{"id":116375,"date":"2018-08-13T12:02:10","date_gmt":"2018-08-13T11:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=116375"},"modified":"2018-08-10T12:27:20","modified_gmt":"2018-08-10T11:27:20","slug":"the-satanic-nature-of-the-atomic-bombings-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/08\/the-satanic-nature-of-the-atomic-bombings-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki\/","title":{"rendered":"The Satanic Nature of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cAhab is forever Ahab, man.\u00a0 This whole act\u2019s immutably decreed.\u00a0 \u2018Twas rehearsed by thee and me billion years before this ocean rolled.\u00a0 Fool!\u00a0 I am the Fates\u2019 lieutenant; I act under orders.\u201d\u00a0 <\/em>
\n\u2013 Herman Melville, Moby Dick<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe greatest evil is not now done in those sordid \u2018dens of crime\u2019 that Dickens loved to paint\u2026But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>
\n\u2013 C. S. Lewis, author\u2019s preface, 1962, The Screwtape Letters<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

American history can only accurately be described as the story of demonic possession, however you choose to understand that phrase.\u00a0 Maybe radical \u201cevil\u201d will suffice.\u00a0 But right from the start the American colonizers were involved in massive killing because they considered themselves divinely blessed and guided, a chosen people whose mission would come to be called \u201cmanifest destiny.\u201d\u00a0 Nothing stood in the way of this divine calling, which involved the need to enslave and kill millions and millions of innocent people that continues down to today. \u00a0\u201cOthers\u201d have always been expendable since they have stood in the way of the imperial march ordained by the American god. This includes all the wars waged based on lies and false flag operations. It is not a secret, although most Americans, if they are aware of it, prefer to see it as a series of aberrations carried out by \u201cbad apples.\u201d \u00a0Or something from the past.<\/p>\n

Our best writers and prophets have told us the truth: Thoreau, Twain, William James, MLK, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, et al.: we are a nation of killers of the innocent.\u00a0 We are conscienceless.\u00a0 We are brutal.\u00a0 We are in the grip of evil forces.<\/p>\n

The English writer D. H. Lawrence said it perfectly in 1923, \u201cThe American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer.\u00a0 It has never yet melted.\u201d\u00a0 It still hasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

When on August 6 and 9, 1945 the United States killed 200-300 thousand innocent Japanese civilians with atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they did so intentionally.\u00a0 It was an act of sinister state terrorism, unprecedented by the nature of the weapons but not by the slaughter. The American terror bombings of Japanese cities that preceded the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki \u2013 led by the infamous Major General Curtis LeMay \u2013 were also intentionally aimed at Japanese civilians and killed hundreds of thousands of them.<\/p>\n

Is there an American artist\u2019s painting of Tokyo destroyed by the firebombing to go next to Picasso\u2019s Guernica,<\/em> where estimates of the dead range between 800 and 1,600?\u00a0 In Tokyo alone more than 100, 000 Japanese civilians were burnt to death by cluster bombs of napalm.\u00a0 All this killing was intentional. I repeat: Intentional.\u00a0 Is that not radical evil?\u00a0 Demonic?\u00a0 Only five Japanese cities were spared such bombing.<\/p>\n

The atomic bombings were an intentional holocaust, not to end the war, as the historical record amply demonstrates, but to send a message to the Soviet Union that we could do to them what we did to the residents of Japan.\u00a0 President Truman made certain that the Japanese willingness to surrender in May 1945 was made unacceptable because he and his Secretary-of-State James Byrnes\u00a0 wanted to use the atomic bombs \u2013 \u201cas quickly as possible to \u2018show results\u2019\u201d in Byrnes\u2019 words \u2013 to send a message to the Soviet Union.\u00a0 So \u201cthe Good War\u201d was ended in the Pacific with the \u201cgood guys\u201d killing hundreds of thousand Japanese civilians to make a point to the \u201cbad guys,\u201d who have been demonized ever since.\u00a0\u00a0 Russia phobia is nothing new.<\/p>\n

Satan always wears the other\u2019s face.<\/p>\n

Many Baby Boomers like to say they grew up with the bomb.\u00a0 They are lucky. They grew up.\u00a0 They got be scared.\u00a0 They got to hide under their desks and wax nostalgic about it.\u00a0 Do you remember dog tags?\u00a0 Those 1950s and 1960s?\u00a0 The scary movies?<\/p>\n

The children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who died under our bombs on August 6 and 9, 1945 didn\u2019t get to grow up.\u00a0 They couldn\u2019t hide.\u00a0 They just went under. To be accurate: we put them under. Or they were left to smolder for decades in pain and then die.\u00a0 But that it was necessary to save American lives is the lie. It\u2019s always about American lives, as if the owners of the country actually cared about them.\u00a0 But to tender hearts and innocent minds, it\u2019s a magic incantation.\u00a0 Poor us!<\/p>\n

Fat Man, Little Boy \u2013 how the words echo down the years to the now fat Americans who grew up in the 1950s and who think like little boys and girls about their country\u2019s demonic nature.\u00a0 Innocence \u2013 it is wonderful!\u00a0 We are different now. \u201cWe are great because we are good,\u201d that\u2019s what Hillary Clinton told us.\u00a0 The Libyans can attest to that. \u00a0We are exceptional, special.\u00a0 The next election will prove we can defeat Mr. Pumpkin Head and restore America to its \u201ccore values.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps you think I am cynical.\u00a0 But understanding true evil is not child\u2019s play.\u00a0 It seems beyond the grasp of most Americans who need their illusions.\u00a0 Evil is real.\u00a0 There is simply no way to understand the savage nature of American history without seeing its demonic nature.\u00a0 How else can we redeem ourselves at this late date, possessed as we are by delusions of our own God-blessed goodness?<\/p>\n

