"The struggle of people against power," wrote Milan Kundera, "is the struggle of memory against forgetting." Washington dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima 62 years ago today, resulting in the deaths of over 140,000 people, almost all of them civilians.
In his speech at the Peace Memorial Park this morning the major of Hiroshima criticized America for failing to disarm it's nuclear weapons, and warned his own government to keep to the "no war" tradition enshrined in Article 9 of Japan's Constitution.
Though the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock says it's five minutes to midnight, there are also some signs of hope. A friend now working in Greenpeace in Japan wrote to say that the documentary “White Light, Black Rain: The Destruction Of Hiroshima And Nagasaki” made by Steven Okazaki will be shown on prime time television in the United States this week. Significantly, this is the first time such a large U.S. audience will be exposed to such an in-depth recount of experiences of living and dying under the atomic clouds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Meanwhile peace activists around the world continue exposing and disrupting nuclear weapons sites with the same creative confrontation Greenpeace earned it's name for.
The beautiful photo of floating umbrellas was taken at the 50th commemoration of the atomic bombing in Hiroshima. The river was used by victims to try to cool their burns.