NO SITTING PRESIDENT HAS VISITED HIROSHIMA, NAGASAKI

Obama Rejects Visit to Hiroshima, Nagasaki. November 13, 2009

President Obama is in Japan today in the first stop of his inaugural visit to Asia since taking office earlier this year. Obama is set to hold talks with Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, whose party was elected in August on a platform that included revisiting Japanese-US military ties. Hatoyama has suggested he wants to move a US military base off the island of Okinawa, while the US says it wants to relocate to a different location. Before his arrival, Obama rejected an invitation to visit the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, site of the US atomic bombing sixty-four years ago that killed an estimated 220,000 Japanese. Obama’s call for ending nuclear weapons and his recent Nobel Peace Prize win had raised expectations in Japan that he would become the first sitting US president to visit the two cities. Asked about his refusal earlier today, Obama said he would visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki at a later date.

By Sam Husseini on November 13, 2009 3:28 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As Obama becomes yet another U.S. president not to visit Hiroshima, we come closer to committing ever more violence.

My friend Elisa Salasin (on my suggestion) plugged audio of Truman's claim that Hiroshima was a "military base" into OMD's Enola Gay (Sash remix). She overlaid it with video and stills resulting in the final video:'']

(About the Sash remix: Enola Gay was name of the U.S. plane that dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. It was named after Enola Gay Tibbets, the mother of the plane's pilot, Paul Tibbets; Little Boy was the codename of the bomb itself, hence the line "Enola Gay, is mother proud of little boy today?" This song is from OMD (Orchestral Manuvers in the Dark) and remixed by Sash to include audio such as Robert Oppenheimer saying "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds," quoting the Bhagavad Gita.)