Well worth remembering. Hiroshima. August 6th, 1945. The USA becomes the first (& still only) country to use a nuclear weapon against a civilian populace (it’s not like you can choose who you vaporize with these things). This very important short book (98 pages) was penned by John Hersey (appearing at first in the New Yorker in 1946), following six victims accounts of the bombing & the immediate aftermath that ensued. It’s a particularly poignant read now, considering the perilous idiocy, doom baying & extinctionocidal misrule being raced forward from the Chump administration & the Blight House. Mad-man mouth-foam about expanding nuclear arsenals, & making the circumstances of their use/application looser/easier (including, in a seizure of off-the-charts derangement/apocalyptic group punishment – “in response to a cyber-attack”) has led to Germany’s foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, to declare that the US has begun a new nuclear arms race with Russia. Furthermore, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists have moved their Doomsday Clock to ‘two minutes to midnight’, an achievement that has only previously been clinched once during the clocks 71-year history, in 1953 during the Soviet-US nuclear stand-off. Wonderful. This coincides with the Chump administrations perverse insistence to countermand on the international Iranian nuclear non-proliferation agreement, cos’ peace accords are for pussies & more nukes, way easier grounds for their expenditure, more conflict, bellicosity & resentment amongst nations & peoples is the best route towards international security right? As Mike “piss-ant” Pence recently put it – “History attests the surest path to peace is through American strength. There’s no greater element of American strength, there’s no greater force for peace in the world, than the US nuclear arsenal.”
So it’s a good time to read, or indeed re-read Hersey’s classic Hiroshima. As a reminder. You can hear all about the horrible ‘flash burns’. of rescuers trying to help victims, only to have their skin slip-off like garments of clothing. Eyes melted out of faces or faces “almost blotted out” from the flash-burns. Radiation sickness, people trapped under rubble as raging-fires sweep through burning them alive. 100’000 dead. Sure, soldiers, but obviously – mostly civilians. Women, children, the elderly, animals – everything! – because you cannot discriminate with nuclear weapons. As far away from heroics as possible. The ultimate coward’s device & must have for tyrants & terrorists, hence USA is right at the crest, desperate to push the perversion even further.
This’ll end well kids ^ ^
Author-John Hersey
Publisher-Penguin (first published in 1946)