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Hiroshima & Nagasaki Never Again event 8/8/09

by on Aug. 04, 2009, under Health, Life, Politics

Being as my ancestors came from Hiroshima and we had relatives living there when the A- Bomb dropped, this is my community though I have never lived in Japan. It’s that time again to remember the dropping of the atomic bombs on a civilian human population, and the hope that this never happens again.

Here is a copy of an email alert sent from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF):

Hiroshima-Nagasaki
NEVER AGAIN !

Commemoration and Call to Action
For Nuclear Disarmament and Conversion

Saturday, August 8 at 7 pm (music starts earlier)

At Reid Park’s Cancer Survivors’ Plaza
22nd Street east of Country Club before Randolph

Sponsored by the Tucson Raging Grannies

“The program features Ellen Thomas, Co-chair of WILPF’s National DisArm Committee, and leader of Washington, DC’s Proposition One Campaign, who is touring the U.S. promoting HR 1653 calling for Nuclear Disarmament and Economic Conversion, for U.S. ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and for ratification of the UN’s Nonproliferation Treaty. Barbara Warren, Tucson Physicians for Social Responsibility, will also participate. Program will include a description of Hiroshima’s annual huge rally against A & H Bombs by Granny Lea Goodwine who was there recently, and songs by the Tucson Raging Grannies.”

Please join us to mourn victims of all wars, re-dedicate our lives to Peace and convey our sentiments to Congress.

This is a family-friendly event. Parking lot is adjacent. Bring folding chairs or blanket to spread. Some benches available.

For more information, contact Margaret Pecoraro at 885-3908 or margaretspiano@aol.com.

Carolyn’s note:
I confess I have never been to Hiroshima (“The City of Peace and Creativity”) to see where my paternal grandparents came from, but I intend someday to see the peace memorial. Practice nonviolence. Pray for peace.

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  • Romeo

    With all due respect, I am glad we dropped both of those bombs to end that war. I have a great uncle entombed aboard the USS Arizona and another great uncle who was shot five times during the battle of Iwo Jima, the last being from a Japanese sniper who shot most of his lower jaw/face away. Had we been forced to invade the mainland of Japan the amount of lives lost on both sides would have been staggering as my uncle told me later the Japanese would never have given up.
    I have been to Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Iwakuni and Yokosuka and while I feel badly for their suffering, their side started the bloodshed on December 7,1941 and we did what we had to do to finish it.

  • Carolyn Classen

    Thanks for  you comment Romeo.  For us Japanese Americans, this is a difficult issue, being as one of my  uncles and a cousin (both US Citizens) served in the distinguished 442nd Regimental Combat Team, but my uncle’s father in law was interned in one of the WWII relocation centers .  Like you,  I still have a lot of sympathy for the horrors sufffered by those Japanese civilians  from the A bombs.

  • Red Star

    The atomic USA bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were actually the opening shots in the next USA war: the Cold War. Tens of thousands of Japanese died to send an imperialist USA signal to USSR.
     
     

    • Romeo

      You are an idiot. Can’t you find a nice dacha somewhere in the Ukraine to live in?

      • radmax

        Yes, he is, and we can only hope.

  • radmax

    The Japanese axis allies, the Nazi’s,actually tried to get components and plans to them to build a bomb. Is there any doubt they would have used it? They also performed biological and chemical tests on the Chinese that made Joseph Mengele(the angel of death) look like a choir boy. Hard decisions have to be made against fanatical foes…sound familiar? That being said, I believe the Japanese-Americans internment was a gross overreaction for some our most loyal American citizens.

    • Romeo

      Post of the day! The lefties beloved FDR’s  illegal  internment (where they were forced to do labor ie; Mt. Lemmon highway for one) was just a slight bump in the road in the overall scheme of their plans. Some things never change, they still don’t care about anything but the idealogy.

  • Red Star

    First:
    http://tucsoncitizen.com/sandbox/commenting-guidelines/
    Second: The “apple pie, peanut butter and jelley (on white bread with the crusts cut off)” view of USA history serves some very well, indeed.  But having lost, for whatever USA idiotic reason, Berlin to Stalin, USA was not about to cede Japan: USA got a clue that summer of 1945. The USA WMD were applied at high cost to Japanese civilians. And some in USA thought the bombs were dropped to save GI lives…that perception is one of the great USA lies.

