Monday, August 6, 2018

Hiroshima and Nagasaki 2018















Image from the Hiroshima series, created by Jacob Lawrence.

Each year on August 6 and August 9, I continue to wonder more deeply why Nazi Germany is held up as the epitome of human cruelty, when the U.S. government perpetrated the atrocity of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, incinerating far more innocent people in two days than the Nazis could in any two-day period and when U.S. history demonstrates centuries of institutionalized human cruelty.   Jacob Lawrence's image of Hiroshima could just as easily be that of people dying in a gas chamber or of any group of people who has suffered under the centuries of policies of the U.S. government, about which there has been such denial and continues to be under the current president and those who voted for him to support their own denial.  

There is so much about which could be said, "Never again."

3 comments:

ellen abbott said...

right?! the US is so adamant about other countries not having nuclear weapons but we are the only ones who have ever used them. of course others want them as a deterrent to us using them again. and we committed genocide as we moved across this continent, maybe not as efficiently as Nazi Germany, but we wiped out whole tribes of people. not to mention our general warmongering throughout our history. it's all about spin and who wins.

Sabine said...

It is a difficult question, others have included in this equation civilian victims in Vietnam and Laos, the Soviet Gulags, the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia, the Balkan massacres such as Srebrenica and . . . well you get the picture.
There is no such thing as an *equation* at all.
Your commemoration of the victims is what matters.

37paddington said...

Thank you for this insightful post. America does not take responsibility for the suffering it has caused, and causes still. I believe we are a very young soul country, with callow self-absorption of youth.