bare yellow bulb, vol 1 it's weird to me that hiroshima & nagasaki & auschwitz & nuremburg are all the same war. the former seem somehow modern while the latter seem ancient.
unless you've been living under a rock or something, you know that japan's in a bit of a bad way just now. a 9.0 earthquake and the ensuing tsunami wreaked devastation up and down the li'l isle, including some fairly frightening damage to a couple nuclear facilities which are now leaking radiation or radioactive material or somesuch toxicity. so the folk there in japan are battling a nuclear disaster again. again, you say? yes, again, you dolt. ever heard of ww2? hiroshima? nagasaki? eh? what? now, today, squads and fleets and troops of usa soldiers are in japan providing relief in the face of the current crisis, relief in the form of medical assistance, food and clean water distribution, rescue and rebuilding efforts. compare and contrast the current usa relief efforts with the bombing of hiroshima and nagasaki. 500-750 words.
posted by ace @ 20:42
7 comments
7 Comments:
“I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary…it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing!”
You go Ike with giving a piece of your mind to cranky old Secretary of War Stimson! Stimson had a serious macho war-mongering wedge up his ass, and like any good chest-beating blowhard American Military Man, Stimson totally saw the utter logic of bombing a desperate and already-trounced enemy to smithereens. Why? Because they wouldn’t surrender. The nerve! Grandly estimating that continuing the fight would cost another million or more lives, Stimson said okey dokey to Fat Man and Little Boy. Because, you know, there would be no other possible way in the militaristic universe to beat the Japanese other than reducing thousands of innocent civilians to little puffs of black ash in the outlines of their final repose and flattening entire cities to dust and mud.
“The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude...”
Well, duh, Dwight. No Secretary of War likes having his knuckles rapped by the president. Hello. Still, there is an on-again/off-again consensus, even 66 years later, that you were a freak of oddly peaceful, yet argumentative, nature and that everyone else was entirely “YOU GO!” about cranking out the nuclear bombs. You were a lone toothless shark. A cream puff of spineless buffoonery among real men. Right? Right??
“The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”
OMG! Your own Chief of Staff, and a Fleet Admiral to boot, said this? Well, my word.
“The use of the atomic bomb, with its indiscriminate killing of women and children, revolts my soul…Use of the bomb has besmirched America's reputation.”
MacArthur?! Oh, now you’re just making things up. Seriously? Wow.
How about the souls of the American people? Were they revolted too? I mean, the mental image of VJ Day is a an assload of confetti and a soldier bending that poor chick’s spine in half in order to kiss her. Didn’t we feel guilty? Or wrong? Well, the Japanese were relentlessly vicious and brutal during WWII. Or, rather, their military was. But to Americans, all Japanese people were Yamamoto, Pearl Harbor, and kamikaze pilots. And, in turn, to the Japanese, all Americans were a pile of bomb-wielding Stimsons. At least for a while. It’s complicated.
So, two to three generations later we find ourselves rushing to Japan’s aid following “the worst crisis since the end of World War Two.” In the wake of a tsunami that flattened entire towns, leaving nothing but mud and dust in its path, we offer food, water, and medicine. As nuclear disaster threatens to add fallout to injury, we offer advice, help, and sympathy.
Is that irony? No. In the wake of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, we did the exact same things. As it turns out, Dwight and old corn cob pipe face MacArthur were not alone. Plenty of Americans could not justify such Dark-Aged brutality. And as time went on, it became less and less justifiable. Today, we look at films and pictures of the total destruction wreaked upon innocent people by our country’s use, the world’s only use ever, of nuclear warfare, and we justifiably think, “What the fuck?”
And so we go to Japan to help. Not because we feel guilty or obligated, but because it’s what we should do. We’re not bomb freaks and kamikazes, we’re human. In many ways the destruction looks eerily similar to that of 1945. At least we didn’t cause it this time. That’s not irony, but it may be progress.
that's some good stuff right there, miss tonay. you are quite the writer. you should get a blog or something.
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try not to make my worlds collide there, k?
Sorry, Ace.
As I was saying, I can't resist a compare/contrast essay challenge. Or something like that. Now I can't remember what I said.
*sigh*
i would apologize, but my marked lack of regret (quite unlike the apologetically nuking marauders of the past) renders my apology disingenuously moot.
but please don't let any of this detract from the brilliance of your essay.
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