75 Years Ago Today, August 6, 1945

Let the ritual wailing begin. The United States killed about 300,000 people in four days. Atrocity. Evil nation.

No.

In World War II, the Americans were dragged in against their will to fight a kind of evil never seen before. We all (most of us, anyway) know about the extermination of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust. Less well known are the genocidal acts of Imperial Japan during the same period.

 Well, take a look.

Even that account understates for purposes of abbreviation. Personal diaries about the Japanese invasion of Manila, for example, describe quite vividly the Japanese soldiers grabbing newborns in the hospital nursery and bashing their brains out against the walls. Hardly ever noted is the fact that Japan did not surrender after Hiroshima. The vaporizing of 100,000 of their own people was not enough to make them yield their dreams of empire. Only another 100,000 at Nagasaki a few days later, and the promise of more to come, finally forced their hand. Why the bomb had to be used. They were crazy.

The Japanese are nice people these days. Good for them.

But guess what? The question nobody wants to ask or answer is what would have happened between 1945 and 2020 if any nation other than the United States had had nuclear weapons. Why the 75th anniversary actually means something: proof positive that the country conceived by our Founders has never aspired to empire, which was ours for the taking on August 9, 1945.

75 years of no use of nuclear weapons. That’s what we should be commemorating, not the fact that we used them to tell a barbaric Japanese throwback to Samurai bloodlust that their game was finally over and Unconditional Surrender means exactly that.

Why we have Toyotas and Sony digital products instead of heads stuck on pagoda walls overlooking Geisha tea ceremonies.

Who wouldn’t have used nuclear weapons in ages past if they were the only ones who had them? Alexander? Caesar? Charlemagne? King John? Napoleon? Kaiser Wilhelm? Adolf Hitler? Stalin? Mao? Khrushchev?

But we haven’t used them. For 75 years thus far. Without us, the implicit, unstated, de facto emperor of the globe, we would be living in a devastated, toxically irradiated world populated by less than 3 billion souls. And if we had never dropped an atom bomb, no one would ever have believed what it could do. We set an example for a century following to remember and learn from. But they’re all forgetting now. Just like you and you and you. Today is a day when we must remember what we did and why it has saved so many lives.

That’s a source of what should be pride, not shame. If any of us knew any history anymore. But we don’t. Do we?

Ever wondered about the famous picture of the building that survived,

now a museum and supposed monument to man’s inhumanity to man.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, Father of the Bomb, went to Harvard College.

So people of the weird persuasion are left to ask, “Is God laughing...?