Translation
of https://translate.google.com/?hl=hu&sl=hu&tl=en&op=docs
For the seventy-fifth anniversary of the end of World War II
- commemoration on the
WJLF
-
02/09/2020 18 h.
Tibor Péter Nagy:
We celebrate the Day of Liberation in Europe in May 1945, but we
must not forget that for hundreds of millions of people, the war lasted until
the end of the summer. In May 1945, Japan still occupied several times its
territory and kept the peoples of East Asia and North Oceania under
unimaginable oppression. Japan was responsible for the deaths of nearly
six percent of the Indonesian population, nearly four percent of the Chinese
population, four percent of the Indochina population, nearly two percent of the
Burmese population - twenty-five million people (civilians and soldiers) - declared
enemies of Japan, and Japan itself lost six
percent of its population. Months after the defeat of Nazism in Europe,
Japan managed millions of more heavily fanatized armies that had not yet
suffered a decisive continental defeat, fighting primarily the U.S. military,
and by the end of the summer soldiers from the entire anti-fascist coalition,
Japan rejected the capitulation offer.
Seventy-five years ago, with the experimental bombing in Los
Alamos, the most powerful scientific enterprise in world history ended in July
1945, the two atomic bombs were deployed in August, forcing Japan to
capitulate, saving millions of casualties in potential civilian areas of
continental and Japanese life in the coming months. preventing losses
comparable to those of the European war between Allied armies and soldiers of
the Japanese army.
Contary these facts, however, historians and politicians have
been debating the correctness of developing and deploying atomic bombs ever
since, and there is no consensus that nuclear weapons have made the world after
1945 better or worse.
A more livable world has emerged in most of the territories liberated
from Japanese occupation, although this region is also associated with the
worst genocide in post-1945 history, and billions of people still live in
dictatorships today. Japan has become part of the democratic world, but
there, as in post-2010 Hungary, there are still memory politicians who would
like to remember the country's role in World War II in a positive way.
John Wesley Theologian College shares the grief caused by the
Asian allies of Nazism, pays tribute to all those who actively opposed
totalitarianism, and pays special tribute to the memory of soldiers who
sacrificed a lifetime of indivisible human freedom very far from their
homeland.
Those interested in the issues of the end of the Second World
War, those committed to remembrance, experts and lay people are welcome to have
a quiet conversation on Capitulation Day on 2 September 2020 at 6 pm.
Comment by Ferenc Laczó:
Glare: For the 75th anniversary of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima
Atomic bombs dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on
August 6 and 9, 1945, in the final phase of World War II, opened a new era in
human history: the Cold War rivalry in the second half of the 20th century, in
the spirit of the irrational spiral of nuclear weapons unfolded in the shadow
of fear.
In light of all this, it is also surprising that the fact that the
atomic bomb attack by the Americans can be said to be well known is an event
that is rarely and rather superficially discussed these days. Compared to
many other topics, the historical literature on the use and consequences of the
atomic bomb is rather small, and its memory has been declining in recent
decades - paradoxically, just as the memory of the Holocaust, this other major
catastrophe of World War II, increased significantly.
The sometimes heated debate in the past 75 years over the
deployment of atomic bombs, characterized by characteristic euphemism as a
little boy and a fat man, has revolved mainly around the issue of effectiveness. To
what extent can the deployment of this terrible and previously unimaginable
means of destruction against Japan be considered useful, especially in view of
Japan's capitulation in mid-August 1945? To what extent did the dropping
of the two atomic bombs shorten the final phase of the war, thus saving the
lives of how many American and (so to speak) Japanese soldiers, and how does
this relate to the devastation they caused?
While Western public debates have often revolved around such
scaling questions, the discussion of the issue of efficiency obscures the basic
fact:
the two atomic bombs completely deliberately caused the deaths of
hundreds of thousands of civilians, thus clearly exhausting the notion of both
war crime and crimes against humanity.
Efficiency is therefore also a misleading criterion. It is
worth distinguishing, at most, between the German use of poison gases in World
War I and the use of the atomic bomb in World War II in terms of the magnitude
of the human life extinguished and the damage caused. It is morally
impossible. By analogy, we can also think of the recently discussed
example of torture, which, while it may prove effective in some cases, is also
a terrible and clearly condemnable crime.
