Hiroshima

A reflection from Japan

(Atomic Bomb Dome — Hiroshima)

I’ve been traveling in Japan, which is why my newsletters have been sporadic over the past week. Today, I went to Hiroshima.

I did not know what to expect when I got there. I have been to Auschwitz and Dachau and Normandy and other sacred places where the scale of human suffering seems almost incomprehensible. Hiroshima is like none of them. There is no history lesson or context. The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum simply tells the story of August 6, 1945 and its aftermath as it affected the people of the city who lived and died there.

At the tail end of the exhibit is a signed guest book from President Obama, who visited the museum in 2016. “We have known the agony of war. Let us now find the courage, together, to spread peace, and pursue a world without nuclear weapons,” Obama wrote.

You cannot read Obama’s words, written a mere decade ago, without thinking about what would happen if the current president of the United States were to visit Hiroshima today. It does not matter whether you, like me, believe that the United States had no alternative but to drop an atomic bomb to end the war and prevent millions more from dying. The horror inflicted on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, regardless of the necessity, is humbling to anyone with a shred of humanity.

All I could think, when I saw that guest book, is that I hoped Trump would never set foot in Hiroshima as president. He might get the wrong idea.

In our might makes right world, Donald Trump would feel no reflection about the toll of human suffering as a result of unfettered war. This is a commander-in-chief who controls the largest nuclear arsenal in the world but feels no humility about any of it. He has made us into a bully nation that can do whatever we want, whenever we want — because we are bigger and stronger than anyone else.

Contrast that with Obama’s words at Hiroshima — and the sentiment of every single American president since Harry Truman, irrespective of party. These men understood the awesome power they possessed and why they needed to exercise it judiciously. This man — this reality show, incurious grifter — knows nothing but his own insecurity. The rest of the world will suffer enormously because of it.

World War II ended right after the United States dropped those nuclear weapons just over eighty years ago. Today, we are in the midst of World War III, which began in Europe four years ago and has now spread to the Middle East. Many decades from now, there will be shrines in Kyiv and Sderot and Gaza and Tehran. There will be other places we do not yet know about that will be considered sacred in the coming years, because they will be the sites of immense civilian suffering.

But we will also remember this era because the United States chose as its leader someone who does not struggle with morality, who does not weigh the power at his disposal, who does not contemplate whether might really makes right. He simply acts — and basks in the glory of his followers, who admire him for acting.

What is so terrifying for anyone visiting Hiroshima today is not just the historical scope of suffering, which would be bad enough. It is that the past has never seemed so close to our present.