Madden Mischief

Watching the event marking the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and three days later Nagasaki, I couldn’t help thinking of the devastation in Gaza today, albeit on a smaller scale than what the most horrific blast the world has ever seen had caused decades ago. 

Hopefully it will never happen anywhere again what happened that day in Japan!

Yet, the ongoing war in Gaza has ominous overtones and eerie shadings reminiscent of World War II. 

President Trump and prime minister Netanyahu today act like President Roosevelt did back then, only instead of demanding unconditional surrender, Trump for now just wants hostages released and a cease fire, same as he’s advocating between Russia and Ukraine. 

But Netanyahu now is planning to take control of Gaza City while Hamas seems to just want to keep shooting at peace and acting like Hitler and would you believe ironically Germany has suspended arms exports to Israel over the Gaza City takeover plan. 

Thousands of people gathered in Hiroshima to commemorate the world’s first wartime use of a nuclear bomb. 

Survivors, officials and representatives from 120 countries and territories marked the milestone with renewed calls for disarmament andHiroshima’s mayor, Kazumi Matsui, warning of the dangers of rising global militarism.

The western Japanese city was flattened when the United States dropped a uranium bomb, code named Little Boy, instantly killing over 78,000 men, women and children plus tens of thousands more who would die by the end of that horrible year due to burns and radiation exposure.  Can you imagine a Big Boy?

A blistering reminder of today was that atomic bomb exclamation point President Roosevelt explosively put on his demand that Japan give up, after which it soon did while many thousands more would die from wounds and radiation in the weeks, months and years that followed the monstrous blast.  Japan surrendering six days after the Nagasaki bombing brought a climactic end to World War II.

Today Japan, the only nation to have suffered atomic bombings, is protected by the U.S. nuclear umbrella. While the US attacked Iran with nuclear bombs, they targeted a non-population area where Iran was building its own nuclear bomb.

Today, more than 50,000 U.S. military personnel are stationed in Japan and in the past eight decades the country has fired not a shot in anger, but now situated in such a dangerous neighborhood, Japan’s postwar commitment is shifting, and it is rebuilding its military. 

While the Japanese constitution, drafted during the U.S. occupation, renounces war as a means of settling disputes, now Japan may be revising that pacifist charter as the area around it has dramatically changed. Many Japanese now perceive real and growing threats making topics once politically untouchable now openly debated.

Incessant villainy

Today in Gaza the villainous Hamas seem to be eating well as they refuse to release remaining malnourished Israeli hostages and continue hiding behind thousands of poor starving children and their beleaguered and homeless families.

Meanwhile, Israel feels forced to keep pounding away often at the cost of innocent civilian’s lives and causing growing abhorrence globally to the IDF attacks and widespread hunger due to blatantly inadequate food distribution.

While there may be wrongs on both sides, Hamas started this stupidly cruel bloody war and seems to be using the civilian population as a shield thus riling up countries to urge statehood for Hamas where the leaders there are still the bloody murderers who started this terrible war, that has resulted in such hunger, chaos and loss of life. 

I pray this terrible war soon ends, the remaining hostages are set free and the two million civilians now homeless and so brutally knocked about can now survive with their hunger erased and living finally . . . finally in homes again, not just tents, but homes with peace restored in Gaza, and hopefully, I fervently pray, spread well throughout the region.

Tom Madden is an author of many books, blogs and short stories besides countless news releases he writes for clients of his ever-enterprising and busy public relations firm, TransMedia Group, which he started several decades ago when he left NBC where he was vice president, assistant to the president, then CEO and TV wunderkind Fred Silverman.  The PR firm’s president today is Adrienne Mazzone, his industrious daughter.