Tag Archives: Hiroshima & Nagasaki

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We’ve Kept You Posted

Yearly Recall Takes
a Blurry 2015 Picture

It was a year of record refugee waves, with boatloads of heartbreaking stories landing en masse on European shores. Greeting them, equal parts of compassion and vile political pettiness, and a stunned world reacting as it usually does: with violence.
As usual too, there were plenty of staggering deaths – massive, laser-focused, or undiscriminated – due to terrorism, war strikes, stampedes, and in the U.S., racism and too many guns. And, of course, a fair share of encouraging news about climate change, for instance.
This post hardly covers them all, though. For these Colltales stories we’ve picked are more of a counterpoint to what was going on then. Rather than rehashing what was on everyone’s devices in 2015, they run a parallel track of commentary, criticism, and even comic relief.
Just as global temperatures kept rising, our pulse on the year’s events was better reflected on the weekly editorial Newsletter/Curtain Raiser. So we were free to report another kind of news, neither Pollyanna nor downright depressing. You know, the Colltalers preferable way. Enjoy.

ELVIS, CATS & RIO IN WINTER
The terrorist attack that killed nine journalists at the Paris offices of the Charlie Hebdo, on Jan. 7, was arguably the biggest news of the first three months of 2015. But the following day, we featured Elvis Presley‘s 80th birthday. And never looked back.
Stories about crows, unemployment, that old fave Voynich Manuscript, and a quirky take on Valentine Day followed. A personal darling was the 450th anniversary of Rio, our city of birth. Bandit Maria Bonita, cats, caturally, and life after death, online, completed the bunch.

A SPRING OF RACE & TIME
By then, the biggest refugee crisis of our era was already creeping in, but within the U.S., an old scourge was robbing the headlines: racism. Our own second quarter, though, was deep into Continue reading →

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Bloody Throes

The Hiroshima Reminder
& the Age of New Killings

Capping a few particularly blood-drenched weeks for thousands of civilians around the world, today’s the 69th anniversary of the mass killing of almost two hundred thousand residents of Hiroshima, by the first ever U.S. atomic bomb attack. It sealed the end of the World War 2 and started the nuclear age.
Meanwhile, Israel’s has withdrawn for now its ground troops from Gaza, but bombs continue to rain over Ukraine and Iraq. Plus, 100 years ago last Monday was the beginning of WW1, while around the same time, 50 years later, the first American combatants were sent to Vietnam. Blood soaked time, indeed.
Yet, for a breed of beings that’s been waging war since its inception on this planet, we’re surprisingly coy to call this game of mutual extermination for what it is. When it comes to rile up the troops and send them to the slaughtering fields, we’re often like bad parents, and lie to them that it won’t hurt. But it always does.
We insist in giving the carnage a catchy name, and promise it won’t last, but it always does, no matter how jazzed up the latest campaign is marketed to be. Remember ‘Shock and Awe?’ Almost like what the schoolyard bully would promise to do with us, at the end of the classes.
The writer H.G. Wells, best known as one of the forefathers of modern sci-fi literature, could’ve spared his legacy from a tragic miss, when he gave that first international conflict a pompous sobriquet: ‘the war to end all wars.’ 37 million dead, and two decades later, he couldn’t believe the world was ready to have another go at it.
To bury Japan’s imperial dreams of taking over where Hitler’d left off, the U.S. leveled two entire cities – Nagasaki was destroyed three days later, with almost another hundred thousand killed -, using atomic power, and justified it by claiming that such a power could not be topped, and it’d be forever a deterrent against war.

WHERE LIFE’S CHEAP, WAR’S MOST FOUL
And yet, many more followed. Speaking of justification, the Vietnam War, perhaps the most traumatic conflict the U.S. got ever involved, was triggered Aug. 4, 1964, with a confrontation with North Vietnamese forces at the Gulf of Tonkin, by covertly operating American ships.
The incident prompted Congress to give an unfortunate carte blanche to President Lyndon Johnson, and later Richard Nixon, to escalate a war that even now remains difficult, to well, justify. Coincidentally, Nixon signed the end of the war in 1973, and resigned from office 40 years ago this coming Saturday.
What we didn’t know then was that the only thing that the atomic bomb could possibly sustain was fear. Out of it, another war lingered, the Cold one, just enough to reset borders and redesign political alliances. Once we were done with it, Continue reading →

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Nuking the Future

Mutant Butterflies May Fail
To Prevent a New Fukushima

There are just a few kinds of people who’d feign surprise about this news: those who have been living under a rock for the past four years; those paid for by Japan’s nuclear industry; and Lady Barbara Judge, who’s nothing of the former, and more than a bit of the latter.
With the fast approaching third anniversary of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which prompted the world’s worst nuclear meltdown, at the complex of plants at Fukushima, what was once logical is, startling, no longer a certainty: that Japan would phase out its nukes for good.
Apparently, not even high radioactive readings surrounding the complex, or the fact that a beautiful creature such as a butterfly has become the canary of the mile, showing disturbing signs of mutations, seem to be enough to deter a renewed push to forget what could’ve been a horrifying tragedy.
Perhaps, the fact that it wasn’t, either by luck, or because genetic mutations and cancers in humans will take years to reveal their patterns, is the one to point as culprit for such short-memory mentality, driving Japan’s government and its aging generation of energy executives.
Who, by the way, should know better: after all, most of them were eyewitnesses of the devastation of the atomic bombs dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some 60 something years ago, and how the staggering health toll it took continues to claim lives and hopes for a future.
We’re not about to bash the brave Japanese people here, who has paid such a heavy price for the sins of its rulers during the war and before it. In reality, Japan has one of the most progressive environmental Continue reading →

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The Miyagi We Can Avoid

The Earth Shook & the Waters Came.
Nukes Blew Up & Thousands Got Killed

It happened a year ago tomorrow. At 2:46pm local time, on a Friday afternoon, the biggest earthquake to ever hit Japan shook the floor of its Pacific coastal sea and the entire country for six long minutes, while gigantic tsunami waves covered 10 miles inland with debris of every boat, building and vehicle it found on its lethal wake.
Even before the powerful aftershocks started, 15,000 had already perished, while over three thousand remain missing. The worst natural disaster, however, may have also caused the worse man made disaster: the destruction of the Fukushima Daiichi complex of six nuclear plants, which may have doomed by radiation thousands of Japanese citizens and miles of once fertile land for generations to come.
Even after a year, it’s impossible to determine the exact extent of the devastation of this tragedy, both uncontrollable from the point of view of nature, and utterly predictable, if experience and wisdom had prevailed years before it happened. Still, for years to come, the Myiagi earthquake will remain a cautionary tale for our losing bet against the dangers of nuclear power.
For if Japan has already started the process of reconstruction and Continue reading →