EDITOR'S NOTE
Rothschild, Matthew
EDITOR'S NOTE Matthew Rothschild The Bomb, Today Every August for the past ten years, author Greg Mitchell has written a commemorative article for us about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and...
...EDITOR'S NOTE Matthew Rothschild The Bomb, Today Every August for the past ten years, author Greg Mitchell has written a commemorative article for us about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...Incidentally, Powers gave a flattering blurb to Mitchell and Lifton's latest book...
...The judge and jury were biased, and Abu-Jamal repeatedly had his rights violated...
...It's an honor to be publishing Mitchell once more—the last of his series for The Progressive on the atomic bombings...
...I wasn't taken by an article by Thomas Powers in the July issue of The Atlantic...
...on August 8 he caught the first train leaving the city for his home town, Nagasaki...
...Abu-Jamal, who had no prior convictions, has steadfastly denied committing this crime, and his trial was a scandal...
...In one long day, he took 119 pictures of suffering and destruction—the most extensive record of either atomic bombing...
...And he comes down hard on the protesters: "It is instructive that those who criticize the atomic bombings most severely have never gone on to condemn all the bombing"—by that he means the fire bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo...
...To urge a stay of execution, please write Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge at 225 Main Capitol, Harrisburg, PA 17120...
...It was about the unluckiest man in the world, Kenshi Hirata...
...The former radio journalist, Black Panther, and supporter of the Philadelphia-based group MOVE, was convicted in 1982 of killing a police officer the year before...
...He played a big role during the past year in criticizing the Smithsonian's self-censorship of its Hiroshima exhibit, and on June 28 he was at the opening of the shameful Enola Gay exhibit with his placard in hand...
...Not anymore...
...After wandering around the center of Hiroshima for two days, however, he was emotionally devastated, and at 3 P.M...
...One great thing about Mitchell is he's not just an impassioned writer...
...Yamahata was twenty-eight when the Western Army Corps sent him to take pictures of the bomb's aftermath...
...He escaped serious injury...
...Hirata was at work at the Mitsubishi shipyards three miles from Ground Zero," Mitchell wrote in our August 1985 issue...
...When the train reached Nagasaki at 10:30 the following morning, Hirata got off and headed for home, a half-hour walk...
...Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose prison writings we excerpted in our May issue ("Live from Death Row"), is scheduled to be executed on August 17, at 10 P.M...
...This painful and important subject has never been considered as carefully, as fairly, or as deeply as it is now, in Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell's Hiroshima in America...
...His son, Shogo Yamahata, has graciously provided us with the photos, along with a brief introduction...
...I was taken by his first-person account of wandering, Chaplinlike, through the military bureaucracy...
...nuclear arsenal...
...The third piece in our commemoration is by Paul Shambroom, a documentary photographer based in Minneapolis who was given exceptional access to the U.S...
...The book, Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, is a masterful account of the deceptions Americans have been fed since day one about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki...
...Powers was once an outspoken critic of the bomb...
...Mitchell, who used to be the editor of Nuclear Times, has gone on to write books—including one on the muckraker Upton Sinclair...
...Wrestling with the reality of nuclear weapons, as Shambroom does, is a crucial exercise for all of us...
...He was greeted by his mother...
...It's also an honor to be publishing some of the photographs of Nagasaki that the Smithsonian refused to show...
...And to praise the bomb as a prophylactic against its use in the last fifty years is to deny the many close calls we've had with nuclear war since then, which Mitchell and Lifton examine...
...She was happy to see him, for she had heard that a new type of bomb had been used in Hiroshima...
...He eases up on Truman: "Now I confess sympathy for the man...
...He did what he thought was right, and the war ended, the killing stopped, Japan was transformed and redeemed, fifty years followed in which this kind of killing was never repeated...
...Yosuke Yamahata was among the very first Japanese photographers to document the destruction of Nagasaki, and his photos reveal the human tragedy in stark terms...
...he's a tireless activist, too...
...I remember his first one vividly...
...Yamahata died of cancer in 1966, at the age of forty-eight...
...Hirata excitedly started describing the unearthly white flash he had observed in the sky three days earlier—when he saw it again through the front door...
...This charge is grossly unfair, since many peace activists have, indeed, criticized the reckless Allied bombings of civilians during World War II...
...But he kept doing his yearly pieces for us, and he began to work on a book about the bomb with Robert Jay Lifton, which has just been published...
...I don't get it, but then again, I don't get the whole cottage industry of book-jacket blurbs, anyway...
Vol. 59 • August 1995 • No. 8
