Pilger: ‘The lies of Hiroshima live on’

There’s a challenging reflection by John Pilger in today’s Guardian on the USA’s murder of Japanese people in 1945:

‘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 … Catching war criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer’.

The full article is re-posted at Civicus.

A book commendation: Some years ago now, I read the inspiring biography of Takashi Nagai, a Japanese victim of terminal radiation disease, a peace activist, a physician, and a convert to Christianity. The book, A Song for Nagasaki, recounts the horrors of atomic devastation, the ironies of the bomb’s dropping on one of Japan’s few Christian communities, Nagai’s struggle to find meaning in suffering, and the power of the word of forgiveness and reconcilation. The book is written by Paul Glynn, an Australian Marist Brother who served over 20 years in Japan.