Hiroshima is everywhere. The never-ending struggle

Hiroshima is everywhere - Or: The never-ending struggle

Hiroshima after the atomic bombing

by Leo Ensel

Hiroshima showed: Man is capable of wiping out all life on Earth. A world without nuclear weapons must be our goal.

[This article published on 8/6/2022 is translated from the German on the Internet, Hiroshima ist überall – Oder: Der niemals endende Kampf - infosperber.]





Hiroshima ist überall – Oder: Der niemals endende Kampf - infosperber

Hiroshima hat gezeigt: Der Mensch ist fähig alles Leben auf der Erde auszulöschen. Eine Welt ohne Atomwaffen mus...

77 years ago, on August 6, 1945, a Monday, at 8:16 a.m. local time, an atomic bomb was detonated for the first time over a living area - it exploded with a heat development of almost 4,000 degrees Celsius 580 meters above the Shima Hospital of the Japanese city of Hiroshima, where about 400,000 people lived on the day of the catastrophe and which had been spared from bombardments up to that point. It was released from the American B-29 bomber "Enola Gay" at an altitude of almost ten kilometers, after another bomber had already flown over the city three quarters of an hour earlier to check the weather conditions. It was a beautiful sunny day, quite clear skies. The bomb, comparable in its explosive power to a present-day 'tactical' nuclear weapon, had been christened "Little Boy" by the U.S. military.

Hundreds of thousands of "test victims

More than 70,000 people were killed instantly. The bomb killed 90 percent of the population within a 500-meter radius of Ground Zero. Most people were vaporized or burned up. Within a second, the blast wave destroyed 80 percent of downtown. A firestorm destroyed 11 square kilometers of the major city and drove the mushroom cloud characteristic of atomic bombs up to an altitude of 13 kilometers, which fell on the surrounding area twenty minutes later as highly contaminated radioactive fallout.

Dead: 282,000. 50 percent of them on the day the bomb was dropped, 35 percent in the following three months, 15 percent since November 1945. (The figures vary. But even if one starts from the lowest assumption, 170,000 victims, everything remains basically the same). Diseases of survivors (among others): Blood diseases (pernicious anemia, leukemia), skin growths caused by burns (keloids), liver disease, cataracts, post-traumatic stress disorder. To this day, people are dying from cancers caused by the bombing.

Three days later, on August 9 at 11:02 a.m., the U.S. detonated another atomic bomb - it was named "Fat Man" - over the port city of Nagasaki, located in southwestern Japan. Casualties: between 60,000 and 80,000. Injuries: around 75,000.

Months later, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey sent doctors to the largely destroyed and contaminated cities. Their job, however, was not to provide medical assistance to the countless injured, highly traumatized people. Their job was to scientifically study the effects of radiation on the human organism. The hundreds of thousands of dead and injured in the two Japanese cities had been, from the U.S. point of view, "test victims," "human guinea pigs." The later spread claim that the atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to force Japan to surrender was a propaganda lie.1)

End Times and End of Time

August 6, 1945 was not a day of any terrible catastrophe. After all, human history teems with atrocities and gruesome crimes. What makes this date a caesura - and not only of human history, but also of the entire planet - is the fact that since that day humans are able to destroy themselves as a species, possibly even all life on this globe.

The philosopher Günther Anders (1902-1992), who was one of the very first to set himself the task of finding an appropriate language for this unprecedented possibility of man-made apocalypse - which had never been foreseen by any philosopher, even by any theologian - put this unheard-of circumstance into forceful sentences at the end of the 1950s:

Hiroshima as a world condition. With August 6, 1945, Hiroshima Day, a new age began. The age in which we can turn any place, nay our earth as a whole, into a Hiroshima at any moment. Since that day we have become modo negativo omnipotent; but since we can be annihilated at the same time in every moment, this means at the same time: since that day we are totally powerless. No matter how long, no matter if it will last forever, this age is the last: Because its characteristic, the possibility of our self-extinction, can never end - except by the end itself.

The consequence: according to Anders, human existence has since been defined as a "time limit". We live as "just-not-yet-selves." By this fact the moral basic question has changed: The classical question "How do we want to live?" has been subsumed by the question "Will we live?" In other words, "To the 'how-question' there is only one answer for us, who are just living in our time limit: 'We have to see to it that the end time, although it could turn into end of time at any time, becomes endless; that is, that the turnaround never occurs.'"

Temporary resistance

The perceptive analyses of people like Günther Anders and Albert Einstein - "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything - except our way of thinking, and so we are drifting towards a catastrophe without equal. A new way of thinking is necessary if humanity is to continue to live." - did not remain completely ineffective.

