Thoughts on Nagasaki

I just received an email from a friend who just went to the Nagasaki museum. I would like to share it all with you. This week 60 odd years ago was the end of World War 2. I think that we should all never forget the atrocities that occurred and were inflicted upon all of mankind.

-Thoughts on Nagasaki-

It's crazy to me how we as humans bomb the shit out of each other, and
then build memorials to remember it and honour the victims. And it's weird
how we flock to these memorials and pay fees to enter museums. Why is it
that we visit them? Is it out of a sense of obligation to remember the victims?
To pay respect to them for their sacrifice? For most of them they were
simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. I think this fills people with a
degree of guilt, and perhaps on some level we feel it's our duty to
witness their suffering. I don't know.

Humanity's gruesomness fascinates and horrifies me. It fascinates me
because it seems so unbelieveable. Like the idea that dinosaurs once roamed
THIS earth... or that babies grow INSIDE us... or that the Universe is
infinite, yet possibly EXPANDING. These things boggle me. I can sit and think
about those three things and boggle and boggle until the cows come home and
never be any less blown away. Contemplating these insane wars has the same
effect on me. I look at pictures of Nagasaki after the explosion, and it is
nothing more than a steaming rubbish pile. A city reduced to smouldering ashes.
And then I imagine what it would be like if that were Vancouver or Toronto.
If someone obliterated everything I knew and loved. It's like something
out of Terminator, a scene so chilling and apocalyptic that it could only come
out of a sci-fi horror movie. And yet it happened. Here. Not during the
dark ages. Not in Roman times. We think Gladiator fights and the Crusades
were barbaric. When it comes down to it, not much has changed other than the
setting.

A single person murders five, and he is a sociopath and deemed unfit to
be a part of society. But a nation does the same to another, and it is part
of life. It is war. The victims are collateral damage. Can we shrug it off
simply because it's always been so, because that's the nature of our
world? Mankind's ability to inflict such pain on ITSELF is beyond my
comprehension.

It's horrendous to say, but after a while, all the pictures and stories
in all these museums start to blur together. From a distance, they are
indistinguishable from each other. Washington's Holocaust Museum,
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Cambodian Killing Fields, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City. I go
to these places and marvel and mourn. I force myself to read books like
Shake Hands With the Devil because I'm afraid of turning a blind eye to these
atrocities. I don't want these people to be forgotten. There will
always be things of which I am ignorant, but I never want to be ingorant about
these
events.

Unlike the museum in Hiroshima, Nagasaki's didn't gloss over the fact
that the bombs were dropped without warning. I am not discounting all the
horrible things the Japanese did during the war, but the fact of the
matter is the Americans were the victors and therefore "in the right" (and
vice versa) simply because they had the upper hand: they had a secret
weapon. And it's always easy to justify an evil deed after the fact. We live in an
ends justify the means world. I mean, isn't that the nature of capitalism?
Capitalism is, at the risk of oversimplifying a complex concept,
another form of war. But I digress (as I so often do...)

It's scary to think that we have the power to unleash such destruction,
that scientists devote their lives not to finding ways to make the world
better and safer, but to developing a science that fascilitates destruction;
that governments actually fund their research and development, and then fund
the efforts to prevent other governments from doing the same. And then they
fund the wars to sniff these other people out. Instead of expending energy
to obliterate nuclear warfare, our top nations are spending money to
IMPROVE it. Can't EVERYONE see that this is utter madness?

There was a Truman quote up on a wall wherein he stated that Nagasaki
(and undoubtedly Hiroshima) was bombed "in order to save the lives of
thousands of young Americans." Why were their lives worth more?

On display were several clocks and watches that had been collected from
the wreckage of what were once buildings. All stopped at 11:02. It was
chilling, and made me think of how many lives time stood still for at that
moment. Forever. 24 000 souls suspended in one second. I know it's a small
number compared to, say, the death toll in the Nazi concentration camps, but
each of those numbers was a person. And their only crime was that they were
Japanese. They were on the wrong side.

Outside of the museum there was a beautiful park, throughout which were
scattered peace statues donated to the city of Nagasaki by various
countries from around the world. Tons of mothers cradling babies and doves and
that sort of thing. I was pretty surprised to come across (the ugliest one
of all) a statue donated by the United States (literally seconds after
uttering to Aneke, "Imagine there was one from the States here!"). The nerve!
What, was it a consolation prize? Sorry we slaughtered all these people while
they were going about their morning activities. Here's a little reminder
that peace is the way to go, let's be friends (not like you have a choice),
and for next time, don't be so freaking evil.

Then I got to thinking - while digging the beauty of the park and
museum - of all the effort that was put towards the museum and the garden and
the park from the city of Nagasaki, as well as all these other countries.
All this energy and money put towards peace after the fact. Too late.

It was a Japanese doctor (who died from leukemia after the bombing) who
said, "The person who prays for peace must not hide even a needle, for
a person who possesses weapons is not qualified to pray for peace."

Sadly, this is appropriate considering the state of the world right
now.

All this hypocricy makes my head spin.

- Kristen.