The indefensible Hiroshima revisionism that haunts America to this day - Salon.com
The indefensible Hiroshima revisionism
that haunts America to this day
Christian Appy, TomDispatch.com
Here
we are, 70 years after the nuclear obliteration of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, and I’m wondering if we’ve come even one step closer to a
moral reckoning with our status as the world’s only country to use
atomic weapons to slaughter human beings. Will an American president
ever offer a formal apology? Will our country ever regret the dropping
of “Little Boy” and “Fat Man,” those two bombs that burned hotter than
the sun? Will it absorb the way they instantly vaporized thousands of
victims, incinerated tens of thousands more, and created unimaginably
powerful shockwaves and firestorms that ravaged everything for miles
beyond ground zero? Will it finally come to grips with the “black rain”
that spread radiation and killed even more people — slowly and painfully
— leading in the end to a death toll for the two cities conservatively estimated at more than 250,000?
Given the last seven decades of perpetual militarization and nuclear “modernization”
in this country, the answer may seem like an obvious no. Still, as a
historian, I’ve been trying to dig a little deeper into our lack of
national contrition. As I have, an odd fragment of Americana kept coming
to mind, a line from the popular 1970 tearjerker Love Story:
“Love,” says the female lead when her boyfriend begins to apologize,
“means never having to say you’re sorry.” It has to be one of the
dumbest definitions ever to lodge in American memory, since real love
often requires the strength to apologize and make amends.