In July 1955, philosopher Bertrand Russell called for the outlawing of a future world war that would inevitably be fought with weapons of mass destruction. His appeal was signed, among others, by Nobel Prize winners in physics Max Born and Albert Einstein. At the end of the 1950s, the "Fight Atomic Death" movement and the "Easter March" movement emerged in the old Federal Republic as a reaction to the temporary plans to equip the Bundeswehr with tactical atomic bombs. In April 1957, 18 highly respected nuclear physicists of the Federal Republic of Germany (among them the Nobel laureates Otto Hahn, Max Born and Werner Heisenberg) also opposed a nuclear armament of the Bundeswehr, downplayed by the then Chancellor Konrad Adenauer as "further development of artillery", in their joint "Göttingen Manifesto" and combined this with an unambiguous act of civil disobedience: "In any case, none of the signatories would be willing to participate in any way in the production, testing, or use of nuclear weapons. "

The Easter March movement died off for a time in the 1960s - the SPD had cut off its funding under American pressure - but experienced a renaissance in the 1980s in the wake of the so-called NATO disarmament decision, along with the New Peace Movement. Never before had there been so many sensitive (and ready for action) groups of the population regarding the danger of a possible nuclear annihilation as in the 1980s in Western Europe, the USA and - under very different conditions - also in some states of the Warsaw Pact.

For a brief, beautiful moment, in the form of Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of "new thinking," Einstein's postulate from 1946 even reached the heights of world politics. And by no means in vain: thanks above all to the determination of the Soviet administration of the time, no less than 80 percent of all nuclear warheads worldwide were scrapped!

Two thousand five hundred times a second world war

Since then, however, times have changed considerably. In the past two decades, almost all disarmament and arms control treaties have been scrapped - exclusively on the initiative of the USA - including the most important disarmament treaty in world history, the INF Treaty signed by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan at the end of 1987.

It is not only since Russia's war against Ukraine that the Cold Warriors have regained the upper hand: nuclear bombs have long since become socially acceptable again, a new, even more dangerous nuclear armament spiral is imminent, scenarios for a possible first use - both in the USA and in the Russian Federation - and a supposedly limited and winnable nuclear war are already in the drawers. German politicians, especially among the once peace-moving Greens, are blathering about "nuclear sharing". And this, although the atomic bombs stored at present world-wide still have together an explosive power of approximately 2500 second world wars!

Resistance against this development, for example in the form of the International Campaign for the Prohibition and Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017, the International Organization "Physicians against Nuclear War" (IPPNW) or the initiative "Justitia et Pax" 2), is only tentatively stirring.

The dark cloud

And the task that lies ahead is gigantic: The goal must not only be pursued with unprecedented tenacity, but also illusionlessly and - endlessly!

This, too, was masterfully summed up by Günther Anders as early as the end of the 1950s:

"As mighty as man may be - he cannot do one thing: He cannot revoke his own ability! And as great as the ability of his learning may be, he cannot learn one thing; namely to unlearn that what he can. The atomic weapons, which he has just now, he can abolish; but his knowledge of making them, he cannot get rid of."

The necessary struggle for a physical destruction of all existing weapons of mass destruction - for which in recent years the now 91-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev 3) has repeatedly spoken out - must therefore, according to Günther Anders, be supplemented by measures of another category, by measures that prevent us from doing that which we can do, that is, from producing those devices whose mode of production we are incapable of forgetting.

"But this means that the transformation of man will have to be a transformation of his morality. The awareness that this is an absolute taboo will have to take such deep roots in each of us billions of people and will have to become so general that whoever would consider using these means to achieve his political ends would face the ostracism of all humanity."

In short and without illusions: The struggle against the danger of nuclear self-destruction of mankind will have to be a never-ending one. For each of the generations yet to come - if there will be any - this danger will precede as a possibility like a dark cloud. - Let us leave the last word to the great philosopher of the atomic age:

"Every day gained will indeed be a day gained. But no day won will be a guarantee of tomorrow's winning. We will never arrive. So what lies ahead is the endlessness of uncertainty. And our never-ending task will be that at least this uncertainty will have no end."

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FOOTNOTES:

1) https://overton-magazin.de/hintergrund/politik/august-1945-atombomben-auf-japan/

2) https://ostexperte.de/die-schaerfste-kritik-der-atomaren-abschreckung-liefert-zur-zeit-die-katholische-kirche/

3) https://www.gorby.ru/presscenter/news/show_30157/

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Turkish annexations in northern Syria

Areas annexed by Turkey in northern Syria: green = since 2016; blue = since 2018; brown = since 2019. A total area of 8800 square kilometers. NATO's "community of values" has not responded.

