Happy Hiroshima Day

Thanks Enola Gay!

Comments

6th-Aug-2010 08:17 pm (local) ravenclaw_eric
Someone, on this day several years ago, was trying to guilt me out about Hiroshima. Bad idea. Considering that I'm a China maven, and know a lot about what the Japanese did there, and elsewhere in their conquests (some of what they did would have got the perps a bullet behind the ear from the Third Reich!) I am...less than sympathetic to the Japanese.

Also, I do want to know why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were Ultimate Horrors Beyond Imagining, while the firestorms that consumed large sections of Tokyo, Kobe and other cities were just business-as-usual? Are people deader when they die from an A-bomb?

6th-Aug-2010 11:21 pm (local) - The deeds of the dead move through angles in dim recesses of time. They are hungry and athirst! fuzzy_geff
My model for the belief you mention is inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft: humans cling to certain comforting illusions, and can be driven mad by exposure to certain unpleasant truths. Hiroshima and Nagasaki prove, beyond the awesome power of denial, that any city (yes, even your beloved home town) can be destroyed without such traditional warnings as an enemy army having seized control of large swaths of nearby land.

After Hiroshima, everybody knows, no matter how hard they try not to, that an enemy base within nuclear weapon range means that they could be killed today. Everybody on their block could be killed today. Everybody they meet in a typical week could be killed today. No matter how badass their military might be, The Bomb could be inbound right now. If it is, that's it; Game Over, man. Game Over.

A few years later, we add to that the equally undeniable reality of ICBMs and submarine-launched missiles, and everybody has to know that there is nowhere they can go to be out of range.

I submit that nuclear weapons killed the belief that violent death is something that can only happen to other people, and that that fact is what makes them literally Horrors Beyond Imagining for so many.


7th-Aug-2010 01:46 am (local) - Re: The deeds of the dead move through angles in dim recesses of time. They are hungry and athirst! ravenclaw_eric

It might also be that, after 1945, the likeliest targets for those bombs (in the hands of the US and its allies) were the USSR and the "People's" "Republic" of "China"---and too many of the bien-pensants were unable to completely give up the girlie-crushes they'd had in the 1930s on "the future that worked." They thought that even though there had been mistakes and excesses, the Communists' hearts were in the right place, as the Fascists' had never been, and just couldn't bear the thought of nuking them.