On today's date, August 6th, in 1945, the United States of America bombed Hiroshima. On August 9, 1945, the United States bombed Nagasaki. Each one of these Japanese cities was virtually obliterated by a single atomic bomb.
The scale of the devastation and destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was beyond imagining. If you need to refresh your recollection, you can read this relatively brief report from the Mises Institute, "The Bombing of Hiroshima: The Crime and the Cover-Up."
That phrase I just used - "refresh your recollection" - is something that an attorney might have occasion to say in court. Attorneys often use that phrase in the course of a criminal trial, as the attorney seeks to make a witness recall, and then report on, what the witness would like to forget - something that the witness says that the witness doesn't remember.
To make a witness remember, an attorney might be allowed to show the witness a picture, and then say, "does that refresh your recollection?" For anyone who wasn't already thinking, today, about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, please take a look at that picture above. Does that refresh your recollection?
I hope so. Let us not - let us never - forget about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And let us hope that other nations won't forget them, either! Plenty of commentaries in the recent press suggest that there are people who are seriously contemplating using nuclear weapons today - in Gaza, or in Israel, or in Iran, or in Ukraine, or somewhere else. That is a world-ending idea. Let us not forget about Hiroshima and Nagasaki! We can't say we don't know! We can't claim not to remember!
oooOOOooo
The headline to my blog posting today, in fact, was not really intened to refer to the use of atomic weapons - although those weapons can certainly also be called, "America's Monster."
I typed in my title first, and then only began today's blog posting with a reminder about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki when I saw the date that this blog posting would be published. I am writing this blog posting on May 23rd, so I am quite a bit ahead of myself. The headline to my blog posting most directly refers to a New York Times article published on Thursday, May 23, 2024. The headline on that article was the headline I am using for today's blog posting: "America's Monster."
That, above, is a picture of Abdul Raziq Achakzai. He is the "Monster" referred to in The Times' headline. That is the person whom The Times calls America's monster!
The Times' article is long, and if The Times' paywall policies will allow you to do so, I recommend that you read it - read it to the end, as I did. Here is how The Times' article begins:
The convoy rumbled into the Taliban heartland, a white desert littered with stones. Over the loudspeakers at the local mosque, the Afghan police officers ordered everyone to gather: The commander was here.
Dozens assembled in the mud square to listen as Abdul Raziq, one of America’s most important partners in the war against the Taliban, stood before the crowd, gesturing at two prisoners he had brought along to make his point.
The prisoners knelt with their hands bound as Raziq spoke to his men. A pair of his officers raised their rifles and opened fire, sending the prisoners into spasms on the reddening earth. In the silence that followed, Raziq addressed the crowd, three witnesses said.
“You will learn to respect me and reject the Taliban,” Raziq said after the killings, which took place in the winter of 2010, according to the witnesses and relatives of both men. “Because I will come back and do this again and again, and no one is going to stop me.”
For years, American military leaders lionized Raziq as a model partner in Afghanistan, their “if only” ally in the battle against the Taliban: If only everyone fought like Raziq, we might actually win this war, American commanders often said.
After reading the article in The Times, I decided to say this to those who will be reading this blog posting: A nation that employs "monsters," whether human representatives or manufactured weapons of mass destruction, deserves to be defeated, and to be rejected by the world. The United States must do better. It must do something new.
I do not think that I am alone in worrying greatly about what is coming - to the United States and to the whole world. Global warming is an existential threat. It's coming. In fact, it is here right now. New technologies seem to be bringing existential dangers, too. And wars, and rumors of wars, are plunging the world into crisis after crisis. We have gone far beyond the "rumor" stage, of course, in so many places, but we are still imaging that there are more conflicts to come, and are building the military might to engage and "win."
That strategy is a failure. Everyone knows that we will either succeed in making major changes in what we are doing, or it will be "game over." Sooner or later it will be "game over," and we know it! We don't want to admit it, but we know that we need to do something different, something completely new (politically, socially, economically), or the world in which we live today will be destroyed. Pictures of tornado damage in Iowa, also in the May 23, 2024, New York Times is a visual metaphor for what we know is coming.
The United States has asserted its world leadership, but that leadership, in the end, has been premised on our nation's military might.
It is time to change our efforts. Rather than building our capacity to engage in military destruction, as a way to bring "world peace," we must actually bring peace itself. To say we want peace, using monstrous men and monstrous weapons to attain it, is more than merely misguided. It is wrong. It doesn't work, and it won't work. Real change is what we, and the whole world, needs.
We, our nation - and each one of us, individually - can change. The question is "will we?"
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