On August 6, 1945, during World War II, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bomb was named Little Boy, dropped from an airplane named the Enola Gay. Little Boy killed 140,000 Japanese, destroyed the city, and seriously injured another 100,000 residents.
On August 9, 1945, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Japan, this one on the city named Nagasaki. That bomb was named Fatman. It killed 74,000, seriously injured 75,000, and destroyed the city.
The death and devastation caused by those two bombs haunted the world for generations, showing the horrors of war, the suffering that could be inflicted by humans on each other, the need to avoid nuclear weapons proliferation and to avoid wars.
But those lessons were forgotten or ignored by greedy sociopathic men like bush-cheney and those who put them into office. So once again, the United States is leading the world in its atrocities against other nations. There are arguments that the atomic bombs were necessary because Japan refused to surrender, and so many Americans would have died tried to invade that nation. Some people argue that the bombs were not necessary. I don't have an answer. I do know that the bombing of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused all people in the world to stop, to back away from war, to think about the consequences of mass murder, which is all that war is.
We have outdone ourselves in the U.S. Wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. Neither nation declared war on us. Neither nation attacked us, or threatened to attack us. Neither nation had much of a military, if any, just poor men with hand-held guns, trying to stop the most sophisticated military in the world from taking over their countries. Why are we really there, other than to act as a private security goon squad for the oil corporations that want to steal the oil? No other reason.
The U.S. government has refused to allow the citizens of the U.S. to know critical information about these wars. Why do they refuse to let the citizens be informed about what is going on? Because they learned from Vietnam that if the citizens really know and see what is being done in their names, they will quickly turn against the wars.
Our government, for example, recently refused to allow the Rolling Stone reporter who interviewed former General McChrystal to go to Iraq as part of a media team. It's straight-up censorship and a first amendment violation to exclude the reporter who everyone admits told the truth, and only allow in the reporters who parrot the government's lies. It's our first amendment -- the people's constitutional rights --to have access to accurate media reporting about what our government is doing. By excluding this reporter, the government has violated the constitutional rights of all the people.
The government has also banned and censored photos -- such as no photos of Americans coming back from war in coffins are allowed to be taken by anyone, because the public during Vietnam was horrified at the sight of the coffins filled with young Americans, dead for no good reason. Photos convey the truth, and the government is trying to prevent the public from learning the truth.
Our government also refuses to allow any counting of the number of people we have killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is intended to cover up and avoid claims of international war crimes (which we have committed) and to keep the public ignorant about the slaughter that is going on in their names. Despite the government's efforts to prevent this from coming out, authoritative sources have done their best to estimate the total number of dead. They have concluded that at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died because of the U.S. War Against Iraq, and possibly well over One Million people have died. We've exceeded anyone's wildest nightmares, and have killed way more than we did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No celebration is in order. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-naiman/how-many-iraqis-did-we-li_b_673683.html
(Firestorm wiped out everything still existing in Hiroshima after the bomb was dropped)
The website Cost Of War keeps a running tab on the cost to the U.S. of the bush-cheney corporate resource wars being waged against Iraq and Afghanistan. Currently, that cost is over One Trillion Dollars. Who profits? Oil corporations, the World Trade Organization which established its control over the occupied nations and their resources by use of brutality and violence, Blackwater, Halliburton, Dick Cheney and his evil spawn, Wall Street, the defense industry. Who loses? The people of Iraq and Afghanistan whose nations have been destroyed and are being militarily occupied and stripped of their resources, and the people of the U.S.
If you want to know why our nation is bankrupt, look to these wars of aggression for a big part of the answer. One Trillion Dollars of taxpayer money spent on these wars, and now our government has the nerve to tell us that they have wiped out the Social Security fund, and they want to change the law so that nobody can collect until they are at least 70 years old. They've stolen our money. We need to go get it back. We need to end these wars, have public hearings to hold the people who lied us into these wars responsible for their actions. We need an accounting of what they have done with our money, because apparently hundreds of millions of dollars have simply been stolen. And we need to make sure that our country will never again go to war unless another nation has attacked us, or there is evidence of imminent threat of attack. http://costofwar.com/
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