Babylonian Hypocrisy (Ezekiel 17)

US hypocritical about policy on nuclear weapons: Analyst
Sun Dec 13, 2015 10:59AM

A new investigative report showing 33,480 US nuclear workers have died of radiation exposure over the last seven decades exposes America’s hypocrisy with regard to nuclear weapons, says an international lawyer in Indonesia.

Barry Grossman made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Sunday when asked about the yearlong investigation by McClatchy which reveals that America’s great push to win the World War II and the Cold War has left “a legacy of death on American soil.”

The death count, disclosed for the first time, is more than four times the number of American fatalities in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Grossman said that the report should not be mistaken for a critique of America’s hypocritical policy toward other nations and its use of weapons of mass destruction which led to the death of many innocent people.

“These disclosures are of course interesting but let’s not lose sight of what this is all about. This is not a well documented criticism of the US nuclear weapons program or of America’s hypocrisy in dictating the international community’s policy stance on nuclear proliferation. Indeed, the McClatchy report concedes, almost celebrates, the fact that most Americans regard the work of those featured in this story as a heroic and patriotic endeavor,” he said.

“Of course, no mention is made in any of this sentimental waffle about the hundreds of thousands of lives destroyed and the huge expanses of territory contaminated by America’s use of depleted uranium war heads, cluster bombs and chemical weapons in other nations. After all, when it comes to tugging at people’s heartstrings and fine-tuning the US policy-making machine, only white American lives matter and even then, only those who do not whine too much about doing their patriotic duty,” he added.

“Rather than being a genuine attempt to question America’s $1 trillion, 30-year commitment to modernizing its nuclear command, by objectively highlighting the dangers faced by previous generations of workers, this piece of selective investigative journalism in fact makes a strong case for fully supporting America’s $1 trillion nuclear modernization program,” Grossman stated.
“The report is little more than a saccharine celebration of what passes in America as grassroots heroics, albeit expressed in an envelope which focuses on exposing the failure to compensate many of the almost 110,000 or so killer moms and dads who contracted life-threatening illnesses as they worked to assemble and disassemble US made weapons,” he noted.

“So what if, from the millions of Americans who have worked in the US weapons industry to make sure that innocent people can be killed around the world, some 32,000 have died from cancers supposedly contracted while doing their heroic duty. What did they expect the outcome of their murderous efforts to be? A ticker tape parade in Manhattan to honor their selfless sacrifice?” he asked.

“In any case, make no mistake about it – nobody cares about them” Grossman said, adding, “Their eventual suffering was nothing more than an unfortunate consequence of them doing their duty. The important subtext here – the US public will tacitly agree – is that people do their duty to keep America great by killing in the name of empire.”

“Moreover, by noting that the death toll among those working in America’s nuclear weapons industry is ‘more than four times the number of American casualties in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,’ this report is as likely to encourage criticism of ‘Peaceniks’ as it is to serve as a basis for questioning the deliberately cultivated, but nothing if not psychotic sensibilities of Americans who overwhelmingly support America’s über violent militarism and the war-based economy that has evolved from such lunacy,” the analyst noted.

“After all, how dare people complain about doing their duty abroad in support of the empire when so many ordinary moms and dads have given their lives quietly while working in support of the war effort at home? If anyone has any doubts about this, no doubt Donald Trump will set them straight,” Grossman concluded.

The nuclear report comes as the US prepares to upgrade its aging nuclear arsenal to the tune of $1 trillion over the next 30 years.

1945 Survivors Warn Us Of The Bowls Of Wrath (Rev 16)

 

Japan’s atomic bomb survivors continue in fight against nuclear weapons

As Japan prepares to mark the 70th anniversary of the world’s first nuclear attack, survivors ponder how to continue warning of the horrors of nuclear war

Justin McCurry in Hiroshima
Friday 31 July 2015 09.15 EDT

It is not as if Sunao Tsuboi needs another reminder of his violent encounter, as a 20-year-old university student, with a “living hell on earth”. The facial scars he has carried for seven decades are proof enough. But, as if to remind himself of the day he became a witness to the horrors of nuclear warfare, he removes a a black-and-white photograph and points to the shaved head of a young man looking away from the lens.