  • Red Star
    • radmax

      Guidelines-the last refuge of a scoundrel…

      • Romeo

        Hey Radman,
        Problem with dimwits like redstar is they are too stupid to actually do any research and form an educated opinion. Hence when cornered they pull the “you’re violating the rules/guidlines/my rights, etc. Had  rojo actually studied history (my major from San Diego State btw) it would have learned that contrary to all the liberal crud you learn in Public schools, FDR was quite fond of Stalin who he referred to as Uncle Joe and was attempting to emulate many of the USSR’s policies and model the US to mimic them. According to rojo the US was testing out nukes to control russia but why would FDR do that if he was so fond of them? FDR was terrified of the Nazi’s getting there before us and having Fascist rule as opposed to his and Stalins dream of socialism/statism. As far as redplanet goes, it (he/she) is a tool and as Lenin said “a useful idiot”and I refuse to lower my intellect to argue with someone who does nothing but quote the left playbook and can’t compete on an intelligent level in any debate. If we ignore the ignoramus maybe it will lose it’s appeal to agitate and just go away. Like most trolls it will eventually give up.

        • Red Star
        • radmax

          That’s the problem Romeo, it’s like a stench that fouls everything, but won’t go away. BTW-don’t let anybody sh…kid ya-history rocks man! Yeah, Stalin played Roosevelt like a violin, poor bastard was dyin’, but who’s on the ash heap of history now?

          • radmax

            PS-Thank God for Churchill

        • Romeo

          And to add a little more to the discussion, folks such as redhead probably don’t have the mental capacity to realize that WW2 was just an extension of WW1. The purpose of which was to bring about a new world order by ridding the planet of the Ottoman Empire. Issues that were not resolved by WW1 were simply continued when the manpower became available to continue the war. The main reason for the “interlude” was the Spanish flu epidemic that decimated the ranks of both sides, hence a war of attrition. It is simply easier for uneducated people such as red-donut to single out an event such as dropping the bomb to attempt to poison a discussion without actually researching the cause and effect and coming to a logical conclusion of said event. So, from this point on, my redhat blocker is in place and I will not be responding to false accusations or innuendoes, may I respectfully request that you do the same? 

  • Red Star
  • leftfield

    You have a very interesting take on history, Romeo.  You said you majored in history; did you actually graduate?  Must have been the John Birch School of History.  I think I heard about them.  The final exam:

    Q: Who is responsible for everything bad?
    A: Them durn lib’rals and their commie friends at the UN.

  • Romeo

    Word!
    It’s funny to me because I can trace my family history back to 1066 (William the Conquerer) and we arrived in the new world in 1610 at the original Jamestown colony. Every generation of my family has served in the military from the Revolutionary war to the present (myself included) to protect and defend this great nation. It makes me sick to my stomach thinking of the sacrafices my family has made to allow pieces of dung such as redmug and leftfield to spew their anti US diatribe but I tell myself it’s worth it because for every pos like them that hates our home there are thousands that truly appreciate our loss for their freedom. I hope I never have to pick up a weapon and take another human beings life, but if called upon to defend our nation, I will, Semper Fi.

    • leftfield

      You’re quite a piece of work, Romeo. 

      “To protect and defend this great nation”; I love it!  Did you stand and salute the flag when you said it? I imagine you shining your shoes and putting a knife-edge crease in your pants before saying your prayers and getting into bed each night. 

      Before I go to bed, I repeat the prayer that brought me so much comfort through the tough times: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh; the NLF is gonna win”! 

       

      • radmax

        I take that back…how the hell could you hope our troops die at the hands of babykilling murderers who believed the end justifies the means in all situations. Giaps attrition strategy be damned!

        • leftfield

          Hey, we told you it was a mistake right from the beginning.  I didn’t hope anyone would die.  I wanted them to stay home.  I would imagine that if this country were to be invaded and occupied, we would all find out that we are capable of doing whatever was needed to expell the barbarians. 

  • radmax

    Lefty! So glad you could make it. Sure love to hear your take on the ‘WMD’ ending of WWII. Romeo, although Lefty has a misplaced allegiance, I believe he means well and that is more than I can say for his redness.

    • radmax

       his redness-AKA-red star

    • leftfield

      Well, I believe the entire story of WWII is anything but simple.  For the sake of discussion, my take is that as regards the conflict between the  US and Japan, it was a struggle between two empires for control over natural resources and control over the Pacific.  As to the bomb, whoever was first in the race to develop it was gonna use it.  The fact that the US had this to keep Stalin’s imperialistic ambitions in check was a bonus.

      • radmax

        Check above-Stalin was the 2nd antichrist. PS? No thoughts on the implementation of the final solution? I’m surprised.

