Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Per non dimenticare: Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Tra qualche giorno e' l'anniversario di uno dei piu' grossi olocausti della
storia del genere umano.
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.

 reprinted with permission.
...
Re-post:
As the United States celebrates the 58th anniversary of one of the
only two uses of nuclear weapons on other humans by holding a
secret conference in Omaha to organize the re-escalation of nuclear
weapons production to levels exceeding any attained during the Cold
War, Democracy Now remembers it with a remarkable broadcast.
If you have broadband, you can watch it at 
www.democracynow.org
.
Even if you're on a modem, you can listen as they allow Shigeko
Sasmori to tell her first-hand story of being in Hiroshima and seeing
the bomb fall.  Then they play excerpts from a radio reading of John
Hersey's "Hiroshima."  It's sobering, especially at a time when our
administration has clearly enunciated its right and its intention to
use tactical nuclear weapons anytime and anywhere they want to,
and have already escalated production of those weapons to Cold
War levels, and are holding this meeting to ensure their ability to
exceed those levels.
When you're finished listening, go buy a copy of Nobel Peace
Prize nominee Dr. Helen Caldicott's "The New Nuclear Danger:
George Bush's Military Industrial Complex" and you'll *really*
begin to understand the danger that the United States poses
to the continuation of life on this planet.

exceeding any attained during the Cold War,
E come fa a saperlo visto che non e' stato certo invitato? :))
*ROTFL*
-Stefano

 enemy of mankind, the imperialists of the United States.
Plebeians: lapsus freudiano?
All the best,
Buzzi