It is important to clarify that while Hiroshima was indeed a
significant city for the Japanese military, its destruction to the dust thus
had tactical purposes, not even in the case of Nagasaki. The latter city
was chosen by the Americans almost randomly, in part because of current weather
conditions. The facts also include the fact that, on top of 9 August, an
even more devastating plutonium bomb was dropped from high altitude in
Nagasaki. The number of victims in Hiroshima exposed to the uranium bomb
attack was ultimately higher, however, because American criminals found the
latter’s downtown virtually full, while flying over Nagasaki they failed to
target similarly accurately.
A typical addition is that the first experimental nuclear bombing
of the Americans took place in mid-July in the New Mexico desert, just three
weeks before the bombing of Hiroshima. The impact of the deployment of the
atomic bomb on crowded cities - the killing of masses - could be enveloped in
advance after this attempt, but the multifaceted dire consequences were
impossible to assess in advance. Based on these, it is clear that the
brutal crime was also of an experimental nature.
The result of the deployment of the atomic bomb 75 years ago was
mass anonymous death. The brutal attempt at hundreds of thousands, mostly
civilians, led to the immediate burning of masses of people and then to the
mass deaths of those who had just escaped as a result of the radiation effect -
it was often not possible to identify the former victims.
The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is thus a landmark
example of nonhuman death in the twentieth century, in this respect most
comparable to the Nazi extermination camps of the Holocaust, the
Vernichtungslagerei.
As the main crime of the Nazis, in the case of the Holocaust, is
to say that millions were killed by rather primitive means in a few years, the
Americans practically killed hundreds of thousands by standing on top of
contemporary (by the way, mostly immigrants, well-known immigrants from Hungary)
science. from one moment to the next, taking into account most victims of
radiation in just a few months.
Undoubtedly, the fact that almost all local hospitals, along with
their doctors, were almost all victims of the unexpected attack also played a
role in the many tens of thousands of the latter.
Assessing the means of mass murder is also a source of particular
shock to Hiroshima and Nagasaki: the two bombs, which detonated their
kilometers to thousands of degrees Celsius and thus destroyed virtually
everything within that radius, were only a few cubic meters per head. (The
little boy and fat man bombs differed little in size, but rather in shape.)
After the shadow of the people who died the monster burned in several places on
the remains of Hiroshima and Nagasaki's buildings, only wildflowers grew among
human bones and building ruins for weeks.
The deployment of the two atomic bombs, meanwhile, is worth
considering as the end point of two processes. Perhaps the most obvious
context is the escalation of the World War II bombings, which the Germans began
on the European stage of the war with the brutal bombing of Rotterdam, Coventry
and many other cities, and of which German cities later became the main
victims.
By 1945, for example, there was little left of Cologne city center
outside the world-famous Duomo. Dresden is perhaps most popular with
Hungarian readers from Kurt Vonnegut's popular novel The British-American
Carpet Bombing of Slaughterhouse No. 5 - which, by objective standards, also
falls into the category of war crimes, but which is still sharply politicized
and sadistic in Germany. a place of remembrance maintained by the right - the
Japanese capitulation was preceded just half a year ago. The unprecedented
tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was the extreme end of this process of war
escalation, which extended to the islands of Japan.
American perpetrators from the island of Tinian, about 2,500
kilometers from Hiroshima, with B-29 bombers have already bombed people and
their cities in many places and on many occasions in the past. By 1945,
mass murder from the sky had obviously become a special routine for them: their
contemporary interviews showed that they did not really perceive a difference
between their earlier actions and the August 1945 deployment of the atomic
bomb.
The other relevant context is, in short, a decade and a half of
Japan’s brutal expansion.
As a result of the Japanese aggression against China, which began
with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and then expanded in 1937, the event we
call World War II actually began in Asia years earlier than in Europe.
In short, I have just mentioned a decade and a half of Japanese
expansion, as Korea, for example, has been officially under Japanese rule since
1910 and, in an inseparable way, has also suffered many Korean victims of
American nuclear bombings.
Thus, August 1945 is the culmination of this massive history of
Japanese expansion and repression, which still largely determines the battles
of memory politics in the Far East, a milestone in modern Japanese history —
despite the reign of Emperor Hirohito announcing his capitulation on August 15.
is over.
Japan’s catastrophic defeat, which brought an end to Japanese
imperialism and militarism, also proved to be the beginning of democratization
under American umbrella and economic prosperity. In view of all this,
Japan's defeat in the war can be called not only deserved, but in a sense (so
to speak, following the German example) lucky. The terrible crime of
August 1945 by the conquering-liberating Americans, who are still in close
alliance with the Japanese, could not, at first, and later would not have been
able to make it one of the central elements of Japanese history.
