BY JAMES P. CANNON
Fifty-three years ago, on August 6 and August 9, 1945, U.S. forces dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, incinerating hundreds of thousands of human beings. Socialist Workers Party national secretary James P. Cannon condemned this atrocity two weeks later at a meeting in New York commemorating the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky. Below are excerpts of his remarks. The entire speech appears in The Struggle for Socialism in the `American Century' - Writings and Speeches, 1945-47. The book is copyright (c) 1977 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted with permission.

Surely the foundations are being laid for the peace of a thousand years. Capitalism in its death agony is dragging humanity down into the abyss. Capitalism is demonstrating itself every day more and more, in so-called peace as in war, as the enemy of the people. Bomb the people to death! Burn them to death with incendiary bombs! Break up their industries and starve them to death! And if that is not horrible enough, then blast them off the face of the earth with atomic bombs! That is the program of liberating capitalism....

In the Times today there is a report from the Tokyo radio about Nagasaki which states that "the center of the once thriving city has been turned into a vast devastation, with nothing left except rubble as far as the eye could see." Photographs showing the bomb damage appeared on the front page of the Japanese newspaper Mainichi. The report says: "One of these pictures revealed a tragic scene ten miles away from the center of the atomic air attack," where farm houses were either crushed down or the roofs torn asunder. The broadcast quoted a photographer of the Yamaha Photographic Institute, who had rushed to the city immediately after the bomb hit, as having said: "Nagasaki is now a dead city, all the areas being literally razed to the ground. Only a few buildings are left, standing conspicuously from the ashes." The photographer said that "the toll of the population was great and even the few survivors have not escaped some kind of injury." So far the Japanese press has quoted only one survivor of Hiroshima.

In two calculated blows, with two atomic bombs, American imperialism killed or injured half a million human beings. The young and the old, the child in the cradle and the aged and infirm, the newly married, the well and the sick, men, women, and children -they all had to die in two blows because of a quarrel between the imperialists of Wall Street and a similar gang in Japan.

This is how American imperialism is bringing civilization to the Orient. What an unspeakable atrocity! What a shame has come to America, the America that once placed in New York harbor a Statue of Liberty enlightening the world. Now the world recoils in horror from her name. Even some of the preachers who blessed the war have been moved to protest. One said in an interview in the press: "America has lost her moral position." Her moral position? Yes. She lost that all right. That is true. And the imperialist monsters who threw the bombs know it. But look what they gained. They gained control of the boundless riches of the Orient. They gained the power to exploit and enslave hundreds of millions of people in the Far East. And that is what they went to war for - not for moral position, but for profit....

American imperialism has brought upon itself the fear and hatred of the whole world. American imperialism is regarded throughout the world today as the enemy of mankind. The First World War cost twelve million dead. Twelve million. The Second World War, within a quarter of a century, has already cost not less than thirty million dead; and there are not less than thirty million more to be starved to death before the results of the war are totaled up.

What a harvest of death capitalism has brought to the world! If the skulls of all of the victims could be brought together and piled into one pyramid, what a high mountain that would make. What a monument to the achievements of capitalism that would be, and how fitting a symbol of what capitalist imperialism really is. I believe it would lack only one thing to make it perfect. That would be a big electric sign on the pyramid of skulls, proclaiming the ironical promise of the Four Freedoms.(1) The dead at least are free from want and free from fear. But the survivors live in hunger and terror of the future.

Who won the war that cost over thirty million lives? Our cartoonist in The Militant(2), with great artistic merit and insight, explained it in a few strokes of the pen when she drew that picture of the capitalist with the moneybags in his hands, standing on top of the world with one foot on the graveyard and the other on destroyed cities, with the caption: "The Only Victor." The only winner is American imperialism and its satellites in other countries.

What are the perspectives? How do our masters visualize the future after this great achievement of the six-year war?

Before the Second World War, with all its horror and destruction of human life and human culture, is formally ended, they are already thinking and planning for the third.

Don't we have to stop these madmen and take power out of their hands? Can we doubt that the peoples of all the world are thinking it cannot go much further, that there must be some way to change it? Long ago the revolutionary Marxists said that the alternative facing humanity was either socialism or a new barbarism, that capitalism threatens to go down in ruins and drag civilization with it. But in the light of what has been developed in this war and is projected for the future, I think we can say now that the alternative can be made even more precise: The alternative facing mankind is socialism or annihilation! It is a problem of whether capitalism is allowed to remain or whether the human race is to continue to survive on this planet.

We believe that the people of the world will waken to this frightful alternative and act in time to save themselves. We believe that before American imperialism, the new master of the world, has time to consolidate its victories, it will be attacked from two sides and defeated. On the one side the peoples of the world, transformed into the colonial slaves of Wall Street, will rebel against the imperialist master, as the conquered provinces rose against imperial Rome. Simultaneously with that uprising, and coordinating our struggle with it, we, the Trotskyist party, will lead the workers and plebeians of America in a revolutionary attack against our main enemy and the main enemy of mankind, the imperialists of the United States.

Notes
1. U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed the "Four Freedoms" as a goal of U.S. foreign policy in an address to Congress, Jan. 6, 1941. They were: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

2. Laura Gray (1909-1958) was the Militant's regular cartoonist from 1944 until her death.  
 
 
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