Nagasaki

 Remembering...

(Kotaro Ueda - Kyodo News via AP)  2025-08-09

Quickly or Slowly?

    At 80 years out today, what has humanity, the world over, learned?     

    I posted my rhetorical question to Facebook and got and immediate, first-time reply from a casual acquaintance I "friended" on the social media platform some twenty years ago. Regrettably, his disheartening response only served to illustrate humankind's pernicious blindspots and ongoing obstinacy to improve.

    The emphatic lesson learned, according to his comment (and by inference, the only lesson to be learned), is that a nation shouldn't sneak attack another having the technical superiority to rain down fire in return. Indeed, going on to recite Isoroku Yamamoto's "sleeping giant" quote, he concludes, with both Hiroshima and Nagasaki as proof.

     In the face of such schoolyard, ass-whooping, myopic, juvenile jingoism (younger than me, this callous commenter wasn't even born at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack - nor was I) and utterly missing my broader point about warfare in general, I was left to lament, "It's as I feared, we're not learning at all." 

     I wasn't just speaking of one particular conflict of one particular group of nations or peoples. In fact in nationalists such as he, I see the Japanese, I see the Americans, I see the Nazi's, I see the Russians, I see the Israeli's, the Sudanese, the capitalists, the communists, the Haitians, et cetera. I see all the the armed, I see the good soldier, and all the factions, between nations, and within, everywhere, always warring, and pointing out the "other" as well as the accusing finger of blame. 

    Am I morally superior? I doubt it. Am I enlightened? I am the village idiot. I am the child who doesn't understand what it is I see. I see horror, I see mayhem, I see systematic murder and maiming. I see unspeakable violence being threatened and homicidal vengeance being "rained down". This is diplomacy?

    This is honorable?

    Still, it continues. Unstopped. It is being born anew and fostered, generation after generation (take my Facebook commenter for instance). What I find abhorrent is how it festers in the thinking and attitudes of so many - making Hell on Earth.

    Sorry for my ramble. It is hard so see hope for humankind dashed.

    I wondered if at first to leave the Facebook comment up (along with my reply) not wishing to thcensor disparate points of view. I thought to use it as an object lesson perhaps. However, when I saw the other reprehensible, blog posts made by this account holder (who is unashamedly proud of their religiousity - go figure) I began to feel their latest comment, a canker instead. And in the end, I did not wish platform it. 

    So I deleted both our replies to my post and, not desiring to associate myself with warmongering, "unfriended" this particular apologist. I will not be an avenue to the inevitable, the hate spawned by hawkishness. It has such a big stage to spread its ills already, that it does not need mine.

     Are my actions severe? Is my judgement prejudicial? Am I self-righteous? However, it is the little delusions we tell ourselves, the flag-waving, the tiny justifications, I fear and despise. The rationalizations for war must end. I hope I can do my part.

   These are the thoughts I managed to jot. I will go back and tidy, what I, for the moment, have hastily written.

Above Images: Pictorial Press Ltd., DPA Picture Alliance, Alamy

Might is all that matters (not quite cousin to might makes right)