Hiroshima Mon Amour
It’s exactly 58 years since the only country in history both savage and determined enough — and with the ability to use nuclear weapons aggressively — annihilated a city of several hundred thousand civilians using the most dreadful weapon of mass destruction yet devised. A device, I note, over which it seems determined to maintain an effective monopoly, even as it schizophrenically credits a regime consisting of a great multiplicity of such city killing devices as the critical foundation of a balance of terror that has delivered “peace” for decades. War is peace, indeed.
The mayor of Hiroshima criticized U.S. officials on Wednesday for pursuing new nuclear weapons technology … Tadatoshi Akiba said Washington’s apparent worship of “nuclear weapons as God” was threatening world peace … “As the U.S.-British-led war on Iraq made clear, the assertion that war is peace is being trumpeted as truth.”
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.