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The dropping of the two bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki are excellent examples of how people on both sides ignore history…just to make a point.

The literal reality of the situation was this: Around 1942, F.D.R. received a letter from several concerned scientists that had fled to the US from Germany that Germany was attempting to build the bomb. In response to that some time later, FDR ordered a group of American scientists to research the technology ourselves. When they tested the first one in the New Mexican desert, they had no idea if it’d even work at all. Obviously it did, and even the ones who built it were shocked at the result, as it had many times the power that they predicted.

In 1945, FDR died in office, and Vice President Harry Truman took over, and US forces were practically already on Japan’s doorstep. He didn’t even know about the A-bomb until this point. A terrible decision was dropped on his lap: either attack Japan directly, which was expected to cost a million allied soliders their lives, and quite possibly mean the extinction of the Japanese people, or use a never before used bomb on Japan itself. He toiled over it for some time before he gave the green light to the attack. When that first bomb was dropped, it was understood that it would demolish a city…none of them understood the horrible aftermath that it’s fallout would produce.

The one thing that everyone should take away from this is that it’s easy to judge soldiers fighting a war after peace has been attained. Only soldiers who have fought in war can truly understand the weight that any soldier, regardless of rank, bears on taking life, or seeing lives taken from around them. Every person involved in war takes a life, they bear that burden. To stare down at soldiers during peaceful times, and deride them for the choices they made, choices that may very well have been the reason that you are alive today, isn’t just disrespectful or pompous, it’s poisonous…venomous.

America and Japan fought a terrible war 65 years ago. A lot of good people died, on both sides. But the war ended, America helped rebuild the Japanese homeland, gave them their country back…and left. When a war started in Korea years later, it was the Americans who intervened to help…though seemingly only the South Koreans remember and respect that. And now, a lifetime later, people want to cast their eyes down an old war and tell the opposing side how terrible they were?

Even if your people suffer the devastation that those in Hiroshima and Nagasaki did, even though your own people committed atrocities yourselves during war…even if people who lived there lost so much, possibly even everyone around them, what good does it do to pursue a blood feud over it 65 years later? Perhaps it’s because I haven’t endured the same, but when you really get down to it, I only have one question for those who would think otherwise: Would those who you’ve lost, whether by your own people’s doing or by another’s…would they really want you to spend not just your lifetime…but your childrens and so on…so full of hatred? Or would they simply want you to be happy any way you could?

I would hope that I could wish that for the people around me. Perhaps one day, others will see this too.

Even though we are peaceful now in much of the world, unless each person takes steps to break a cycle of hatred, peace will never be lasting. Do what you can to break it, and you’ll find the world might not be as bad as you think it is…

X&V,
K.D.S.