March 31, 2010

• Victims

  Double Nuclear Survivor - From the Economist

  All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.  And each man, in his time, plays many parts.

  Shakespeare, As you like it.

  What would it be like to survive not 1, but 2 nuclear explosions?  What might it be like remembering, collectively as a nation, being the only target of two nuclear bombs?  Every country remembers times when it is a victim, the grievances and the humiliation.  For many countries in east asia, they can remember being a victim of some external invasion or oppression.  It's often easy from certain nations' perspective to forget that one of the remembered oppressors was also uniquely subjected to terrible weapons.

  There is, therefore, a unique sensitivity to nuclear weapons in Japan... and it's interesting to realize that, while the US remembers Pearl Harbor readily enough, the abject terror that a nuclear bomb invokes is often forgotten.  It's similarly easy to remember Nanjing, and the number of people killed, raped and tortured -- and forget the number of non-combatants vapourized in Hiroshima and Nagasaki... or the number of secondary cancers that occurred from those bombs... also in innocent non-combatants.

  The list could go on... but there are few conflicts that only one side is at fault.  There are no peoples without sin.  Condemning any people categorically for their collective sins is dangerous business.

  The US should be particularly careful, as our own history of death and destruction is hardly short, despite the relative lack of longevity on the world stage.  Genocide, avarice, land grabs, financial manipulation, mass destruction - they've all been used by our government.

  Humility is always in order.

  • 5:44 pm
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