A DAY OF INFAMY

JUNE 6,1945

The definition of terrorist is: someone who uses violence, especially bombing, kidnapping and assassination to intimidate others often for political purposes.

I can remember in Vietnam the war cry of ‘Kill-um all and let God sort it out’.    I was outraged when the civilians cried for justice and the government prosecuted the soldiers at My Lai.   To a military man in a war zone the most important thing in the world is your band of brothers – fuck everyone else.  You take fire from a village you ‘kill-um all and let God sort it out’.

An attack on a civilian population is an atrocity.   The military can get bound up in war mania and try to justify the killing of women, children and old people as collateral damage that is the unavoidable result of waging war.   But the intentional targeting of a civilian population for annihilation is, and should be, looked on as a war crime – a crime against humanity.  

We celebrate, in our macabre way, the attack on the World Trade Center on 9-11; and, as a results, we readily condemn an entire race for the killing of three thousand civilians on our hallowed soil.  This will go down in our children’s history books as a shockingly cruel act of wanton violence.   

However, in our children’s history books you will never find the account of the most blatant, heinous assaults ever executed by a nation with the intention of annihilating   a specific civilian population.    The reason for this omission is that the United States of America conducted this assault.

It was eight-o-clock in the morning on August 6, 1945.   Mothers were feeding there children in preparation for school, old people were having their morning tea,  men were leaving for work - while somewhere off the coast a B-29 bomber called The Enola Gay was headed for its target.  

Fifteen minutes later the American Air Crew released the first nuclear bomb, nicknamed Little Boy, which detonated 1900 feet above the city of Hiroshima, Japan.  The blast instantly killed one hundred and forty thousand of the three hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants, turning two thirds of the city to rubble. 

This act of war against a civilian population - this crime against humanity - was celebrated at the time, but later became a footnote to be omitted from our history.