The New York Times on Obama’s Visit to the Hiroshima Memorial:
Training People to View World Through Eyes of Empire

May 30, 2016 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

On May 27, President Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to ever visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park in Japan, which is dedicated to the memory of the tens of thousands mass murdered when the U.S. dropped the first nuclear bomb in history on that city.

The New York Times reportage repeated all of Obama’s bullshit with a straight face. But then it offered a few bits of “objective reportage.” Take this bit for example:

The park offers a victim’s narrative, illustrating in gut-wrenching detail how more than 100,000 people in the city perished and thousands more were injured. It provides few of the historical reasons for the bombing, such as descriptions of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the savagery of Japan’s occupation of China, or the extraordinary death toll of soldiers and civilians in the invasion of Okinawa.

Think about that for a minute. Can you imagine the response if the New York Times had, in its coverage of the 9/11 Memorial, followed this logic and noted that the memorial did not include the “historical reasons” for the attack and demanded that it include “descriptions” of U.S. attacks in the Middle East, or the “savagery” of its (or Israel’s) invasions and occupations, or the “extraordinary death toll of soldiers and civilians” in America’s 1991 Persian Gulf War and the decade of sanctions that followed (all crimes that helped fuel reactionary Islamic fundamentalism)?

Or take this gem:

Many historians believe the bombings on Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, which together took the lives of more than 200,000 people, saved lives on balance, since an invasion of the islands would have led to far greater bloodshed.

Yes, many do believe that—and many also believe that it was an utterly unnecessary exercise of brute power designed to intimidate the Soviet Union and any other possible rival or opponent in a postwar world that the U.S. aimed to dominate, coming at a time when U.S. President Harry Truman himself wrote in his diary that the Japanese emperor had sent him a telegram suing for peace.

Finally, what is the largest article on the New York Times page? A feature about Obama’s embrace with a Hiroshima survivor to get the facts on... American prisoners of war who died in the bombing!

Notice a pattern? Think someone may be trying to mold your outlook? To get you to see the world through the eyes of empire... to look at things through the lens of “America first” and not humanity—or objective truth?

You’d be right.

 

 

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