“That’s me,” he says. “We were hoping we would find some sort of medical help, but there was no treatment available, and no food or water. I thought I had reached the end.”

The location is Miyuki Bridge, Hiroshima, three hours after the Enola Gay, a US B-29 bomber, dropped a 15-kiloton nuclear bomb on the city on the morning of 6 August 1945. Between 60,000 and 80,000 people were killed instantly; in the months that followed the death toll rose to 140,000.
In the photo, one of only a handful of surviving images taken in Hiroshima that day, Tsuboi is sitting on the road with several other people, their gaze directed at the gutted buildings around them. To one side, police officers douse schoolchildren with cooking oil to help soothe the pain of their burns.

As Japan prepares to mark the 70th anniversary of the first nuclear attack in history, Tsuboi and tens of thousands of other hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) are again confronting their own mortality.
“People like me are losing the strength to talk about their experiences and continue the campaign against nuclear weapons,” says Tsuboi, a retired school principal who has travelled the world to warn of the horrors of nuclear warfare.

The average age of the 183,000 registered survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks rose just above 80 for the first time last month.

While each has a unique recollection of the morning of 6 August and its aftermath, near disbelief at the scale of destruction is a theme that runs through hibakusha testimony.

Tsuboi remembers hearing a loud bang, then being blown into the air and landing 10 metres away. He regained consciousness to find he had been burned over most of his body, his shirtsleeves and trouser legs ripped off by the force of the blast.

“My arms were badly burned and there seemed to be something dripping from my fingertips,” said Tsuboi, who is co-chair of Nihon Hidankyo, a nationwide organisation of atomic and hydrogen bomb sufferers.

“My back was incredibly painful, but I had no idea what had just happened. I assumed I had been close to a very large conventional bomb. I had no idea it was a nuclear bomb and that I’d been exposed to radiation. There was so much smoke in the air that you could barely see 100 metres ahead, but what I did see convinced me that I had entered a living hell on earth.

“There were people crying out for help, calling after members of their family. I saw a schoolgirl with her eye hanging out of its socket. People looked like ghosts, bleeding and trying to walk before collapsing. Some had lost limbs.

“There were charred bodies everywhere, including in the river. I looked down and saw a man clutching a hole in his stomach, trying to stop his organs from spilling out. The smell of burning flesh was overpowering.”

He was taken to a hospital, where he remained unconscious for over a month. By the time he came to, a defeated Japan was under the control of the US-led allied occupation. “I had no idea that the war had ended,” he said. “It was difficult to take in.”

Since then Tsuboi has been hospitalised 11 times, including three occasions when doctors told him he was about to die. He takes drugs for several illnesses, including two cancer diagnoses, which he says are connected to his exposure to radiation.

While the A-bomb survivors’ testimony is now a matter of historical record, the hibakusha are trying to ensure that their experiences don’t die with them, at a time when the world is facing nuclear threats from North Korea and Russia.

Earlier this year one of the most active branches of Hidankyo announced it would disband after its members, most of whom are in their 80s and 90s, conceded they were too old to continue their activities.

“In 10 years, I’d be surprised if there are many of us left,” says Hiroshi Shimizu, a Hidankyo official who was three years old when the Hiroshima bomb exploded a mile (1.6km) from his home.
“If the hibakusha continue to speak out against nuclear weapons, then other people will follow suit. That’s why we have to continue our campaign for as long as we are physically able.”
Hiroshima and Kunitachi, a small city in western Tokyo with a small population of A-bomb survivors, have tried to preserve the hibakusha legacy by setting up “storyteller” courses open to people who have no direct experience of the attacks and no A-bomb survivors among their relatives. Hidankyo, meanwhile, has started reaching out to the children and grandchildren of hibakusha.
Last month, Yoshiko Kajimoto, an 84-year-old survivor, recounted her experiences via Skype to dozens of members of the British parliament, and a delegation of hibakusha recently took part in a 24-country “voyage for peace” with the Japanese NGO Peace Boat.

