Thoughts on Nagasaki

It's crazy to me how we as humans bomb the shit out of each other, and then build memorials to remember it and honour the victims. And it's weird how we flock to these memorials and pay fees to enter museums. Why is it that we visit them? Is it out of a sense of obligation to remember the victims? To pay respect to them for their sacrifice? For most of them they were ismply at the wrong place at the wrong time. I think this fills people with a degree of guilt, and perhaps on some level we feel it's our duty to witness their suffering.

I don't know.

Humanity's gruesomenss fascinates and horrifies me. It fascinates me because it seems so unbelievable. Like the idea that dinosaurs once roamed THIS earth... or that babies grow INSIDE us... or that the Universe is infinite, yet possibly EXPANDING. These things boggle me. I can sit and think about those three things and boggle and boggle until the cows come home and never be any less blown away. Contemplating these insane wars has the same effect on me. I look at pictures of Nagasaki after the explosion, and it is nothing more than a steaming rubbish pile. A city reduced to smouldering ashes. And then I imagine what it would be like if that were Vancouver or Toronto. If someone obliterated everything I knew and loved. It's like something out of Terminator, a scene so chilling and apocalyptic that it could only come out of a sci-fi horror movie. And yet it happened. Here. Not during the dark ages. Not in Roman times. We think Gladiator fights and the Crusades were barbaric. When it comes down to it, not much as changed other than the setting.

A single person murders five, and he is a sociopath and deemed unfit to be a part of society. But a nation does the same to another, and it is part of life. It is war. The victims are collateral damage. Can we shrug it off simply because it's always been so, because that's the nature of our world? Mankind's ability to inflict such pain on ITSELF is beyond my comprehension.

It's horrendous to say, but after a while, all the pictures and stories in all these museums start to blur together. From a distance, they are indistinguishable from each other. Washington's Holocaust Museum, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Cambodian Killing Fields, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City. I go to these places and marvel and mourn. I force myself to read books like Shake Hands With the Devil because I'm afraid of turning a blind eye to these atrocities. I don't want these people to be forgotten. There will always be things of which I am ignorant, but I never want to be ignorant about these events.

Unlike the museum in Hiroshima, Nagasaki's didn't gloss over the fact that the bombs were dropped without warning. I am not discounting all the horrible things the Japanese did during the war, but the fact of the matter is the Americans were the victors and therefore "in the right" (and vice versa) simply because they had the upper hand: they had a secret weapon. And it's always easy to justify an evil deed after the fact. We live in an ends justify the means world. I mean, isn't that the nature of capitalism? Capitalism is, at the risk of oversimplifying a complex concept, another form of war. But I digress (as I so often do...)

It's scary to think that we have the power to unleash such destruction, that scientists devote their lives not to finding ways to make the world better and safer, but to developing a science that facilitates destruction; that governments actually fund their research and development, and then fund the efforts to prevent other governments from doing the same. And then they fund the wars to sniff these other people out. Instead of expending energy to obliterate nuclear warfare, our top nations are spending money to IMPROVE it. Can't EVERYONE see that this is utter madness?

There was a Truman quote up on a wall wherin he stated that Nagasaki (and undoubtedly Hiroshima) was bombed "in order to save the lives of thousands of young Americans." Why were their lives worth more?

On display were several clocks and watches that had been collected from the wreckage of what were once buildings. All stopped at 11:02. It was chilling, and it made me think of how many lives time stood still for at that moment. Forever. 40, 000 souls suspended in one second. I know it's a small number compared to, say, the death toll in the Nazi concentration camps, but each of those numbers was a person. And their only crim was that they were Japanese. They were on the wrong side.

Outside of the museum there was a beautiful park, throughout which were scattered peace statues donated to the City of Nagasaki by various countries from around the world. Tons of mothers cradling babies and doves and that sort of thing. I was pretty surprised to come across (the ugliest one of all) a statue donated by the United States (literally seconds after uttering to Aneke, "Imagine there was one from the States here!"). The nerve! What, was it a consolation prize? Sorry we slaughtered all these people while they were going about their morning activities. Here's a little reminder that peace is the way to go, let's be friends (not like you have a choice), and for next time, don't be so freaking evil.

Then I got to thinking - while digging the beauty of the park and museum - of all the effort that was put towards the museum and garden and park. All this energy and money put towards peace... after the fact. Too late.

It was a Japanese doctor (who died from leukemia after - and as a result of - the bombing) who said, "The person who prays for peace must not hide even an needle, for a person who possesses weapons is not qualified to pray for peace."


Sadly, this is appropriate considering the state of the world right now.

All this hypocricy makes my head spin.