first, just as history had said it was. WW2 amounted to the death of millions. We have the luxury of not being forced to live that reality, in those days. I think the jubiliation of the end of the war was not about victory as much as the joy of returning to peace.
It is tragic that from that desire for peace or fear of war, that we have built an establishment that feeds on war. But I am seeing the demise of that from my view, and we can aim our energies elsewhere.
Those of us with the luxury of sitting safely being behind keyboards in the world largely built by that generation, and making lofty moral statments about times they have not lived in, are indulging themselves with a flawed sense of reasoning.
These were realities most of us never had to face. May it never come again.