Bloodshed (Updated)

But the word of the Lord came to me, saying, ‘You have shed much blood and have waged great wars; you shall not build a house to my name, because you have shed so much blood in my sight on the earth. 
- 1 Chronicles 22:8

3 guesses as to modern nation which closely models that described above?  Perhaps a great country built on bloodied backs of kidnapped slaves?

Could we say 'tis the country which unleashed the nuclear sword on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which although dread and terrible probably still killed less than the original sin of slavery?

Could we use the example of a country which fought 2 land wars in Asia: 1 which has not ended on the Korean peninsula and another where our Vietnamese allies became abandoned, the latter where US experts told politicians we could not win.

Or could we use the example of country which declared a global war on terror which will last for generations since we can't kill an idea?  This war recently claimed the lives of 4 American patriots in some homeless, misbegotten jungle.  Our leaders claim the right to blow anyone anywhere to bits, even Americana.

Whither our cival rights?  Whither the Constitution?

Face the Facts of US War Crimes

After a plane from the United States Army Air Force dropped without warning a second atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Nagasaki on 9 August 1045 at 11:02 am, the weapon vaporized a third of a mile above the Urakami valley, reaching a temperature of 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit, greater than the heat at the centre of our very own sun.

Three seconds later, the temperature at the ground level beneath the expanding may have reached 7.200 degrees Fahrenheit, instantly burning to cinders, every human, animal, tree, and shrub.

The blazing heat melted iron and other metals, scorched bricks and concrete buildings, ignited clothing, disintegrated vegetation, and caused severe and fatal flash burns on people’s exposed faces and bodies. A mile from the detonation, the blast force caused nine-inch brick walls to crack, and glass fragments bulleted into people’s arms, legs, backs, and faces, often puncturing their muscles and organs. Two miles away, thousands of people suffering flesh burns from the extreme heat lay trapped beneath partially demolished buildings.

At distances up to five miles, wood and glass splinters pierced through people’s clothing and ripped into their flesh. Windows shattered as far as eleven miles away. Larger doses of radiation than any human had ever received penetrated deeply into the bodies of people and animals. The ascending fireball suctioned massive amounts of thick dust and debris into its churning stem. A deafening roar erupted as buildings throughout the city shuddered and crashed to the ground.

“The Light Was Indescribable”

“It all happened in an instant,” Yoshida remembered. He had barely seen the blinding light half a mile away before a powerful force hit him on his right side and hurled him into the air. “The heat was so intense that I curled up like surume [dried grilled squid]."http://www.salon.com/2015/08/06/most_of_nagasakis_residents_had_no_warning_the_day_we_dropped_the_bomb_partner

Like a grilled squid.  Underneath the bomb, the tremendous heat and shock wave from the blast burned the skin right off humans' bodies, leaving burnt heaps behind.

Buildings exploded, and more radiation than ever unleashed on earth before, fell upon the inhabitants of Nagasaki--normal people like you and me despite the racism published in the US warning of the yellow menace of the Japanese which promoted fear based on skin pigmentation.  It becomes psychologically easier to slaughter great numbers of people if you define them as subhuman and barbaric--people who had received no warnings, no dropped leaflets, no radio broadcasts warning them to flee the city before nearly utter destruction.

The use of  the second atomic bomb on people came after a campaign of firebombing of German and Japanese cities, cities unimportant as military targets.  Firebombing them mostly killed civilians under the new theory of war as utter destruction of an enemy populace, bringing Old Testament biblical destruction upon other human beings, in violation of all the rules of civilized war.

World War II was a landmark in the development and deployment of technologies of mass destruction associated with air power, notably the B-29 bomber, napalm and the atomic bomb. An estimated 50 to 70 million people lay dead in its wake. In a sharp reversal of the pattern of World War I and of most earlier wars, a substantial majority of the dead were noncombatants. [1] The air war, which reached peak intensity with the area bombing, including atomic bombing, of major European and Japanese cities in its final year, had a devastating impact on noncombatant populations.

