A recent
discovery is shedding light on the century of relative peace that prevailed
after the first atomic weapon was used. The document that was recently found on
a small memory drive buried in layers of rubble may tell us something about the
intellectual climate that prevailed in the years leading up to the great
cataclysm. The document is concerned with the atomic attack on Hiroshima and
the subsequent hopes to live in a world without nuclear weapons. It seems to
have been delivered in Hiroshima as a speech at some time after the atomic bomb
was dropped on the city in 1945. However, according to archaeologists who are
analyzing the text, there is a frustrating lack of clues as to who wrote these
words, and there is a conspicuous, seemingly deliberate avoidance of reference
to specific historical figures, events, nations and contentious ideas about how
realize the goal of a nuclear-free world. One historian noted:
Aspirational
essays and speeches like this began to appear within months of the bombing in
August 1945, so it could have been any time over the next century. These
documents were remarkable for the degree to which eloquence was combined with
boilerplate, vapid, aspirational drivel that managed to refer to no actual
events or serious approaches for resolving the problem under discussion. As far
as this new discovery is concerned, we would love to know who spoke these words
and when. For now, it at least seems to shed light on the declining culture
that led to the global upheaval. Several theories are bouncing around. References
in the text tell us the speaker was American, and the mention of the “genetic
code” suggest it dates to the 1950s when DNA was first understood. Some believe
it was authored by a beauty pageant contestant, or a high school student in a
speech competition. It may have been such a person, someone who would have had
little knowledge about current events, only a vague knowledge of the outline of
world history, and definitely not any critical awareness of it. Another less
likely theory is that it was delivered by a highly placed political figure who
was painfully constrained by several factors such as public opinion, power
projected through dominant bureaucracies and financial interests, as well as his
or her own cognitive dissonance—the gap between long-ago stated goals and the
actual record of achievement.
The newly
discovered text follows:
______
…
years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world
was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and
demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.
Why
do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force
unleashed in a not-so-distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over
100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans, a dozen
Americans held prisoner.
Their
souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and
what we might become.
It
is not the fact of war that sets Hiroshima apart. Artifacts tell us that violent
conflict appeared with the very first man. Our early ancestors having learned
to make blades from flint and spears from wood used these tools not just for
hunting but against their own kind. On every continent, the history of
civilization is filled with war, whether driven by scarcity of grain or hunger
for gold, compelled by nationalist fervor or religious zeal. Empires have risen
and fallen. Peoples have been subjugated and liberated. And at each juncture,
innocents have suffered, a countless toll, their names forgotten by time.
The
world war that reached its brutal end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fought
among the wealthiest and most powerful of nations. Their civilizations had
given the world great cities and magnificent art. Their thinkers had advanced
ideas of justice and harmony and truth. And yet the war grew out of the same
base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflicts among the
simplest tribes, an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new
constraints.
In
the span of a few years, some 60 million people would die. Men, women,
children, no different than us. Shot, beaten, marched, bombed, jailed, starved,
gassed to death. There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war,
memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism, graves and empty camps that
echo of unspeakable depravity.
Yet
in the image of a mushroom cloud that rose into these skies, we are most
starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction. How the very spark that
marks us as a species, our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our
toolmaking, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our
will — those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.
How
often does material advancement or social innovation blind us to this truth?
How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.
Every
great religion promises a pathway to love and peace and righteousness, and yet
no religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith as a
license to kill.
Nations
arise telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation,
allowing for remarkable feats. But those same stories have so often been used
to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.
Science
allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds, to cure
disease and understand the cosmos, but those same discoveries can be turned
into ever more efficient killing machines.
The
wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth.
Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can
doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom
requires a moral revolution as well.
That
is why we come to this place. We stand here in the middle of this city and
force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell. We force ourselves to feel
the dread of children confused by what they see. We listen to a silent cry. We
remember all the innocents killed across the arc of that terrible war and the
wars that came before and the wars that would follow.
Mere
words cannot give voice to such suffering. But we have a shared responsibility
to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to
curb such suffering again.
Someday,
the voices of the hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness. But the
memory of the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, must never fade. That memory allows us
to fight complacency. It fuels our moral imagination. It allows us to change.
