The Biggest Lie

WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, 16 Aug 2021

Stephanie Hiller – TRANSCEND Media Service

Nagasaki Day, August 9, 2021 – The biggest secret ever revealed was the Manhattan Project, in which the US spent two billion dollars or more to build the bomb.

It was followed by a big lie by President Truman when he got on national radio to announce that this marvelous invention had been dropped on “Hiroshima, a military base.

“We wished in this first attack to avoid, in so far as possible, the killing of civilians.” It was a lie. Hiroshima was not a military base; some 140,000 civilians died.

Bigger lies followed, such as the insistence that the bomb was used to justify the secret expense to Congress (who had not been informed, much less included in the decision).

But bigger than all these,  the biggest lie of all, was the assertion made for decades in classrooms across America and taken as fact by most Americans that the bombing of Hiroshima had ended the war.

A number of historians, beginning with Gar Alperovitz, have produced credible evidence that Japan was ready to surrender and that the US knew it before August 6, having deciphered the codes of messages from the Japanese to Churchill, stating Japan’s intention to withdraw.

You can read a powerful summary of the historical record by David Swanson, executive director of World Beyond War.

August 9 was the 76^th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, an act the US never even bothered to justify.

The two bombings slaughtered some 200,000 civilians who died in the most miserable holocaust of them all. But the event was barely noted in the mainstream media.

It’s crucial that we remember these two dates and honor the men, women and children who suffered horribly on the day of the bombing and for years thereafter from the radiation poisoning which the US also lied about.

The lies about the bomb, beginning with its inception and continuing to the present day, established a habitual pattern of deceit in this country that became so exaggerated during the reign of Donald Trump that it is no wonder that many people do not trust the government to tell the truth about anything, not even the vaccine.

Most of these vax-skeptics are fans of the Abominable Donald. But not all. Some are good-hearted well-meaning liberal intellectuals who are so well aware of the government’s addiction to deception that they have become susceptible to even that most flagrant conspiracy theories.

Hence one might say that the situation of polarization and cynicism now prevailing in this country is part of the enormous dark legacy of the atomic bomb.

I’m saying that here.

The bomb, and its use, and the enormous sums expended to make more bombs, has almost destroyed this country and may lead to its complete collapse.

Inventing, and using, an instrument capable of destroying the entire world in an eyeblink is a hard act to live with, one that has corrupted government and society, supported violence all over the world and robbed us of our integrity.

Now we have climate change delivering essentially the same message, that we’re all going to die if we don’t wake up. The tragic outcome of another addiction, to fossil fuels, climate change has an actual deadline. We have less than ten years to stop the dangerous pathway to our tragic demise, and the consequences have already begun, as the IPCC report released this week has brought home to us all. Unlike the looming catastrophe of all out nuclear war, this event has a deadline.

The COP26 to be held in Glasgow in November may well be the critical turning point, when the nations of the world will either commit to policies that will hold back that demise or consign us all to the fires of hell.

In a brilliant move, a coalition of UK organizations has formed to alert the world to the relationship between the production of genocidal nuclear bombs and climate change. This is key to stopping our headlong race to extinction.

As has been shown repeatedly and amply discussed at the World Beyond War’s 2017 NoWar conference, the military is the biggest polluter on the planet and hence the most culpable of bringing on climate change, far exceeding the carbon cloud created by buildings, cars and the deceitful, lying fossil fuel companies. For tons of resources, see www.worldbeyondwar.org/

“The COP26 Coalition is a UK-based civil society coalition of groups and individuals organising towards mobilising around climate justice during COP26. “Coalition members include environment and development NGOs, trade unions, grassroots community campaigns, faith groups, youth groups, migrant and racial justice networks.” See www.COP26.coalition.org

It also includes 350.org and CodePink. Other groups are certain to join. CodePink has organized a petition and a useful information page for those who want to initiate protests at home or go to Glasgow.

CodePink is broadcasting the stark connection between climate change and an inflated, lugubrious and heedless military, with a proposed 2022 budget of $730 billion and more (the loathsome Repubs are trying to add $50 billion), much of it to support the building of new nuclear intercontinental missiles. The money spent on war could easily provide resources for the entire transition to a clean-energy world with a stable climate and food for all.

Finally, the real culprit has been identified. War is the true source of our imminent demise. And it is not human nature. “It’s the testosterone,” said Helen Caldicott, speaking at a meeting of PraxisPeace August 13 in Sonoma, the aggressive, dominator model that Riane Eisler described so well.

Civilizations existed in the long-ago preliterate world for which no evidence of weapons has been found, as Marija Gimbutas demonstrated in her study of thousands of artifacts from Eastern Europe. Other studies have confirmed her theory. Humanity has not always been propelled to engender its own mass suicide. It is this that is the biggest lie, the notion that making war is human nature.

We’ve got to stop this insanity.

I’m considering making a trip to cold, drizzly Glasgow the first week of November to join this absolutely fundamental protest. Will you come?

Find out more, and at least sign the petition at https://www.codepink.org/cop26

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Stephanie Hiller is a free-lance writer in Sonoma, California. A slightly different version of this piece appeared in her blog, TheAge, in the Sonoma Sun on August 9.

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 16 Aug 2021.

Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: The Biggest Lie, is included. Thank you.

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