hiroshima

Hiroshima

Mika here

Perhaps it's dangerous to jump in here, but I feel a certain obligation to r espond to this comment. It is very true that Japan was far from innocent. In fact, it was as guilty of colonial expansionism in Southeast Asia as any European power.

But one thing I must insist you understand: the bomb on Hiroshima set a new (low) standard for human barbarism. At the onset of WWII, many people in the west were horrified, and rightly so, by the targeting of civillian populations by the Nazis in Spain and in Poland and later, in England.

Also, by Japan in Mongolia. By the end of the war though, the "military algebra" made civillian bombings a common practice of all parties. Hence, Dresden. Hence, Hiroshima. And worse, in my opinion, because it was so coldly calculated as a experimental test of the other desgin of the bomb, Nagasaki three days later.

The point is not to fight the war again. (Thank God Japan and America are close partners!) I and I am so very glad that your relatives were not killed. The point I wish to stress is not that *Japan* didn't deserve the A-Bomb, but rather that the people who were instantly turned into standing piles of ash, or whose skin dripped from their fingers like water, were *people* Just regular ordinary people. Just like the ones under the rubble of Oaklahoma City.

Please, don't turn the people who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki into a "them" There were an *us*--all of us. As Kundera observed, "people are not the subjects of history; they are the objects of history." Out of respect for the dead, please do not "objectify" them.

Thank you for your kind attention.

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