Team Genocide Walks Out on Nagasaki Commemorations

In an astonishing “Fuck you” to the survivors of the 1945 US nuclear bombing of Nagasaki, several Western countries including the US, Australia, Canada, France, Italy and the UK have just dropped a bombshell: announcing their ambassadors are shunning this week’s commemorations in solidarity with Israel.

Last week the mayor of Nagasaki, Shiro Suzuki, rescinded Israel’s invitation to the annual peace ceremony. It was a gentle but pointed diplomatic message: Lest we forget what it was – and still is – all about.

Shigemitsu Tanaka, the 83-year-old head of the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Survivors Council, supports the move to keep the Israelis away from the commemorations saying it was inappropriate to invite representatives from countries waging armed conflicts in defiance of calls from the international community.

As a hibakusha – “a survivor of the bomb” – his words carry, or should carry, weight.  The average age of a hibakusha is 88 years old. For some this will be their last commemoration.  Their lives will be book-ended by nuclear blasts killing hundreds of thousands of civilians at one end and a powerful statement of Western contempt for both Japanese and Palestinian civilian lives at the other.

It is likely that in generations to come people will look back on the governments of these Western countries as a kind of moral detritus floating across an ocean of American violence.

The atomic bomb that exploded over Nagasaki at 11:02 on the morning of 9 August 1945 took the lives of 74,000 people.  As with Hiroshima a few days earlier, the Americans decided that killing civilians was a legitimate tactic to achieve a strategic victory.

The people of Gaza have had several times more US-Israeli bombs, by explosive power, dropped on them than was inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined; a staggering statistic.

The US can, rightly, condemn Hamas for killing hundreds of Israeli civilians on October 7th, but has the chutzpah to say mass killings of civilians are ok when it’s done by them. People will passionately argue every side of this but should attempt to discover some central core of consistency amongst the complexity, not least because consistency is the cornerstone of both morality and rationality.

Back in June Mayor Suzuki sent a letter to the Israeli ambassador calling for a ceasefire.  He pointed out that as a child of survivors of the Nagasaki bombing he knew only too well the human cost of armed conflict.

It is worth remembering that no US President has ever apologised for the deliberate targeting of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians. With this in mind, their attendance at previous Hiroshima and Nagasaki commemorations is akin to a murderer turning up at a funeral. Sorry is obviously the hardest word.

George HW Bush said the nuclear attack on civilians was right because it spared American lives. U.S. President Bill Clinton said, “the United States owes no apology to Japan for having dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”  George W Bush was widely condemned for his offensive comment, “Hey let’s forget that, let’s go forward now together.”

I grew up in the afterglow of those detonations in a New Zealand that had very little sympathy for the Japanese civilians who died. Today I live in a New Zealand where our government has little practical sympathy for the similar number of Palestinians who have died due to yet more American bombs.  According to The Lancet, the authoritative British medical journal, by July this year 186,000 Palestinian lives have likely been taken in the US-Israeli War on Gaza – a figure higher than usually reported because, as well as the bodies actually recovered, it calculates the bodies under the 150,000 buildings flattened in the bombings.

We still live in a world where killing huge numbers of civilians is considered justified if the aim is to achieve a strategic victory.  This week Israeli Cabinet Minister Bezalel Smotrich told Israel Hayom, “We can’t, in the current global reality, manage a war. Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger even though it might be justified and moral until our hostages are returned.”  Latest figures: 115 hostages are being held in Gaza, several thousand Palestinian hostages are being held in Israel, including political leaders such as Marwan Barghouti and children who threw stones.

Reading Smotrich’s words, hearing those 70,000 tonnes of bombs exploding on men, women and children, the millions of bullets sprayed or sniped at those same civilians, it is not hard to understand why Palestinians fear the Israelis are planning a Final Solution to the Palestinian Question.

I note that Turkey is the latest in a growing list of countries joining South Africa’s ICJ genocide case against Israel. Consistency would suggest that New Zealand, Australia and the rest should join them.

I commend the people of Nagasaki for keeping the representatives of Israel out of their city.  I think the US, UK, Australia and the other Western nations who spat out their contempt for the hibakusha and their important moral stance should hang their heads in shame.

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