Hiroshima

As another anniversary of the American bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki comes and goes, I have no wish to lend my voice to the still raging argument as to whether the dropping of those nuclear devices shortened the war, saved American lives or was merely a heinous calculated ploy—the first gambit in the Cold War of Mutually Assured Destruction. I am writing here only to testify to the futility of war itself. Everyone speaks of the Last Good War. Even many of those who opposed our recent wars of choice and folly in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, reluctantly admit that WWII was justified. And yet wasn't it that same war that quantitatively and qualitatively increased man's indifference to man beyond all previous expectations? The quality of this indifference found evidence most notably in the Holocaust, the fire bombing of Dresden and that abandonment of all humanitarian restraints: the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When will mankind come to realize that war always and ultimately results in the abandonment of our humanity and our very reason?

Robert Fisk is the Middle East correspondent of The Independent. He has reported on nearly every war in the Middle East for the past 30 years, including the combat zones in the United States' wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He holds more British and International Journalism awards than any other foreign correspondent. Robert Fisk is a man whose knowledge of war is extensive and intimate. I cannot imagine a more eloquent anti-war statement than this:

"If you go to war, you realize it is not primarily about victory or defeat, it is about death and the infliction of death and suffering on as large a scale as you can make it. It is about the total failure of the human spirit. We don't show that because we don't want to. And in this sense journalists, television reporting, television cameras are lethal. They collude with governments to allow to you have more wars because if they showed you the truth, you wouldn't allow any more wars."

Even more particular to the anniversary at hand:

In the introduction to his book "Science and Human Values," scientist, philosopher, poet, historian, and Blake scholar, Jacob Bronowski wrote:

On a fine November day in 1945, late in the afternoon, I was landed on an airstrip in Southern Japan. From there a jeep was to take me over the mountains to join a ship which lay in Nagasaki Harbour. I knew nothing of the country or the distance before us. We drove off; dusk fell; the road rose and fell away, the pine woods came down to the road, straggled on and opened again. I did not know that we had left the open country until unexpectedly I heard the ship's loudspeakers broadcasting dance music.

Then suddenly I was aware that we were already at the centre of damage in Nagasaki. The shadows behind me were the skeletons of the Mitsubishi factory building, pushed backwards and sideways as if by a giant hand. What I had thought to be broken rocks was a concrete power house with its roof punched in. I could make out the outline of two crumpled gasometers; there was a cold furnace festooned with service pipes; otherwise nothing but cockeyed telegraph poles and loops of wire in a bare waste of ashes. I had blundered into this desolate landscape as instantly as one might wake among the mountains of the moon.

The moment of recognition when I realized that I was already in Nagasaki is present to me as I write, as vividly as when I lived it. I see the warm night and the meaningless shapes; I can even remember the tune that was coming from the ship. It was a dance tune, which had been popular in 1945, and it was called "Is You Is Or Is You Ain't Ma Baby?" This dissertation was born at that moment, for the moment I recall was a universal moment. What I met was almost as abruptly was the experience of mankind. On an evening sometime in 1945 each of us in his own way learned that his imagination had been dwarfed. We looked up and saw the power of which we had been proud loom over us like the ruins of Nagasaki. The power of science for good and for evil has troubled other minds than ours we are not here fumbling with a new dilemma. Our subject and our fears are as old as the tool making civilization. Nothing happened except that we changed the scale of our interference to man and conscience for an instant became immediate to us. Let us acknowledge our subject for what it is: Civilization face to face with its own implications The implications are both the industrial slum that Nagasaki was before it was bombed and the ashy desolation which the bomb made of the slum. And civilization asks of both ruins, "Is you is or is you ain't my baby?"

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