On 6 and 9 August 1945, the United States detonated two atomic bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively. The aerial bombings together killed between 129,000 and 226,000 people, most of whom were civilians.
Eye-witness accounts of the bombing's aftermath depicted a kind of apocalyptic horror: Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German Jesuit priest, encountered a group of soldiers whose "faces were wholly burned, their eye-sockets were hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their cheeks... Their mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds, which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit the spout of the teapot."
Dr. Michihiko Hachiya, a survivor, spoke of "streetcars were standing and inside were dozens of bodies, blackened beyond recognition. I saw fire reservoirs filled to the brim with dead bodies who looked as they had been boiled alive".
President Harry Truman made the case to the public that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a necessary and humanitarian means of forcing Japan's surrender. This view was not held, however, by military commanders or leftist American dissidents.
Once American forces had Japan under military control, they imposed censorship on many images related to the U.S. bombing campaign. Among the images banned was a picture of a partially incinerated Nagasaki child, taken by Japanese photographer Yōsuke Yamahata. These restrictions were not lifted until 1952.
Among the first Americans to denounce the bombing were socialists such as the Trotskyist James P. Cannon, who publicly denounced the use of nuclear weapons as "an unspeakable atrocity".
The dissent of military commanders was not public, however. In 1950, Admiral William Leahy, Truman's chief of staff, wrote: "The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan". In his memoirs, President Eisenhower, then General of the Army, confessed that "dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary".
Dropping the Bomb: Hiroshima & Nagasaki - Shaun 💀
Megathreads and spaces to hang out:
- ❤️ Come listen to music and Watch movies with your fellow Hexbears nerd, in Cy.tube
- 💖 Come talk in the New Weekly Queer thread
- 💛 Read and talk about a current topics in the News Megathread
- ⭐️ August Movie Nominations ⭐️
reminders:
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- 💙 Hexbear’s algorithm prioritizes comments over upbears
- 💜 Sorting by new you nerd
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- 🐶 Join the unofficial Hexbear-adjacent Mastodon instance toots.matapacos.dog
Links To Resources (Aid and Theory):
Aid:
Theory:
so uh how do we find all the libs to dunk on? it just looks like normal to me
hexbear.net/c/{lib comm}@{lib instance}
e.g. hexbear.net/c/genzedong@lemmygrad.ml
deleted by creator
It’s because the lemmygrad server is far from the hexbear server
redshift
if you browse the frontpage by "All" you should see more and more posts from other instances as time goes on. Federation doesn't really work retroactively, at least not yet, so it isn't immediate.
You can see what servers we are federated with at hexbear.net/instances and if there are any comms from those that you want to see, you can paste their URL into the search box here on Hexbear to find and sub to them (or to force an initial sync of the comm, as they dont federate unless at least one user here has subbed to it)