Although the nuclear inferno that instantly incinerated some 200,000 people at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has long since cooled, the controversy over the United States bombing continues 50 years later. For working people, the stakes in this political battle are of much more than simply historical interest.
Today, in a world that has entered an economic depression, the wealthy rulers of the United States, Germany, Japan, and other capitalist powers are increasingly competing with each other in the world market, while trying to squeeze every drop of profits from the livelihood of workers and farmers in their own countries. In this process, much of the same political propaganda used by all these imperialist governments leading up to World War II is again being dusted off.
Once again, the big-business media and politicians from both the Democratic and Republican parties are urging workers and farmers to look at fellow working people in other countries as rivals, often as less than full human beings, rather than equals with common interests. Workers are told we must accept lower wages, increasing unemployment, economic uncertainty, and attacks on fundamental social rights so "our country" can be "competitive."
Events like the 1987 stock market crash, the U.S.-led slaughter against Iraq, and the increasing military involvement of the imperialist powers in the carnage in Bosnia make it clear imperialism's march toward fascism and another worldwide war, while at an early stage, has already begun. Before reaching that point, however, the employers will need to defeat working people in the major class confrontations that will erupt. Chauvinist appeals, pitting workers here against workers abroad in the name of the "national interest," "saving our jobs," or "saving our lives," are therefore a central part of the political softening-up operation being attempted by capitalist politicians against the labor movement throughout the world.
This is why the controversy over Hiroshima and Nagasaki cannot be shoved aside.
The capitalist rulers have a problem. Millions of working people around the world are repulsed by the horrible crime of the 1945 U.S. atomic bombing. And they are deeply suspicious of a government that has continued to militarily intervene around the world on behalf of capitalist profits, from Vietnam to Iraq - the same government that today is also leading an assault on their own wages and living standards. For this reason, many question the official hypocrisy on Hiroshima and insist on discussing the issue and finding out the truth.
An objective study of the facts about Hiroshima, such as the one by Fred Halstead reprinted in this issue, makes it clear that the U.S. bombing had nothing to do with saving "American lives" in the face of an allegedly evil, subhuman Japanese enemy prepared to fight despite irrational odds.
Neither do the war crimes committed by Tokyo in China, Korea, and Vietnam justify the nuclear atrocities perpetrated by the warmakers in Washington, who were fighting in the Pacific for only one reason - to win the "right" to replace Japanese with American exploitation throughout the region.
Washington made a cold-blooded decision to annihilate the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because it wanted the peoples of the Soviet Union, China, Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East, and elsewhere to know it not only had the bomb, but was willing to use it against human beings. This nuclear terrorism has been a central prop of U.S. imperialist domination for 50 years. Questioned about Washington's holocaust, President Bill Clinton insists to this day that there's nothing to apologize about.
It was precisely to close off discussion as to whether or not this was in the interest of humanity that rightist groups mobilized to force the gutting of an exhibition on the atomic bomb planned by the Smithsonian Institution earlier this year. The Smithsonian's secretary at the time argued, "In this important anniversary year, veterans and their families were expecting, and rightly so, that the nation would honor and commemorate their valor and sacrifice...They were not looking for analysis and, frankly, we did not give enough thought to the intense feelings such analysis would evoke."
This is a lie. The ruling capitalists don't need analysis and discussion - all they need is to continue to get away with justifications for their continued domination. Working people, however, both in and out of uniform, do have the capacity, desire for, and stake in an objective discussion of the facts. That is what the warmakers in Washington are afraid of and would like to prevent.