And
since that fateful day, we have made choices that give us hope. The United
States and Japan have forged not only an alliance but a friendship that has won
far more for our people than we could ever claim through war. The nations of
Europe built a union that replaced battlefields with bonds of commerce and
democracy. Oppressed people and nations won liberation. An international
community established institutions and treaties that work to avoid war and
aspire to restrict and roll back and ultimately eliminate the existence of
nuclear weapons.
Still,
every act of aggression between nations, every act of terror and corruption and
cruelty and oppression that we see around the world shows our work is never
done. We may not be able to eliminate man’s capacity to do evil, so nations and
the alliances that we form must possess the means to defend ourselves. But
among those nations like my own that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the
courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.
We
may not realize this goal in my lifetime, but persistent effort can roll back
the possibility of catastrophe. We can chart a course that leads to the
destruction of these stockpiles. We can stop the spread to new nations and
secure deadly materials from fanatics.
And
yet that is not enough. For we see around the world today how even the crudest
rifles and barrel bombs can serve up violence on a terrible scale. We must
change our mind-set about war itself. To prevent conflict through diplomacy and
strive to end conflicts after they’ve begun. To see our growing interdependence
as a cause for peaceful cooperation and not violent competition. To define our
nations not by our capacity to destroy but by what we build. And perhaps, above
all, we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human
race.
For
this, too, is what makes our species unique. We’re not bound by genetic code to
repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn. We can choose. We can tell our
children a different story, one that describes a common humanity, one that
makes war less likely and cruelty less easily accepted.
We
see these stories in the hibakusha. The woman who forgave a pilot who flew the
plane that dropped the atomic bomb because she recognized that what she really
hated was war itself. The man who sought out families of Americans killed here
because he believed their loss was equal to his own.
My
own nation’s story began with simple words: All men are created equal and
endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights including life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness. Realizing that ideal has never been easy, even
within our own borders, even among our own citizens. But staying true to that
story is worth the effort. It is an ideal to be strived for, an ideal that
extends across continents and across oceans. The irreducible worth of every
person, the insistence that every life is precious, the radical and necessary
notion that we are part of a single human family — that is the story that we
all must tell.
That
is why we come to Hiroshima. So that we might think of people we love. The
first smile from our children in the morning. The gentle touch from a spouse
over the kitchen table. The comforting embrace of a parent. We can think of
those things and know that those same precious moments took place here… years
ago.
Those
who died, they are like us. Ordinary people understand this, I think. They do
not want more war. They would rather that the wonders of science be focused on
improving life and not eliminating it. When the choices made by nations, when
the choices made by leaders, reflect this simple wisdom, then the lesson of
Hiroshima is done.
The
world was forever changed here, but today the children of this city will go
through their day in peace. What a precious thing that is. It is worth
protecting, and then extending to every child. That is a future we can choose,
a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic
warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.
______
If
you’ve read this far, the jig is up. You know this is the Hiroshima
Statement read by US President Barack Obama on May 27, 2016. For the sake
of setting up the satire, I deleted the two references to “seventy-one years ago.”
Other than these two indications in the original, the point made here remains.
This long statement is stripped of context and importance. It says nothing of
substance about nuclear disarmament. The best thing to come out of the
president’s visit is the fact that Hiroshima and Nagasaki received so much
attention from the world media and the visit provoked many writers to make
excellent analyses that were infinitely better than the statement delivered in
Hiroshima Peace Park:
Eric Draitser, “Obama in Hiroshima: A Case Study in Hypocrisy,” Stop Imperialism, May 20, 2016.
Gar Alperovitz, “We didn’t need to drop the bomb — and even our WW II military icons knew it,” Salon, May 12, 2016.
Jack Mirkinson, “America’s enduring Hiroshima shame: Why Barack Obama should apologize for the atomic bomb — but won’t,” Salon, May 12, 2016.
Miki Toda and Mari Yamaguchi, “Japanese Don’t Expect Apology from Obama During Visit to Hiroshima,” Global News, May 11, 2016.
Simon Wood, “Obama Does Hiroshima,” Dianuke.org, May 28, 2016.
