[Mb-civic] It's Hiroshima day -- don't look away - Marianna Torgovnick - The Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

<>It's Hiroshima day -- don't look away
By Marianna Torgovnick  |  August 6, 2005

AMERICANS WILL be reminded today of the 60th anniversary of the dropping 
of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Most likely, we will miss once again 
the true impact of this event, not just for the Japanese who experienced 
it, but also on us and on how we now live.

It's not, of course, that we don't know that Americans flew the planes 
that killed at least 60,000 Japanese, most of them civilians, in 
Hiroshima, and, three days later, 40,000 more in Nagasaki (figures from 
the Avalon Project at Yale law School). It's not that Americans don't 
know that the United States remains the only nation ever to have used 
atomic weapons against civilian populations. It's that the events, 
unlike D-Day, say, or the liberation of the concentration camps, place 
Americans in ambiguous, unpleasant, or even guilty roles.

It seems natural that, as a culture, we prefer to look away. It seems 
natural that we prefer to emphasize events that reflect how we like to 
think of ourselves, that show a face we like to show to the world.

So don't expect to see today marked by daylong ceremonies like June 6, 
the 60th anniversary of D-Day. Don't expect to see President Bush fly to 
Hiroshima to make a policy speech there in the way that he and other 
presidents, most notably Ronald Reagan, have flown to Normandy. Don't 
expect to see the crew members of the Enola Gay smiling or saluting into 
the camera, their faces marked, perhaps, by the weightiness of their deeds.

The anniversary is likely to be mentioned, but quickly, almost as a kind 
of stealth event, under the radar screen and under the claim -- always 
controversial and often inflated -- that the bombings prevented an 
invasion and saved, and were designed to save, millions of American and 
Japanese lives.

<>And yet the bombings have marked us strongly as a nation since 1945 
and continue to do so in many ways. The Cold War, the bogeyman of my 
childhood, was driven by the fear that the Soviets would have nuclear 
weapons -- as they did by 1949 -- and would use them. In the book 
''Hiroshima's Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the 
Smithsonian Controversy," edited by Kai Bird and Lawrence Lifschultz , 
the theory is raised that fear of the Soviets helped motivate the 
bombings, with our display of atomic power designed as a warning to our 
future enemy as World War II came to an end.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/08/06/its_hiroshima_day____dont_look_away?mode=PF 

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