      • Romeo

        Wrong take buckaroo. Japan was looking to expand its empire namely Korea which they had been fighting both the Chinese and The Russians for control over. The US had no interest in the far east other than trying to prevent human atrocities being wrought by the Japanese only for the simple fact of trying to appease the peaceniks/isolationists to get FDR re-elected. Stalins main concern was establishing a buffer zone between the USSR and Nazi Germany because he knew the Germans had intentions to gain leibensraum- living room in eastern Russia and the Ukraine.  Russia and Japan had signed a non-aggresion pact to give each other the piece of mind to fight a one front war/ russia with germany and japan with china and the US. If FDR was ignorant to the current situation then why were all the first rate carriers ordered out of Pearl and replaced with obsolete battlewagons, the USS Arizona was built in 1916 and was obsolete by 1931.
        FDR had a vision to help Soviet Russia (lend lease) as much as possible, circumventing his executive authority and the congress in so much as he had an admiration for Stalin and wished to emulate his policies here to retain absolute power (new deal, tva, scotus, public wrks) for the left for generations to follow.
         And yes lefttard, I graduated with a bachelors degree from San Diego in history, A B.S. in engineering from Texas A&M and a B.S in fine arts from Alabama State (music) any other qustions for me? Didn’t think so, have a nice night.

        • leftfield

          Don’t forget to press and lay out your tighty-whities for tomorrow, soldier.

          • Romeo

            You are such a wanker, go finger yourself, strawman, I’m done talking to a cretin like yourself. You make me sick.

  • Romeo

    And one last thing portnut, before you bring it up, the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was nothing more than an attempt by both Germany And Russia to buy time by sacrificing Poland(Prussia) to buy time to equip both countries with the means for preparing for a drawn out war which both knew was coming and to establish a buffer zone to give each other a chance to respond. Little known fact is that Russia invaded Poland 17 days after the Nazi’s did and perpetrated the same atrocities as the Nazi’s, murdering Jews, a convenient little fact left out by most revisionist history books as both sides were looking for ethnic cleansing of the Jews and educated elites.
    I taught history(era 1900 to 1970) at Marine Corps Air Station Tustin from 1983 to 1984 night school, so if you want to debate me you should bring your “A” game as I do not suffer fools lightly. The ball is now fully in your court.
     GYSGT Cowherd HMM-262, 1st sgt, crewchief Ch-46d-e.

    • leftfield

      The idea of you teaching history to other Marines is just the cherry on top of my image of you.  Let me guess…the US has never had imperial ambitions and invades other countries only out of humanitarian concerns; kind of like the way we saved the savage indian from his pagan ways.  I think you were actually teaching government approved propaganda, not history. 

      Perhaps there’s just not enough oxygen way up there where you reside.

      Now, drop and give me twenty, grunt!

  • Romeo

    Carolyn, I apologize for the hijacking that took place in your thread. I had no intention of debating these fools and moving the course of dialect away from the original intent of your blog. My intention was to educate the uninformed of the actual conditions that revolved around the circumstances that ended up being the actual dropping of an atomic bomb on your country. Had I known that this would have evolved into another anti US rant from the left I never would have given my opinion. Please accept my apologies and God rest your relatives as I think you would wish mine.

    • Carolyn Classen

      Japan is not my country, only the country where my grandparents emigrated from to the Kingdom of Hawaii (now the 50th State).  I’m no expert on WWII having been born after it, nor a history major,  and my intention was to publicize this Hiroshima & Nagasaki Commemoration event coming up on Saturday for those who care about such atomic/nuclear issues, especially for those who promote peace.  Thank you for all your comments and lively discussion.
       

  • Lionel

    American submarines, armed with nuclear rockets, many times more powerful than those dropped on Japan,  roam the seas.
    If one of their rockets is fired in anger (mistakes are unlikely!) and the inevitable response comes, the World is finished.

    Romeo;
    I understand that when the first bomb was dropped on Japan, peace negotiations were already imminient.

    • radmax

      The Japanese were also negotiating when they attacked Pearl…

  • Carolyn Classen

    August 6 today:  64th anniversary of the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. Went to a sobering exhibit on this event & here are some statistics:
    3,000 degree Centigrade was the temperature on the ground at the hypocenter.
    Area reduced to ashes: 13 square kilometers in Hiroshima, 6.7 square kilometers in Nagasaki.
    140,000 plus or minus 10,000 died in Hiroshima (out of pop. of 350,000).
    74,000 plus or minus 10,000 died in Nagasaki (out of pop. of 240,000).
    A-bomb victims developed cancer up to 40 years after 1945.  No wonder the victims & their families now pray for world peace.