But average Americans play at innocence.\u00a0 They excite themselves at the thought that with the next election the nation will be \u201crestored\u201d to the right course.\u00a0 Of course there never was a right course, unless might makes right, which has always been the way of America\u2019s rulers.\u00a0 Today Trump is viewed by so many as an aberration.\u00a0 He is far from it.\u00a0 He\u2019s straight out of a Twain short story.\u00a0 He\u2019s Vaudeville. He\u2019s Melville\u2019s confidence man.\u00a0 He\u2019s us. Did it ever occur to those who are fixated on him that if those who own and run the country wanted him gone, he\u2019d be gone in an instant?\u00a0 He can tweet and tweet idiotically, endlessly send out messages that he will contradict the next day, but as long as he protects the super-rich, accepts Israel\u2019s control of him, and allows the CIA-military-industrial complex to do its world-wide killing and looting of the treasury, he will be allowed to entertain and excite the public \u2013 to get them worked up in a lather in pseudo-debates. \u00a0And to make this more entertaining, he will be opposed by the \u201csane\u201d Democratic opposition, whose intentions are as benign as an assassin\u2019s smile.<\/p>\n

Look back as far as you can to past U.S. presidents, the figureheads who \u201cact under orders\u201d (whose orders?), as did Ahab in his lust to kill the \u201cevil\u201d great white whale, and what do you see?\u00a0 You see servile killers in the grip of a sinister power.\u00a0 You see hyenas with polished faces. You see pasteboard masks.\u00a0 On the one <\/strong>occasion when one of these presidents dared to follow his conscience and rejected the devil\u2019s pact that is the presidency\u2019s killer-in-chief role, he \u2013 JFK \u2013 had his brains blown out in public view.\u00a0 An evil empire thrives on shedding blood, and it enforces its will through demonic messages.\u00a0 Resist and there will be blood on the streets, blood on the tracks, blood in your face.<\/p>\n

Despite this, President Kennedy\u2019s witness, his turn from cold warrior to an apostle of peace, remains to inspire a ray of hope in these dark days. As recounted by James Douglass in his masterful JFK and the Unspeakable<\/em>, Kennedy agreed to a meeting in May 1962 with a group of Quakers who had been demonstrating outside the While House for total disarmament.\u00a0 They urged him to move in that direction. \u00a0Kennedy was sympathetic to their position.\u00a0 He said he wished it were easy to do so from the top down, but that he was being pressured by the Pentagon and others to never do that, although he had given a speech urging \u201ca peace race\u201d together with the Soviet Union. He told the Quakers it would have to come from below. \u00a0According to the Quakers, JFK listened intently to their points, and before they left said with a smile, \u201cYou believe in redemption don\u2019t you?\u201d\u00a0 Soon Kennedy was shaken to his core by the Cuban missile crisis when the world teetered on the brink of extinction and his insane military and \u201cintelligence\u201d advisers urged him to wage a nuclear war.\u00a0 Not long after, he took a sharp top-down turn toward peace despite their fierce opposition, a turn so dramatic over the next year that it led to his martyrdom.\u00a0 And he knew it would.\u00a0 He knew it would.<\/p>\n

So hope is not all lost.\u00a0 There are great souls like JFK to inspire us. Their examples flash here and there. But to even begin to hope to change the future, a confrontation with our demonic past (and present) is first necessary, a descent into the dark truth that is terrifying in its implications.\u00a0 False innocence must be abandoned.\u00a0 Carl Jung, in \u201cOn the Psychology of the Unconscious,\u201d addressed this with the words:<\/p>\n

It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses – and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster\u2019s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is so painfully aware.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How can one describe men who would intentionally slaughter so many innocent people?\u00a0 American history is rife with such examples up to the present day.\u00a0 Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, etc. \u2013 the list is very long.\u00a0 Savage wars carried out by men and women who own and run the country, and who try to buy the souls of regular people to join them in their pact with the devil, to acquiesce to their ongoing wicked deeds.\u00a0 Such monstrous evil was never more evident than on August 6 and 9, 1945.<\/p>\n

Unless we enter into deep contemplation of the evil that was released into the world with those bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we are lost in a living hell without escape.\u00a0 And we will pay.\u00a0 Nemesis always demands retribution.\u00a0 We have gradually been accepting rule by those for whom the killing of innocents is child\u2019s play, and we have been masquerading as innocent and good children for whom the truth is too much to bear.\u00a0 \u201cIndeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one,\u201d Screwtape the devil tells his nephew, Wormwood, a devil in training, \u201cthe gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.\u201d\u00a0 That\u2019s the road we\u2019ve been traveling.<\/p>\n

The projection of evil onto others works only so long. \u00a0We must reclaim our shadows and withdraw our projections.\u00a0 Only the fate of the world depends on it.<\/p>\n

_______________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a> and teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is <\/em>http:\/\/edwardcurtin.com\/<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Unless we enter into deep contemplation of the evil that was released into the world with those bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we are lost in a living hell without escape. And we will pay. Nemesis always demands retribution. We have gradually been accepting rule by those for whom the killing of innocents is child\u2019s play, and we have been masquerading as innocent and good children for whom the truth is too much to bear. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":89352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-116375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116375\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}