65 Years Ago, Today, One of the Most Efficient Killers to ever have existed was Let Loose on Hiroshima. Us.
Many people on the street were killed almost instantly. The fingertips of those dead bodies caught fire and the fire gradually spread over their entire bodies from their fingers.
A light gray liquid dripped down their hands, scorching their fingers. I, I was so shocked to know that fingers and bodies could be burned and deformed like that. I just couldn’t believe it. It was horrible. And looking at it, it was more than painful for me to think how the fingers were burned, hands and fingers that would hold babies or turn pages, they just, they just burned away.
via gizmodo.com
Those words came from a post on Gizmodo today quoting Akiko Takakura. She was 20 years-old when she miraculously survived, just 300 feet, from where the atom bomb over Hiroshima detonated, 65 years ago, today. Read the rest of Takakura-san’s account and the accounts of other witnesses/survivors at Voice of Hibakusha (hibakusha=atomic bomb survivors).
To anyone who still maintains this action was justified, I simply say this:
With a single act, more than 50,000 people were wiped out. By the end of that year, an estimated 150,000 people had died from the bomb’s effects.
Did we need to become such efficient killers? Or could we have ended the war another way, without staining our hands with the blood of 150,000?
This isn’t about whether “they deserved it” or not. It’s about what we made ourselves on that day. It’s about what we continue to make ourselves any time we wage war. Is anything we gain worth that kind of violence, pain, destruction and loss?
I feel like denying that last part is like denying any hope at all for humanity.
"Yes, we had to kill all those people--there was no other way to win the war!"
Well, if that level of violence is what humanity sometimes requires to stop the fighting, what about us is worthy of survival at all?
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