  • Mark B. Evans

    I think so much is made of the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan because of what happened in the decades after the war  – the Cold War and the prospect of nuclear Armageddon.
    About three times as many Japanese were killed between March and July 1945 in B-29 firebombing raids than all the casaulties of the two atomic bombs together, including those who died of radiation sickness after.
    In Tokyo, where more than 8,000 tons of firebombs were dropped, more than 50 square miles were obliterated. Another 50 to 100 square miles were severely damaged. In one raid, March 9/10, more than 100,000 people were killed, 100,000 injured and about 250,000 displaced. That’s more casualties than Nagasaki and almost as many as Hiroshima.
    Of  Tokyo’s 7 million inhabitants at the start of 1945, nearly half were displaced by bomb damage by war’s end. That’s the equivalent of the entire Phoenix metropolitan area moving to Tucson because the city had been wiped out.
    Altogether in World War II, about 70 million people lost their lives, with the Soviet Union accounting for about a third, or 23 million. Nearly 3 million Japanese died in World War II. The United States had about 500,000 deaths.
    In terms of the deaths of that war, Aug. 6 and Aug. 9 were no worse than March 10, 1945. Or Dec. 7, 1945, or July 7, 1937.
    Incinerated is incinerated. It matters not to the incinerated the method of incineration. Dead is dead. Why does it matter to the living?
    Perhaps the better day to commemorate for world peace is Aug. 15, the day Japan surrendered and brought that horrible war to an end.

  • aclassen

    Wow, how can anyone be so insensitive and just count dead bodies? And ignore the historical dimension of the atomic bomb, which was a paradigm shift in world politics. Sure, particularly in light of the cold war this one time event was monumental, but the enormous suffering, the horror, and the decades long fall-out was even worse. The atom bomb symbolizes the worst development of war technology, taking us to the brink of global annhihilation. Even if only a percentage of those people had actually died, this would not have changed the meaning of the atom bomb at all. Your comment would be analogous to saying that the Holocaust was less significant than the suffering of the Russian people because of numbers. History is not a matter of figures. It is a matter of human life. Let’s not weigh one side against the other, instead lets use past experiences to work toward world peace.

  • Red Star

    Yes, seems the Editor Mark Evans seeks a bumpersticker…

  • Jenise Porter

    I’ve just been reading American Prometheus, the biography of Robert Oppenheimer. There is quite a bit of evidence there that the Japanese were attempting through third parties to surrender before we dropped the bomb. There was a strong opinion in the scientific community that Truman wanted to test the bomb in order to scare Russia and dropping it on Hiroshima was an opportunity. In any event, the idea that incinerating civilians and leaving the population with radiation sicknesses that would affect generations to come, is difficult to fathom from a “civilized” society.

    • radmax

      “Truman wanted to test the bomb in order to scare Russia” ? Didn’t have the desires effect then, did it. The warlords of WWII era Japan never would have surrendered. The entire island hopping campaign of the Pacific theater was evidence of this. Ask a marine vet-they’ll give you the skinny.

  • http://www.jeanmariesimpson.com Jeanmarie Simpson

    Okay, trolls. Seriously.
    This is a subject that requires sensitivity, intelligence and insight.
    Try to relax, breathe, take a moment and consider before posting mean-spirited spewings just for the sake of posting.
    Thank you for your post, Carolyn.
    Never again.

  • stephanie

    Carolyn, I always look forward to your editorials because community is what gives meaning to my life.

  • Margaret Pecoraro

    We’ve had such terrible times in the 20th C. …. and cannot afford
    to have such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 21st ….. If we do
    we will NOT  have the world as we know it to live in  AND  will have destroyed our very own home  . . . ,  . . . our ONLY home!
          I hope for all that have participated in this blog that they have
    either read or seen NEVIL SHUTE’s “ON THE BEACH”, starring
     Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire , the mid ’50s movie
    made from his book .. .. and, then, too, there’s always
                                         
                                              “DR. STRANGELOVE …” ..
         
     It is IMPERATIVE that we on our planet live in peace …

  • Carolyn Classen

    August 9 today: 64th anniversary of the dropping of the Bomb on Nagasaki. I appreciate those who can exhibit compassion for human suffering and who believe in world peace. Let us work together toward that goal in this 21st century.

  • typondis

    There wasn’t any one reason they used atomic weapons at the end of World War II. But many were satisfied. Some of those reasons were clandestine, and some of those still not known, I’m sure.

    Regardless, ALL this stuff is gesticulation. Transcend (human) culture; transcend gender. Then there will be reason to speak.

    (Curiously, the second part of my ‘word challenge’ is ‘diffidence’. Hmmm.)

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