As of August 2014, the number of people recognised as having died from the effects of the two atomic bombs stood at more than 450,000: 292,325 in Hiroshima and 165,409 in Nagasaki, which was bombed three days later. On 15 August, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender to a shattered nation.

“I won’t be here in 10 or 15 years’ time, so the question we’re all asking is how to continue sending our message,” said Hiroko Hatakeyama, who was six in 1945.

“I barely have the energy to campaign these days, and I’m no longer scared of dying. But at the same time I realise that it’s our duty as survivors to carry on for as long as possible, to honour the memory of those who are no longer with us.”

Tsuboi, who went on to have three children and seven grandchildren, will make his annual pilgrimage to Hiroshima Peace Park on 6 August. That evening, he will release a lantern along the Motoyasu river – where thousands fled to escape the heat of the nuclear blast – to “guide” the spirits of the dead.

In his role as one of the world’s most active A-bomb survivors, Tsuboi will have a brief conversation with Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe, whom he has criticised for attacking the country’s postwar commitment to pacifism.

“On behalf of all A-bomb victims, I will ask him to do everything in his power to rid the world of nuclear weapons,” Tsuboi said. “I will continue to repeat that demand until my last breath.”

The Bowls Of Wrath (Revelation 16)

‘Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War,’ by Susan Southard

By IAN BURUMA

JULY 28, 2015

Mushroom cloud over Nagasaki, Aug. 9, 1945. Credit U.S. Army A.A.F. photo/Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

There are good reasons for writing a book about the atom bombing of Nagasaki and its agonizing aftermath. Most people have heard of Hiroshima. The second bomb — dropped by an Irish-American pilot almost exactly above the largest Catholic church in Asia, which killed more than 70,000 civilians on the day and more in the long term — is less well known.

Susan Southard’s harrowing descriptions give us some idea of what it must have been like for people who were unlucky enough not to be killed instantly: “A woman who covered her eyes from the flash lowered her hands to find that the skin of her face had melted into her palms”; “Hundreds of field workers and others staggered by, moaning and crying. Some were missing body parts, and others were so badly burned that even though they were naked, Yoshida couldn’t tell if they were men or women. He saw one person whose eyeballs hung down his face, the sockets empty.”

Gen. Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, which had developed the atom bomb, testified before the United States Senate that death from high-dose radiation was “without undue suffering,” and indeed “a very pleasant way to die.”

Many survivors died later, always very unpleasantly, of radiation sickness. Their hair would fall out, they would be covered in purple spots, their skin would rot. And those who survived the first wave of sickness after the war had a much higher than average chance of dying of leukemia or other cancers even decades later.

What made things worse for Japanese doctors who tried to ease the suffering of atom-bomb victims is that information about the bomb and its effects was censored by the American administration occupying Japan until the early 1950s. Even as readers here were shocked in 1946 by John Hersey’s description of the Hiroshima bomb in The New Yorker, the ensuing book was banned in Japan. Films and photographs of the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as medical data, were confiscated by American authorities.

The strength of Southard’s book is that her account is remarkably free of abstractions. She is a theater director, albeit one with an M.F.A. in creative writing, and her interest in the story began in 1986, when she was hired as a translator for one of her subjects who was on a speaking tour in the United States. Instead of statistics, she concentrates, like Hersey, on the fates of individuals. We read about Wada Koichi, an 18-year-old student worker for the municipal streetcar company, as well as a 16-year-old schoolgirl named Nagano Etsuko, another teenage girl named Do-oh Mineko, a 13-year-old boy named Yoshida Katsuji, and several others.

They were so badly disfigured by the blast that it not only took them years to recover some kind of health, but they were also hesitant to reveal themselves in public. Children would cry or run away from them, thinking they were monsters. Younger survivors were often bullied at school. Atom-bomb victims (hibakusha) found it hard to find marriage partners, because people were afraid of passing genetic diseases to their offspring.

The only reason we know about the people described by Southard is that all of them overcame their deep embarrassment and “came out,” as it were, as kataribe, or “storytellers” about the atom bomb, reminding people of the horrors of nuclear war by speaking in public, at schools, conferences and peace gatherings all over the world.

