Hiroshima: genocide or war action?

Nakamura-San , one of the survivors John Hersey interviewed in May 1946 for his report on the consequences of the atomic bomb dropped in Hiroshima last summer, used a resigned expression to synthesize the apathy he lived in since he suffered the "most inhuman life experience of the entire twentieth century", in the words of Kenzaburo Oé: " Shikata ga nai " ( Nothing to do ). For Mrs. Nakamura, as for many others condemned to live under the effects of radiation, the bomb, writes Hersey, "seemed almost a natural disaster; a disaster that was simply a consequence of bad luck, part of destiny (which was due to be accepted)".

On that feeling of helplessness and submission, seasoned with a well-meaning pacifism , the Peace Memorial Museum was built in 1955, a few meters from the epicenter of nuclear deflagration. To the images of a happy and prosperous city that on August 5, 1945 nothing could suspect about the destiny that someone was writing for her, they happen in the spacious rooms of the enclosure conceived by Kenzo Tange others of the city razed on the 6th And then, the allegations, almost as prayers, against war and the proliferation of atomic weapons. It is that of Hiroshima, a museum inspired by values, which a pedagogue would say, but which contributes little to the knowledge of what happened in the country in the first half of the 20th century. Because hell on earth, even less in the deadliest century that written history has ever known, is never unleashed by the action of a supernatural and divine force . It has causes. And they are human.

To point out, however, to those responsible and their motivations, would inevitably imply assuming the part of guilt that each one had in the savage clash that took place between the established American empire and the expansive Japanese Imperial Army that, undermined by the economic depression In 1929, he sought, between 1931 and 1945, a vital space to establish his territorial, political, economic and racial dominance. "For the Japanese," explains Laurence Rees in The Asian Holocaust ( Critique , 2009), "the war against the Western allies was but one more chapter of their global struggle for supremacy in Asia, a conflict that had begun in Manchuria" and that it was later extended to the rest of China, where from 1937 a genuine genocide against the Chinese people took place , which the Japanese defined as a race of "subhumans." But Nankin, despite his atrocity, was not, Rees explains, "but one more element of a mosaic that was fixed during the beginning of the conflict." On December 3, 1941, the Imperial Headquarters through Order 575 approved the application of the Sanko Sakusen doctrine, or the Three All : "Kill everything, plunder everything, destroy everything . " The terror then spread to the rest of Southeast Asia, mostly in the hands of Western powers. British, Dutch and French controlled enclaves like Hong Kong, Singapore, Burma, Malaysia, the East Indies or Indochina. And in all of them, the Japanese Imperial Army applied a war of extermination that includes atrocious massacres such as Manila, against the Spanish community in the Philippines, crop confiscations, indiscriminate shootings and use as slaves until exhaustion along with the application of cruel Tortures to all Western and local prisoners of war, who were often left to starve and thirst.

Faced with the attack on their interests in the Pacific, the Western powers began a shy embargo policy that began in July 1941 with the freezing of all Japanese funds and financial assets in the US and the end of oil exports, iron and steel, shared by the rest of allies. The Japanese response was swift and on December 7 of that year, the Imperial Navy launched an attack on US planes, cruisers and battleships anchored at the naval base of Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii , to try to have a possible US intervention slow down Your conquests The aggression, in which more than 2,400 Americans died and more than 1,100 were injured, rekindled a feeling of hatred towards the Japanese that resulted in the war cry of the Marines throughout the conflict: "Don't forget Pearl Harbor! Keep on dying! " The United States began its true Second World War . In the Pacific, most of its troops were left. In Okinawa alone, 12,000 soldiers died, four times more than on the beaches of Normandy.

But the feeling of racial hatred towards everything Japanese did not remain only in the Armed Forces. As Miguel del Rey and Carlos Canales collect in Campos de muerte. Geography of evil ( Edaf , 2016), Pearl Harbor marked "the beginning of a racist, unfair and cruel persecution of innocent civilians, whose only crime was their place of birth." Democratic Congressman John Elliot Rankin marked the path immediately after the Japanese attack: "I propose," he said in the House of Representatives, "that all Japanese in America, Alaska and Hawaii be captured, interned in concentration camps and I sent them to Asia as soon as possible. This is a racial war. The white man's civilization has gone to war with Japanese barbarism . One of the two must be destroyed. Let's condemn them! Let's get rid of them now! "

The Japanese were excluded from the unions, expelled from their jobs and in just three months there were 36 attacks, seven of which ended in death. In full anti-Japanese phobia, Roosevelt signed on February 19, 1942 executive order No. 9066 in which two military areas were created in which civilians became dependent on the Secretary of War. In March, he signed No. 9102, through which 10 internment camps were projected under military jurisdiction in which 120,000 Japanese of origin (called isei , about 43,000) and second generation ( nisei , about 77,000) were interned. The latter ceased to have U.S. citizenship.

They were locked up for three years, until in December 1944 the Supreme Court ruled that, with the exception of some suspects, the Japanese could return to their homes. " None was ever charged with any crime. None was prosecuted . The operation," conclude Del Rey and Canales, "also included the freezing of bank accounts, the seizure of assets and (...) other restrictive measures." Any historiographical consideration of whether what came next may or may not be considered genocide (beyond the limited and restrictive legal definition of the United Nations), must take into account that in the United States, the Japanese, for the sole purpose of being so, They were selected, expropriated and locked in fields . The temptation of extermination, as Congressman Rankin advanced, is evident, although this one, at least on American soil, was not finally carried out.

On the battlefield, from the Guadalcanal campaign, in February 1943 , the allies manage to stop the Japanese expansion and initiate an offensive that will lead to the defeat of the Japanese empire. But this would be by annihilation. On March 10, 1945, US aviation caused, in a bombardment with incendiary shells over Tokyo , the largest known fire storm, killing more than 100,000 people, as many as they would die in Hiroshima. The crew of the B-29, Rees explains, knew "that their mission was no longer to attack industrial targets but to kill civilians and, as far as possible, deliberately hinder the work of firefighters trying to extinguish fires." Then Hiroshima and Nagasaki arrived . And one day before the surrender, on August 14, the attack on Kumagaya , which razed half its surface.

Following the report by Hersey, the occupying authority, which had prevented Hirohito from sitting on the bench like the rest of his subordinates, imposed silence on the survivors. Resigned, they were then turned into instruments of a naive pacifism that prevented them from knowing what happened . And denounce their executioners.

Fernando Palmero is a doctor from the Complutense University, journalist and co-author, among others, of The places of the Holocaust , which will appear in the Confluencias publishing house.

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