A comparable loss of significance has also occurred in the United
States, where the European war sinks of World War II and the crimes of the main
enemy, the Nazis, have been remembered more regularly in recent decades than
the Japanese battlefield. Although, since entering the war following the
attack on Pearl Harbor, the Pacific region has been at least as central to
American warfare. It’s also easy to find arguments that the title of
America’s main enemy of the war years belongs to the Japanese rather than the
Germans - just think of the resettlement and internment of Japanese-Americans
in the United States, a policy that had no systematic counterpart to those of
European descent.
If we are to make a brief prediction, in the light of American
foreign policy, which is increasingly focusing on Far Eastern relations (this
shift in emphasis was under the key concept of pivot to Asia under Barack
Obama's presidency), the history of this massive Pacific front is expected to
be rediscovered in the near future. it will be from World War II that the then
main enemy is now an ally, and China, “raped” by the Japanese, is now America’s
main rival.
In this respect, the Far Eastern formula for remembrance continues
to be reminiscent of the Cold War European situation, where the main ally of
the war years (the Soviet Union) became the main rival, while the former main
enemy became the most important ally (West Germany).
What did the free public of the United States and the West more
broadly begin with the unprecedented tragedy of the atomic bomb attack?
The most significant early attempt to reconstruct what happened in
Hiroshima was made by John Hersey (1914–93), a popular American writer and
experienced war correspondent. As a child of missionaries, Hersey, who
spent the first ten years of her life in China and also received a Pulitzer Prize
for her fact-based novel The Bell for Adano, which discusses the events of the
war in Italy, worked primarily for Life and Time magazines during the war
years.
The acclaimed and still only 32-year-old author had already
visited Hiroshima in 1946 on behalf of the New Yorker magazine, typically as
virtually the only American correspondent to report on the relatively
short-term consequences of the world’s first nuclear attack. (It is a
remarkable fact that the very first interviews with the survivors of the Nazi
camps were conducted in parallel, including in Budapest.)
Hersey devoted a full number of her precise report, written with a
sense of fiction, to a total of about 20,000 words, as a unique exception in
the history of the magazine. The English-language report, which later
appeared in book form, has since sold about three million copies. Thanks
to one of the outstanding literary translators of the period, Endre Gáspár
(1897–1955), the Hungarian translation of Hersey's work was completed by 1947,
which has unfortunately been practically forgotten since then. So what
advanced in the United States to become one of the best-known and most
significant classics of the twentieth century could have had almost no effect
in Hungary, despite its contemporary translation.
Although, with the exception of his most famous work, Hersey is
probably still read by few on the other side of the Atlantic today, the author
devoted six significant books to various aspects of World War II in the 1940s
and 1950s. Consistent with Michael Rothberg's theory of multidirectional
memory interactions, he was the author of The Wall (first edition: 1950), the
first famous American novel about the Holocaust and, more specifically, the
history of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Hersey, who could perhaps best be described as a solid moralist
refraining from formulating explicit political messages, in his works of war,
he firmly questioned the dominant American image of heroic efforts on the right
side.
On the side of the victors, the war, which has often been mythical
since then, has been portrayed as a contemporary human catastrophe, showing,
among other things, Rutger Bregman's arguments about warfare, showing that most
American soldiers were far from committed and enthusiastic warriors.
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Hersey did not want to write
about complicated mathematical formulas and epoch-making scientific
breakthroughs in connection with the atomic bomb, but rather tried to examine
the direct effect of atomic bombs dropped on Japanese cities.
How to approach the unprecedented tragedy of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki? Is it possible at all to report an event that caused the
unexpected death of hundreds of thousands?
In his account of Hiroshima, John Hersey primarily sought to
portray what the relatively fortunate survivors of the attack went through. Arriving
in the exploded city, he decided to show individual life paths, unfolding the
intertwined personal stories of six survivors.
With this, he was able to bring the Japanese, who were strongly
despised by many of them, closer to his American audience. By highlighting
local doctors and Christians, he was also able to reduce the sense of cultural
distance - although he clearly did not want to provide a representative pattern
in this way. In addition to the fact that Hersey was indeed the first to
elaborate on a topic of current and universal significance, the unparalleled
success of his book was probably due to this humane decision, a close-to-person
presentation of the shocking events.
In addition to the suddenness of the devastation and the
inconceivable extent of the devastation, the hell of the first hours and days
after the attack is also detailed in the pages of his carefully composed book,
which presents the unparalleled drama in a lean style. The author,
meanwhile, repeatedly shows that the bombed locals had no idea even after the
incident what attack they had actually suffered.