NATO countries do not have to adhere to shared values

Andreas Zumach / 25.07.2022 Whether USA, Erdoğan, Orbán or Milanović: they can disregard the values. NATO does not know sanctions against its own members.

[This article published on 7/25/2022 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.infosperber.ch/politik/nato-staaten-muessen-sich-nicht-an-die-gemeinsamen-werte-halten/.]

NATO's military alliance is currently engaged in supporting Ukraine against Putin-Russia's war of aggression in violation of international law. Since its founding in 1949, NATO has liked to call itself a "community of values." According to the Founding Act, its now 30 member states are "committed to the UN Charter" and, beyond that, "to the principles of democracy, individual freedoms and the rule of law," as Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg emphasizes at every available opportunity.

The Ukraine war has once again considerably strengthened NATO's self-assessment and also its external perception as a "community of values," more than any other event since the end of the Cold War. The roles of good and evil in this war are clearly distributed. Putin-Russia is waging a "criminal," "genocidal" war of aggression not only against Ukraine, but "against liberal Europe." On the other hand, NATO countries are "defending" "Western values of freedom" with their arms deliveries to Ukraine and economic sanctions against Russia.

Proceedings against Putin and other members of Russia's political and military leadership allegedly responsible for the war have been filed or already initiated before the International Criminal Court as well as before national judicial authorities in Germany and other NATO member states. In contrast to the sharp, quite accurate descriptions of Putin-Russia's war, the past violations of international law and war crimes committed by NATO or individual member states in the last three decades in former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and elsewhere are merely played down as "mistakes" or even explicitly justified by most politicians and journalists in the member states of the alliance.

Not a single one of the Western politicians or military officers responsible for these violations of international law and war crimes has been investigated to date.

NATO is more than tolerant towards its own members

Even inside NATO, the reality over the past 73 years has often been different from the noble self-description of a "community of values" committed to the principles of freedom, democracy and the rule of law. This is even more true than for the current dismantling of democratic rights and freedoms in Hungary and Poland, which NATO has so far not even criticized, especially with regard to Turkey and, to a lesser extent, Greece.

The two countries were admitted to NATO in 1952. The aim at the time was to secure NATO's southeastern European flank against the communist Soviet Union and its allies Bulgaria and Romania, which bordered Turkey and Greece. At the same time, it gave NATO unimpeded access for its naval forces to the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean, as well as to ports on the coasts of those waters.

Fascist dictatorships supported

The bloody military coups and subsequent fascist dictatorships in Turkey in 1960 and 1980, and in Greece in 1967, were not only tolerated but even supported by the U.S. and other NATO member states. The same applies to Turkey's occupation of northern Cyprus, which has continued since August 1976 in violation of international law, as well as to Turkey's warlike interventions and land occupations in Syria and Iraq, which have been ongoing for years.

The suppression of the Kurds in Turkey and the dismantling of democracy and the rule of law by the increasingly dictatorial President Erdoğan have so far not been a reason for the other NATO members to counter these serious violations of the "principles of democracy, individual freedoms and the rule of law" in any way. The NAT0 treaty "does not provide for sanctions against members," this inaction is excused at the alliance's Brussels headquarters.

NATO allows itself to be blackmailed

But the real reason for this reluctance is that NATO has allowed itself to be blackmailed by the government in Ankara for many years. Primarily by threatening to close NATO's Incirlik base in southeastern Turkey. The base was and is the most important military infrastructure for NATO and for the U.S. for all previous wars and air operations in the Middle East. In addition, U.S. nuclear weapons are stationed at Incirlik. An equivalent replacement for this military base in another country in the region is not yet in sight for the U.S. and NATO.

With Ankara's initial opposition to NATO accession by Finland and Sweden - two countries that fulfill all of the cited principles of the NATO Founding Act better than any other country - an unprecedented controversy had arisen within NATO. To justify its eastward enlargement from 16 to 30 members since 1997, NATO has repeatedly stressed "the sovereign right of all European states" to join existing military alliances (ergo: NATO, the only military alliance in existence worldwide) if this is in their security interests. The same "sovereign right" has so far been emphasized by NATO with regard to a possible accession of Ukraine to NATO. With reference to this "sovereign right," NATO and the Ukrainian president also strictly rejected any offer of compromise to Russia in the run-up to the Ukrainian war - for example, in the form of a moratorium of several years on the question of Ukraine's NATO membership.

Then, a few days after the war began, Selensky announced that a renunciation of NATO membership as well as a renunciation of foreign military bases and a neutrality status for Ukraine with security guarantees by certain states were possible.

