Text of President Obama’s Speech in Hiroshima, Japan
Source: New York Times
MAY 27, 2016
The following is a transcript of President Obamas speech in Hiroshima, Japan, as recorded by The New York Times.
Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.
Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans, a dozen Americans held prisoner.
Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become.
It is not the fact of war that sets Hiroshima apart. Artifacts tell us that violent conflict appeared with the very first man. Our early ancestors having learned to make blades from flint and spears from wood used these tools not just for hunting but against their own kind. On every continent, the history of civilization is filled with war, whether driven by scarcity of grain or hunger for gold, compelled by nationalist fervor or religious zeal. Empires have risen and fallen. Peoples have been subjugated and liberated. And at each juncture, innocents have suffered, a countless toll, their names forgotten by time.
Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/28/world/asia/text-of-president-obamas-speech-in-hiroshima-japan.html
yallerdawg
(16,104 posts)...a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.
This more than anything else!
ucrdem
(15,512 posts)proverbialwisdom
(4,959 posts)Last edited Tue May 31, 2016, 11:45 PM - Edit history (1)
Friday, May 27, 2016
Special Feature Marking Obama's Visit to Hiroshima
Since 1982, when I became the editor of Nuclear Times, I have perhaps written more words about the atomic bombings of 1945, and their aftermath for decades since, than anyone: in articles, in blog posts, in three books. Spending a month in the two atomic cities was, of course, something of a formative experience. A very small sampling of my writing on this subject sits below in this blog. And here is a separate page at Pressing Issues that traces what I call the "atomic cover-up" of images since 1945.
Posted by Greg Mitchell at 10:30 AM
http://gregmitchellwriter.blogspot.com/
http://gregmitchellwriter.blogspot.com/p/blog-page_19.html
http://whowhatwhy.org/2016/05/27/survivors-almost-gone-tragedy-lives/
http://whowhatwhy.org/2016/05/26/classic-hiroshima-series-part/
http://whowhatwhy.org/2016/05/27/classic-hiroshima-series-part-ii/
http://whowhatwhy.org/2016/05/28/classic-hiroshima-series-part-iii/
bananas
(27,509 posts)bettydavis
(93 posts)drink it in people. There's more than a bad chance we might not hear this level of eloquence from an American president again for a long while...😩
Redness
(18 posts)Obama speaks of the nuclear strikes as if they were the consequence of an abstract "war". No, they were decisions on the part of the US. Hiroshima forced Japan to surrender to the US in particular so that Russia would not share post-war authority as it did in Germany, and Nagasaki further demonstrated to Russia the US's nuclear potential, just like North Korea is today censured for doing, the difference being that the US's demonstration killed tens of thousands of civilians.
latebloomer
(7,120 posts)Meanwhile he just approved a trillion dollars for new nuclear weapons.