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This year's anniversary of the U.S. Nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is winding down. Let's seek to finalize our understanding of this unnecessary and calculated unspeakably barbaric act before we move on the the atrocities in Muslin nations today.
And we keep it simple. The words of Dwight Eisenhower, U.S. president to be, Commanding General of all Allied Forces in World War Two, upon being informed of the decision to drop an nuclear device on Japanese cities, and his statement upon hearing the news of the deed having been done:
"...in [July] 1945... Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. ... I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..." - Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." - Dwight Eisenhower - Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63
We add the corroborating review of John Pilger in The Guardian, UK, 8/6/08
"In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, the allied occupation authorities banned all mention of radiation poisoning and insisted that people had been killed or injured only by the bomb's blast. It was the first big lie. "No radioactivity in Hiroshima ruin" said the front page of the New York Times, a classic of disinformation and journalistic abdication, which the Australian reporter Wilfred Burchett put right with his scoop of the century. "I write this as a warning to the world," reported Burchett in the Daily Express, having reached Hiroshima after a perilous journey, the first correspondent to dare. He described hospital wards filled with people with no visible injuries but who were dying from what he called "an atomic plague". For telling this truth, his press accreditation was withdrawn, he was pilloried and smeared - and [later] vindicated.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a criminal act on an epic scale. It was premeditated mass murder that unleashed a weapon of intrinsic criminality. For this reason its apologists have sought refuge in the mythology of the ultimate "good war", whose "ethical bath", as Richard Drayton called it, has allowed the west not only to expiate its bloody imperial past but to promote 60 years of rapacious war [war on the post-colonial world under the pretext of anti-communism and never pro-capitalism], always beneath the shadow of The Bomb."
Sadly, Eisenhower did not warn us of the dangerous domination of the Military-Industrial-Complex until the day he left office, after a presidential tenure that included not confronting the establishment on using nuclear weapons and following the foreign policy needs of investment banking in bombing Laos to smithereens, overthrowing a first democratic president in impoverished and exploited Guatemala, ordering the assassination of the popular Patrice Lumuba first elected president of a Congo freed from the horrific colonial enslavement of Belgium, blocking the all-Vietnam elections called for in the Geneva Peace Accord between our defeated French Colonial Army and the nationals forces led by W.W.II hero Ho Chi Minh, and overseeing the preparations to have the CIA invade Cuba with clandestine U.S. air cover.
But Ike's depressed statements regarding the America's Atom bombing go down as irrefutable.