Without excusing Japanese wartime behavior, Southard writes with compassion about Japanese victims, and measured indignation about postwar American evasions and hypocrisy. Although her lack of theory and abstraction is a blessing, she might have analyzed the politics of discrimination, as well as the nuclear issue in Japan, a bit more closely.

Hibakusha were not just ostracized because of their grotesque scars. It so happened that the epicenter of the bomb was over an area called Urakami, which was inhabited not only by a large number of Christians, but also by traditional outcasts, or burakumin, the people who did jobs that were polluted in Buddhist eyes: jobs that had to do with death, like those in the meat or leather industries.

As a consequence, the borderlines between hibakusha and burakumin became blurred. Christians, too, although not outcasts, had been persecuted, even after religious freedom was granted in the late 19th century, because of their suspected lack of patriotism. It was often assumed that they would be more loyal to the Vatican than to the Japanese emperor.

And yet the most celebrated victim of the bomb was a young man named Nagai Takashi, a Christian physician who wrote “The Bells of Nagasaki” in 1949, before dying a few years later. Dr. Nagai, also known as “the saint of Urakami,” regarded the bombing in terms of Christian martyrdom: Nagasaki was sacrificed to pay for the sins of war.

The subjects of Southard’s book did not see their suffering in this light. But there is something evangelical about the kataribe’s mission of peace. Wada, Do-oh, Yoshida and the others found a meaning in their lives by spreading the word about the evil of nuclear bombs. World peace became something like a religious mantra. One has to feel sympathy for this. Their suffering ought not to be forgotten, and neither should the horrendous effects of such cruel and destructive weapons. What could be unleashed on cities today would be immensely more devastating than the bombs that obliterated much of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nonetheless, preaching world peace and expressing moral condemnation of nuclear bombs as an absolute evil are not a sufficient response to the dangers facing mankind. For even though the kataribe of Nagasaki, and their sympathetic American interlocutor, are driven by human rather than political concerns, the peace movement they promote was politicized from the beginning.

Southard mentions Nagasaki Peace Park, for example, with its many monuments to world peace. The park was established in 1955. Many of the monuments donated by foreign countries were from such places as the Soviet Union, Poland, Cuba, the People’s Republic of China and East Germany. The peace movement was at least partly a propaganda tool in the Cold War. That killing a massive number of civilians with a radiating bomb is an act of barbarism is hard to refute. Whether the world would have been a safer place on the terms of the Soviet Union and its satellites is less clear.

Domestically, too, Japanese anti­nuclear and peace organizations were manipulated by political interests, conservative as well as leftist. Right-wing nationalists like to cancel out the history of Japanese atrocities (which they often deny anyway) by claiming that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were far worse. Left-wing pacifism has often been just as anti-American, but from the opposite political perspective.

Since Southard set out to concentrate on individual lives, rather than politics, one cannot really blame her for dodging these complications, but when she does mention them she can be oddly off beam.

In 1990, Motoshima Hiroshi, the Christian mayor of Nagasaki, was shot in the back by a right-wing extremist for publicly holding the Japanese emperor partly responsible for the war. Southard explains that Motoshima “broke a cultural taboo.”

In fact, Motoshima was courageously challenging a right-wing political goal, which is to strengthen the imperial institution, and undo some of the postwar liberal reforms, including pacifism. Southard says these reforms were “forced on Japan by an occupying nation,” which is also what right-wing nationalists claim, I think wrongly. Most Japanese were happy to enjoy their new freedoms. They didn’t have to be forced, for they cooperated quite willingly with the Americans who helped instigate them.

Still, the merits of Southard’s book are clear. It was bad enough for the Americans to have killed so many people, and then hide the gruesome facts for many years after the war. To forget about the massacre now would be an added insult to the victims. Southard has helped to make sure that this will not happen yet.

Antichrist Holds Dramatic Demonstration

Standard Times

An Iraqi woman carries a child that plays dead as they take part in a performance in Baghdad’s Shiite slum of Sadr City, Iraq, Thursday, Dec. 28, 2006, organized by the powerful Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s bureau to honor victims of terrorist attacks in Iraq. (AP Photo/Karim Kadim)