With regard to the ongoing northern expansion of NATO by Sweden and Finland, the "sovereign right" of free choice of alliance was again emphasized. Of course, this "sovereign right" exists.

However, current NATO members also have the "sovereign right" to reject membership requests.

The decisive question, however, should be whether the expansion of NATO so far and the expansions of the military alliance planned for the future were and are (security-)politically wise. If Erdoğan had declared that he considered the accession of Sweden and Finland, with its more than 1,000-kilometer-long border with Russia, to be (security-)politically unwise and a dangerous provocation of Russia, then a politically relevant, long overdue internal NATO debate could have emerged from this.

100,000 Kurds in Sweden and Finland in danger?

Instead, Erdoğan had justified his objection to NATO membership for the two Scandinavian countries by claiming that the governments in Helsinki and Stockholm support the Turkish Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) because they allegedly tolerate the presence of PKK members among Kurds living in both countries, as well as measures to raise money for the PKK.

Ankara considers the PKK a terrorist organization and is fighting it with harsh military and police means. The EU, of which both Sweden and Finland are members, has also classified the PKK as a terrorist organization. But in plain language, Erdoğan demanded that the governments in Stockholm and Oslo abandon their protection and asylum commitments for persecuted Turkish Kurds, whom he sweepingly defamed as PKK supporters and thus "terrorists."

This was sheer blackmail. There are more than 85,000 Kurds living in Sweden and about 15,000 in Finland, most of them first-, second- or third-generation refugees who have fled persecution and war since the late 1960s, primarily from Turkey but also from Iraq and Syria.

The same applies to Erdoğan's demand for the resumption of arms deliveries, which the governments in Oslo and Stockholm had stopped out of justified concern that Turkey would use these weapons in its interventions in Syria and Iraq, which are contrary to international law, or against the Kurds in its own country.

Erdoğan's blackmail maneuver, however, was directed not only against the governments in Stockholm and Helsinki, but also against the Biden administration in Washington. On the one hand, the Turkish ruler wants to coerce the U.S. into delivering fighter jets to Turkey, which Washington canceled after Ankara's purchase of Russian surface-to-air missiles. On the other hand, Erdoğan wants Washington to give the green light for a new, wide-ranging further military operation against Kurds in northern Syria, which he announced in late May.

Past Turkish military incursions in Syria were primarily directed against the Kurdish militia YPG, which Ankara considers an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and therefore classifies as a terrorist organization. For the U.S., on the other hand, the YPG's ground forces were an important partner in the fight against the terrorist militia Islamic State (IS). Since the IS has since resumed attacks there after being largely driven out of Syria in 2018, the U.S. does not want to give up this partnership with the YPG, at least for the time being.

Ankara already controls and occupies areas near the border in northern Syrian territory in violation of international law. The goal is a continuous "security zone" that extends 30 kilometers deep into Syrian territory along the entire border. After the expulsion or destruction of the YPG, some three million Syrian refugees currently in Turkey are to be settled there. As early as 2015 and 2019, Erdoğan had unsuccessfully sought the U.S. government's approval and support for these plans.

According to analyst Salim Cevik of the Center for Turkish Studies (Cats) in Berlin, Turkish military attacks in western northern Syria are taking place with Russian approval or even support. East of the Euphrates, he said, Turkey needs U.S. and Russian approval. "Erdoğan sees his opportunity now, as Russia is preoccupied with the war in Ukraine. He is using his veto card in NATO to press the U.S. for concessions on Syrian soil."

Still unclear what the compromise means

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg in particular, but also the governments in Washington and Berlin, had pushed for a positive decision on Finland's and Sweden's mid-May membership application as early as the NATO summit at the end of June, which is what happened. The NATO secretary-general involved in the negotiations had urged the governments in Oslo and Stockholm to compromise on Ankara's blackmail. "If an important key ally like Turkey expresses concerns about terrorism, then of course we have to sit down and take that seriously," Stoltenberg said. "No other NATO country" has suffered "more terrorist attacks than Turkey," he said. Turkey is "an important ally that has played a key role in the fight against terrorist groups like the Islamic State terrorist militia," the NATO secretary-general asserted - contrary to all evidence that shows Turkey supported IS in many ways, at least until the terrorist militia was largely driven out of Syria in 2018.

Should the U.S. and all other NATO countries, as well as Finland and Sweden, interpret the agreed compromise with blackmailer Erdoğan in such a way that it comes at the expense of the rights and protection of Kurds living in the two Scandinavian countries, or that it leads to a resumption of Finnish and Swedish arms supplies to warring Turkey, NATO's self-description as a "community of values" would become a bit more implausible.

https://marcbatko.academia.edu