Journal toby's Journal: John Pilger: The lies of Hiroshima live on 1
The always brilliant John Pilger, writing in the Guardian:
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, always beneath the shadow of The Bomb.
... This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the media. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and that is Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in 1986 when he smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as 200 nuclear warheads. In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today clearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new American administration might, just might, conduct genuine negotiations
... In the New York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny Morris
... threatened "an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland". This would be mass murder. For a Jew, the irony cries out. The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming, as good Germans did, that "we did not know"?
... Catching war criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer.
The real problem is Cartesian Dualism (Score:2)
... and its parallels in other cultures. It is one thing to acknowledge that the lives of others have influence beyond biological death, but a dangerous mistake to imagine that we contain some separable essence capable of reincarnation (whether in heaven, hell or some unfortunate critter).
Belief in personal reincarnation allows no end of moral absolution, whether for Buddhists from WWII Japan to the Khmer Rouge, for American fundies, for Islamists or more minor centres of confusion.
Unfortunately those of th