Hiroshima: T-Plus 70

Eric Renderking Fisk | August 6th, 2015Bookmark and Share

Remember, Kids! Fedoras save lives!

One of the things that concerned me about the news media last week was the actual lack of coverage of this anniversary. If you were to tell me that it would only take 70 years for us to forget this historical event, I would have thought you were crazy.  But the seventieth anniversary of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima came and went with little fanfare, commentary or remembrance. There was a couple of “On this day…” articles that included this and other historical events that occurred on the same date through out history.

There were a few articles on Hiroshima and its aftermath on some of the news sites that were the obligatory kind, the compulsory retrospective that occurs whenever an infamous date arrives. There were too few articles that I saw that spoke about the actual impact on our society.

Granted, they did the due diligence on horrific aspects of the specific event with images of the carnage that ranged from burned survivors to city blocks vaporized to ash. There wasn’t enough of what happened next; how Hiroshima and Nagasaki changed the lives of every living being on planet Earth and how doomsday suddenly felt inevitable from that moment forward.

There was little or no talk to the sociological and individual philological effects that occurred after Hiroshima and the revelations about secret weapons programs that were being conducted in secret locations in our country on our side, and in the Axis Territories in Eastern Europe and Japan. There were no mentions that I saw about the stress fatigue that came with the constant living in fear about the end of the world being destroyed by an accidental launch or all-out nuclear war.

The atomic bomb changed everything in the western hemisphere. It touched every aspect of art, music, pop culture, the news, and especially science. Were it not for the atomic bomb, we wouldn’t have the post-apocalyptic genre.

Try listening to most of the pop songs from the 1950’s and tell me that you don't hear some desperation. The night I started this rant my family went out for ice cream at a local establishment that plays nothing but the oldies (50’s & 60’s era) music on the overhead sound system. Three songs in a row had that desperate whinny tonality; ‘we’re all going to die soon, let’s do it before they drop the bomb!’ mood.

The end of World War 2 brought about the entire film noir genre to America to suit the dark nature of our newly established self-conscience; we fought to end the very thing we’ve become. Film noir is a reaction to the way the nation felt after the end of World War 2 beneath the façade of victory and patriotism, it’s a dark and brooding world after all.

The atomic age also touched modern art and brought about a resurgence of abstractism.

New needs need new techniques. And the modern artists have found new ways and new means of making their statements... the modern painter cannot express this age, the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio, in the old forms of the Renaissance or of any other past culture.
Jackson Pollock

What the events leading up to Hiroshima and the end of the war with Japan did was simply create the new realm of conspiracy theories. If the United States government was able to hide a couple of people in the desert and create something brand new out of virtual thin air thanks to a couple speculative scientific papers, what else are they doing out in the desert, in secret, with our tax dollars? If they were able to create an atomic bomb that could destroy an entire town with one blast, what else are they doing?

Couple that with the wearing down of civil liberties (something I also discussed in “Witness To Roswell…”) The Government has allowed itself to say “In the name of National Security, we can and will detain you without a trial and make you disappear. No trial, no judge, no witnesses to your execution… all in the name of ‘National Security.” Sure, that’s great when it comes to terrorists and enemies of The State until they redefine what those are on a case-by-case basis to suit the needs and demands of the moment.

Los Alamos lead to Roswell, which lead to Area 51, and so on... The invention of the atomic bomb and the destruction of Hiroshima and the Cold War arms race between The United State and her allies and The Soviet Union lead to a slow burning mass hysteria that changed social norms and mistrust of "the establishment" for decades to come.

What was missing from most of the coverage about this anniversary is that the conversation we started at the end of World War 2 hasn’t changed significantly, the only thing that’s changed is the name of the players and the locations. In the last decades of the last century, we were horrified at the idea of Pakistan and India – two ancient rivals – getting ‘The Bomb.’ That gave way to the fact that The Former Soviet Union lost a handful of nuclear bombs that are still unaccounted for and might fall into the hands of terrorists.

Now, we’re reading about a controversial deal between The United States and Iran that should prevent them having an atomic bomb for the next 15 years in exchange for trade sanctions being lifted. For me, the question remains – will we ever be free of the nightmare of the imminent atomic holocaust? Or is this something we’re just going to have to learn to live with, regardless of the consequences?

Will I ever be able to trust and believe "The Government" and "The Media" to tell us the truth about what's really going on behind scenes behind the covert opperations? Only history will be able to know, and even that's becoming suspect.

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