“The hospital staff was convinced that the big bomb may have had
some peculiar feature because on the second day, the deputy director of the
hospital went down to the basement where the X-ray plates were kept and found
that everyone was exposed,” he reports.
According to Hersey’s report, in 1946, the survivors - in Japanese
their name, are faucets, the so-called individuals under the influence of
an explosion - their reactions fluctuated between total shock and crippling
depression. The flaws presented were typically either too busy saving
their lives or too preoccupied to show more serious interest in almost incomprehensible
events. In 1945–46, they were not even aware of the destructive effects of
radioactive radiation - they were only able to assess the damage, which was
still decades old or even newly felt, only gradually.
As John Hersey's forty-year report on Hiroshima: The Aftermath,
which focuses on the stories of the same six people after 1945, reveals, in
addition to the particular fortunes of survival that are often shamefully
survived, miscarriages have to deal with a number of complicated troubles and
general distress. . In post-war, increasingly prosperous Japan, they were
also exposed to various forms of stigma and discrimination, as many of their
fellow citizens found them unfit for regular work as well as marriage and
succession.
It was not until 1957 that the Japanese state began providing free
health care to the survivors of an unprecedented human disaster. The
relevant law is the so-called classified the individuals affected by the
detonation into four categories, distinguishing between those present at the
time of the nuclear explosion, those who turned up there within fourteen days,
those who came into direct contact with the victims, and those born to women in
the first three categories immediately after the tragedy. Defective
minions with irreparable and permanent damage only began to receive regular
monthly benefits even later.
The dust-torn city of Hiroshima, meanwhile, has been rebuilt - by
1945, its population had swelled to about a third of the number before August. On
the fourth anniversary of the bombing, this rebuilt city, which has almost
without exception destroyed the rubble, was called by the so-called peace. It
was designated as a memorial city, establishing a memorial park with several
elements, which has been open to the public ever since (perhaps the most
spectacular part of this complex is one of the ruins left as an exception
anyway).
It is astonishing, yet true, that Hiroshima has virtually regained
its former importance within the Japanese urban network since 1945 - with more than
one million inhabitants, it is now the 11th largest city in Japan. August
with its sixth annual commemorations and numerous, “never again!” with its
international event in the spirit of the city, the city is, among other things,
a center of peace activism in the (at least nominally) demilitarized country.
The shocking story of the deployment of the atomic bomb 75 years
ago has shed a blinding light on the dual nature of man — his unprecedented
inventiveness and unparalleled cruelty.
Hiroshima is also a symbolic gate through which humanity has
entered the age of nuclear warfare. Perhaps it is worth thinking of this
gate that this is where the final destruction of the human world began.
There is so much doubt that by the time this really proves, there
will be no more who will write it.
Answer by Tibor Péter Nagy:
I am glad that my excellent colleague Ferenc
Laczó shared this article of Mérce, with which, although only marked For your
information, he obviously agrees somewhat. I myself pointed out in the
original post that there are debates about the real purpose, utility, and
legitimacy of the development and deployment of the atomic bomb. That’s
why what I posted is not simply an entry - but also a suggestion for a quiet
Saturday night conversation for someone who wants to be more comfortable on
Dankó Street in front of their computer screen worldwide. There is no
doubt that countless excellent books, studies, articles and documentaries have
been written to support the gut of our own kind: the fact that we are horrified
by the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people and, of course, the
protracted health effects of nuclear explosions decades later. they also took
their victims. But the human mind still works in such a way that a single
tragic event with many casualties is more shocking than an event with many
fewer casualties - plane crashes, high-speed train collisions are always
leading news - while the number of car accident victims per hundred thousand
passenger kilometers is incomparably higher. The tens of thousands of
innocent victims of the two atomic bombs are part of a longer series of
historical events in which tens of millions of innocent people died, with more
than twenty-seven thousand victims each day of the nearly 2,200-day story. People
of our kind hate war as much as they are averse to military solutions, as do
most American and British citizens of the 1930s who believed that by not
interfering, they would preserve peace and freedom for their own territory and
their own lives for their own generation. It turned out that they were
wrong to start defending freedom earlier, with tens of millions more innocent
people worth the fall of 1945. But without sacrifices, there is never a
better world - and it has been no different since then. It's hard to
accept that. That is why, I think, we need to not only remember but also
talk