The lies of Hiroshima live on, props in the war crimes of the 20th century

John Pilger
London Guardian
Saturday, Aug 9, 2008

When I first went to Hiroshima in 1967, the shadow on the steps was still there. It was an almost perfect impression of a human being at ease: legs splayed, back bent, one hand by her side as she sat waiting for a bank to open. At a quarter past eight on the morning of August 6, 1945, she and her silhouette were burned into the granite. I stared at the shadow for an hour or more, then walked down to the river and met a man called Yukio, whose chest was still etched with the pattern of the shirt he was wearing when the atomic bomb was dropped.

He and his family still lived in a shack thrown up in the dust of an atomic desert. He described a huge flash over the city, “a bluish light, something like an electrical short”, after which wind blew like a tornado and black rain fell. “I was thrown on the ground and noticed only the stalks of my flowers were left. Everything was still and quiet, and when I got up, there were people naked, not saying anything. Some of them had no skin or hair. I was certain I was dead.” Nine years later, when I returned to look for him, he was dead from leukaemia.

In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb’s blast. It was the first big lie. “No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin” said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. “I write this as a warning to the world,” reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called “an atomic plague”. For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared – and vindicated.

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The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate “good war”, whose “ethical bath”, as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.

The most enduring lie is that the atomic bomb was dropped to end the war in the Pacific and save lives. “Even without the atomic bombing attacks,” concluded the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, “air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion. Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that … Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”

The National Archives in Washington contain US government documents that chart Japanese peace overtures as early as 1943. None was pursued. A cable sent on May 5, 1945 by the German ambassador in Tokyo and intercepted by the US dispels any doubt that the Japanese were desperate to sue for peace, including “capitulation even if the terms were hard”. Instead, the US secretary of war, Henry Stimson, told President Truman he was “fearful” that the US air force would have Japan so “bombed out” that the new weapon would not be able “to show its strength”. He later admitted that “no effort was made, and none was seriously considered, to achieve surrender merely in order not to have to use the bomb”. His foreign policy colleagues were eager “to browbeat the Russians with the bomb held rather ostentatiously on our hip”. General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project that made the bomb, testified: “There was never any illusion on my part that Russia was our enemy, and that the project was conducted on that basis.” The day after Hiroshima was obliterated, President Truman voiced his satisfaction with the “overwhelming success” of “the experiment”.

Full article here

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7 Responses to “The lies of Hiroshima live on, props in the war crimes of the 20th century”

1. Nick Barry Says:
   August 10th, 2008 at 4:43 am

   I have often wondered why they bombed those people two times and were willing to have all of those innocent men women and children on their souls. An experiment! Wow! Why would they not stop after the first experiment? This article is very interesting and would say that anyone reading it would want to dig deeper to get more strange facts because that was a horrible thing to have taken place one country against another. It is so sad to listen to the survivors tell what they saw. I don’t believe we are actually animals as animals would not do this to each other.
   Canada.

2. maninwarren Says:
   August 10th, 2008 at 8:05 am

   Powerful article. Does a lot to dispel the myth that the bombs prevented the loss of thousands of Americans.

   Which, it seems clear, is a good thing: America’s myths about itself and the rest of the world are, more than any other single factor, the greatest threat to its survival. At least, it survival as a republic.

3. dirtbag Says:
   August 10th, 2008 at 3:51 pm

   Definately war crimes, mostly all victims were women and children as all the men were off at war. Largest single acts of terrorism in human history by definition. The way this is justified to children in schools since then is laughable, I would suggest equal to soviet era propaganda.

4. Alabaster Says:
   August 10th, 2008 at 10:11 pm

   The Japanese were not about to give up. You should all read more about the very terrible and horrifying tactics of the Japanese back in that time. They deserved it. Sometimes it takes a sledgehammer to drive a thumbtack just to make a point.

5. tom Says:
   August 10th, 2008 at 10:18 pm

   I watched a special on HBO this week on this. Got a bad feeling in my stomach from it

6. redoctoberbaby Says:
   August 11th, 2008 at 11:06 am

   ALABASTER:
   No one “deserves” this.
   You are a mindless twit who obviously laps up the drivel of the zionist MSM.
   Are you a butt wipe for the NWO to say such a thing?
   If you are, change your name to A la Bastard.

7. Barbara Aho Says:
   August 11th, 2008 at 1:17 pm

   The Truth Shall Set You Free. Stop being a slave to the “controlled” opposition. Type the names of some of Alexs’ “guests” into the seach engine at http://www.watch.pair.com and LEARN FOR YOURSELF. Stop being spoonfed 1/2 truths. A war is coming and it will be blamed on YOU…not the NWO. Alex is nothing more that a glorified pin setter…and YOU are the pins.