this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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Not to be pedantic about a meme but I would consider the US repeatedly detonating nuclear weapons on the Marshall Islands and then doing jack shit to clean up the mess to be worse than any coup.
67 of them to be exact. 70 years later, the Marshallese are still the ones paying the price of that incredibly bad decision.
It’s just weird that nuclear bombs came to your mind, but somehow the nuclear annihilation of two civilian cities was less salient to you than uninhabited islands.
"MEN OTEMJEJ REJ ILO BEIN ANIJ" — "ALL IS IN THE HANDS OF GOD" — were the words uttered by Juda, leader of the Bikinians, to Commodore Wyatt when asked to exile his own people for the "good of mankind". It is said that Juda's words were intended to imply, "It would literally take divine intervention for me to agree to this.". Nevertheless, the Bikinians would be taken from their homes, and as the ships sailed away, the Bikinians got to watch their many-generations' houses and boats get burned down by the American soldiers. Many of the Bikinians wouldn't eat after witnessing that, and they would live in poverty in their new homes.
It's no wonder, then, that the Bikinian flag looks like a desecrated American flag.
This isn't to say that Bikini was a more inhumane act than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hearing any recollection by survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or seeing any of the artwork that they created to process their experiences, makes that much obvious. But you hear about Hiroshima and Nagasaki: it has a place in the popular imagination, even if it is a heavily sanitized version that portrays the annihilation as "necessary".
In contrast, when's the last time you met someone who knew of "Bikini" as anything other than swimwear?
Not sure as it seldom comes up in conversation, but I knew.
I don't live in the US, but I'll try to ask around about it anyways. It doesn't really come up in real-life conversations for me either.
Fair that the cities were worse, but the islands were not uninhabited. The people there were evacuated (they were told temporarily) and the place they were evacuated to was still within the fallout zone. A lot of people died pretty much immediately and they're still dealing with increased cancer and birth defects today.
This was when these weapons were fairly new, and what little information we had about them was not given to the people of these people before they were pressured into allowing their islands to be testing grounds.
The two uses of nuclear weapons in Japan were horrible. It's been long debated whether or not that choice vs. the invasion planned was the better of two. I won't get into that.
What is more horrible is that instead of staying shocked at the potential of nuclear war, humans in every nation that could tried to make more and bigger ones...for defense, of course. And the islands weren't originally uninhabited, that's a nice story of forced relocation for the humans. The wildlife, not so much. That was the point of the post, the history of nuclear arms post-Japan is far worse than the first two bombs used.