"That's why we come to Hiroshima": Mr Obama's Hiroshima speech. - 2016/5/27

President Obama's Speech in Hiroshima: Mr Obama's Hiroshima speech. - 2016/5/27

1)

Seventy-one years ago, death fell from the sky on a bright, cloudless morning, and the world was changed. A flash of light and a firewall destroyed a city and demonstrated that humanity has the means to destroy itself.

Why have we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to reflect on a terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children; thousands of Koreans; a dozen Americans held prisoner. Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look within, to take stock of who we are and what we might become.

2)

It is not the fact of war that distinguishes Hiroshima. Artefacts tell us that violent conflict appeared with the very first humans. Our early ancestors, having learned to make blades from flint and spears from wood, used these tools for hunting and against their kind.

On every continent, the history of civilisation is filled with war, whether driven by scarcity of grain or hunger for gold, compelled by nationalist fervour or religious zeal. Empires have risen and fallen. People have been subjugated and liberated. And at every juncture, innocents have suffered an innumerable toll, their names forgotten by time.

3)

The world war that came to its brutal end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was fought between the wealthiest and most powerful nations. Their civilisations had given the world great cities and magnificent art. Their thinkers had advanced ideas of justice, harmony and truth.

And yet the war grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest that had caused conflict among the simplest tribes, an old pattern amplified by new capabilities and without new constraints. In a few years, some 60 million people would die - men, women, children no different from us, shot, beaten, marched, bombed, imprisoned, starved, gassed.

4)

Many sites worldwide chronicle this war - memorials that tell stories of courage and heroism, graves and empty camps that echo unspeakable depravity. But it is in the image of a mushroom cloud rising into those skies that we are most starkly reminded of humanity's core contradiction; how the very spark that defines us as a species - our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool-making, our ability to separate ourselves from nature and bend it to our will - also gives us the capacity for unparalleled destruction.

5)

How often does material progress or social innovation blind us to this truth? How easily can we justify violence in the name of some higher cause? Every great religion promises a path to love, peace, and justice, yet no religion has spared believers who have used their faith as a licence to kill.

Nations are created, telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation, enabling remarkable achievements. Still, those same stories have often been used to oppress and dehumanise different people.

Science allows us to communicate across oceans and fly above the clouds; to cure disease and understand the cosmos. But the same discoveries can be turned into ever more efficient killing machines.

6)

The wars of the modern age teach this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without corresponding progress in human institutions can be our undoing. The scientific revolution that led to atom splitting also requires a moral process.

That is why we have come to this place, Hiroshima. We stand in the middle of this city and force ourselves to imagine when the bomb fell. We push ourselves to feel the fear of children being confused by what they see. We hear a silent cry. We remember all the innocents killed across the arc of this terrible war, the previous wars, and the following ones.

Mere words cannot voice such suffering, but we have a shared responsibility to look history in the eye and ask what we must do differently to prevent such suffering from happening again.

One day, the voices of the Hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness. But the memory of the morning of 6 August 1945 must never fade. This memory allows us to fight against complacency. It fuels our moral imagination. It will enable us to change.

7)

And since that fateful day, we have made choices that give us hope. The United States and Japan forged an alliance and a friendship that has given our people far more than we could ever claim from war. The nations of Europe built a union that replaced battlefields with the bonds of trade and democracy.

Oppressed peoples and nations won their freedom. An international community established institutions and treaties that worked to avoid war and to limit, roll back and ultimately eliminate the existence of nuclear weapons.

Yet every act of aggression between nations, terror and corruption and cruelty and oppression we see worldwide shows that our work is never done. We may not be able to eliminate man's capacity for evil, so nations - and the alliances we've formed - must have the means to defend themselves.

But for those nations, like my own, that have nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and seek a world without them.

8)

We may not achieve this goal in my lifetime. But with persistent effort, we can roll back the possibility of catastrophe. We can chart a course that leads to the destruction of these stockpiles. We can stop the spread to new nations and keep deadly materials out of the hands of fanatics.

But that is not enough, for we see worldwide how even the crudest rifles and barrel bombs can be used for violence on a terrible scale.

We must change the way we think about war itself -- to prevent conflict through diplomacy and to seek to end conflict once it's begun; to see our growing interdependence as a cause for peaceful cooperation, not violent competition; to define our nations not by our capacity to destroy, but by what we build.

9)

And perhaps most of all, we need to reimagine our connection to each other as members of one human race. That, too, is what makes our species unique. We're not bound by genetic code to repeat the mistakes of the past. We can learn.

We can choose. We can tell our children a different story - one that describes a common humanity, one that makes war less likely and cruelty less readily accepted.

We see these stories in the Hibakusha -- the woman who forgave a pilot who flew the plane that dropped the atomic bomb because she realised that what she hated was war itself; the woman who sought out the families of Americans killed here because he believed that their loss was equal to his own.

10)

How often does material progress or social innovation blind us to this truth? How easily can we justify violence in the name of some higher cause? Every great religion promises a way to love, peace, and justice, yet no religion has spared believers who have used their faith as a licence to kill.

Nations are created, telling a story that binds people together in sacrifice and cooperation, enabling remarkable achievements. Still, those same stories have often been used to oppress and dehumanise different people.

Science allows us to communicate across oceans and fly above the clouds; to cure disease and understand the cosmos. But the same discoveries can be turned into ever more efficient killing machines.

11)

The wars of modern times teach this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without a corresponding improvement in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to atom splitting also requires a moral process.

That is why we have come to this place, Hiroshima. We stand in the middle of this city and force ourselves to imagine when the bomb fell. We push ourselves to feel the fear of children being confused by what they see. We hear a silent cry. We remember all the innocents killed across the arc of this terrible war, the previous wars, and the following ones.

Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering. Still, we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to prevent such suffering from happening again. One day, the voices of the hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness.

But the memory of the morning of 6 August 1945 must never fade. This memory allows us to fight against complacency. It fuels our moral imagination. It will enable us to change.