What is the logic and what have been the consequences—for its victims, for subsequent global patterns of warfare and for international law—of new technologies of mass destruction and their application associated with the rise of air power and bombing technology in World War II and after? Above all, how have these experiences shaped the American way of war over six decades in which the United States has been a major actor in important wars? The issues have particular salience in an epoch whose central international discourse centers on terror and the War on Terror, one in which the terror inflicted on noncombatants by the major powers is frequently neglected.  (emphasis added)  From A Forgotten Holocaust: http://japanfocus.org/site/view/2414

So failing to face facts of "moral atrocitie"s committed in the name of the American people in service of the Global War on Terror (sic) today causes misuse of US military power, which engenders and foments the terror we seek to stop.

"As I have observed, those who plow evil
    and those who sow trouble reap it."
Job 4:8

                                           

The Genius and Despair of the Human Race

First, let's consider the better nature of ourselves, that human desire to take what we see and transmit it to posterity in the form of paintings, dating all the way back to prehistory in the form of cave paintings, with perhaps finest examples found near Lescaux, France.

Just when one gets tempted to give up on the Internets as font of racism and home of trolls, troglodytes, and deviant porn, you accidentally find a Google Earth Tour of Florence, Italy, and just today found the Web Gallery of Art, the last web based collection of "European fine Art from the eleventh to nineteenth centuries, with artists from A to Z: Aachen, Hans von to Zurn, Michael.

Love me some Vermeer, Johannes in this case with the Geographer:

Right at your fingertips you can find the masters, indeed the Titans of European art; damn, that's some good stuff.

Now for the opposite side of the coin, today we find the 70th anniversary of the dropping of the second atom bomb, by the United States of Self Righteous America, the two unnecessary bombings comprising some of the worst crimes in the history of the world, akin to the angry as Hell old, white, bearded old Testament God instructing the Israelites to slaughter the Amalekites; men, women children and even the animals: God HISownSelf ordering a junior Holocaust.

 

Yup, here you see it, American exceptionalism at the best.

[Seventy years ago this week we vaporized 250,000 civilians, and yet still view the bombings as an act of mercy....   (Emphasis added)

(S)ome of America’s best-known World War II military commanders opposed using atomic weaponry. In fact, six of the seven five-star generals and admirals of that time believed that there was no reason to use them, that the Japanese were already defeated, knew it, and were likely to surrender before any American invasion could be launched. Several, like Admiral William Leahy and General Dwight Eisenhower, also had moral objections to the weapon. Leahy considered the atomic bombing of Japan “barbarous” and a violation of “every Christian ethic I have ever heard of and all of the known laws of war.” (Emphasis added again because Americans refuse to face facts.) http://www.salon.com/2015/08/05/americas_overdue_hiroshima_reckoning_the_revisionist_history_that_haunts_the_good_war_partner/

Most of us live in a fantasy world where force can solve everything, refusing to face even the basic fact use of nuclear weapons creates clouds of radioactive fallout which circle the globe.

"Nuke 'em until they glow," will kill us too, making it far preferable to seek peace through diplomacy and avoid becoming complicit in war crimes, except of course the odd drone strike which kills innocent civilians.  www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-strikes-kill-1147

Gosh those make me feel safer; guess i can go back to the bread and circuses offered up by American telly.  Praise Allah the NFL started the preseason tonight.

Amen!

[The second atomic bomb attack of Japan took place on August 9, 1945 in the city of Nagasaki. The northern portion of the city was destroyed almost instantaneously, and an estimated 70,000 people were killed as a result. According to the statistics found within Nagasaki Peach Park, the death toll from the atomic totaled exactly 73,884, including 2,000 Korean forced workers and eight POWs, as well as another 74,909 injured. This does not include another several hundred thousand diseased and dying from fallout and other illness caused by nuclear radiation.]

http://www.japanfinds.com/nagasaki-travel-guide/