Sixty-One

Today marks the 61st anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Nagasaki, Japan. Having worked for a peace and justice organization for the past four years, I’ve always been struck with how many people forget about Nagasaki. I don’t know if it’s because Hiroshima happened first, or if Hiroshima Day gets more attention, but I always found it odd that Nagasaki gets overlooked. I sometimes wonder if people realize that it was a full three days after Hiroshima that Nagasaki was bombed.

I wrote an article several years ago, condemning a display at the Smithsonian that essentially celebrated the dropping of nuclear bombs in Japan. It was an exhibit dedicated to the Enola Gay. I think I received more hate mail from that article than from anything else I’ve written. More than 100,000 people died in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and yet, so many people still think that dropping those bombs on Japan was an act of justice; a victory for American heroism over ruthless tyrants.

Arundahti Roy, an activist and author of The God of Small Things, offers some appropriate words for this day. She pulls no punches.

“The nuclear bomb is the most antidemocratic, antinational, antihuman, outright evil thing that man has ever made. If you are religious, then remember that this bomb is man’s challenge to God. It’s worded quite simply. We have the power to destroy everything that You have created.”

“If you’re not [religious], then look at it this way. This world of ours is four thousand six hundred million years old. It could end in an afternoon.”

The world’s nuclear powers are all just one big recipe for Holocaust. Now that’s something to be scared about.

But there’s a challenge in this for us, articulated by spiritual author Henri Nouwen, to remember the death caused on August 6 (Hiroshima) and August 9 (Nagasaki).

“To forget our sins may be an even greater sin than to commit them. Why? Because what is forgotten cannot be healed and that which cannot be healed easily becomes the cause of greater evil. In his many books about the Holocaust, Elie Wiesel does not remind us of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Treblinka to torture our consciences with heightened guilt feelings, but to allow our memories to be healed and so to prevent an even worse disaster. An Auschwitz that is forgotten causes a Hiroshima, and a forgotten Hiroshima can cause the destruction of our world. By cutting off our past we paralyze our future: forgetting the evil behind us we evoke the evil in front of us.”

That last part is so powerful. If nothing else, perhaps the sheer act of remembering August 6 and August 9 will prevent future Hiroshimas and Nagasakis from happening again.