Hiroshima August 6th, 1945

At 08:14 and 45 seconds on August 6, 1945, the American bomber Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy,” the bomb that destroyed about 90% of the buildings in the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

A devastating flash of lightning, the shockwave, lives broken.

The devastation and rubble are there, but then… Then the rain and the dust, the real beginning of the horror.

Lives are broken by the radioactive fall-out that follows, condemning to death or unspeakable suffering thousands of people, women, men, children, young people, old people who will suffer for years the consequences of hell brought to earth in the name of peace.

Three days later the horror is repeated in Nagasaki, a bomb dropped more out of the need to test it than for real military reasons. And the target is linked to the damn fate, the bad weather prevented the bomber from reaching the real target, Kokura, but Nagasaki is down there. It doesn’t matter if it is the least aligned Japan’s city, the most open, and with a strong Christian community. A bitter irony.

Urakami Tenshudo, a Catholic cathedral in Nagasaki, destroyed by the atomic bomb and with the dome upside down.

Pain and a wound that will continue for years. A pain that has never had a message of apology.

In American ethics, there is a deep sense of their absolute impunity linked to their sense of moral superiority over the world. The blame lies with the Japanese, they have always repeated it, and since winners write the history, the whole narrative leads there.

Of course, if you talk to the Japanese, the story sounds different, but they lost, their version doesn’t count.

Let’s clear up a monstrosity like the release of atomic power on the civilian population does not cancel the faults and horror that imperial Japan caused during the war.

What the Japanese did in China, the Manshūkoku or as the Chinese say Mǎnzhōuguó (Manchukuo for English speakers) was the scene of horrors beyond imagination, a wound that cries out horror from the depths of the soul.

But two horrors do not cancel each other out, they add up in the deafening roar of an annihilation of humanity.

Today it remains a memory that many people do not understand or do not want to understand, not only in the West, even in Japan itself.

But for a minute we close our eyes, we relive that flash that wounded humanity and left the wound open, a wound that will not close until we make amends for our responsibilities.

Today we mourn civilians who have died, immolated to the idea that there is a higher value than them.

We tell ourselves it will never happen again, but I don’t believe it that much.