On Sunday, Aug. 7, Watertown Citizens for Peace, Justice & the Environment will host a ceremony Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The group sent out the following announcement:
Please join us for a commemoration of the nuclear attack on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in 1945 – the first use of nuclear weapons by any country – that caused over 210,000 deaths and years of misery and suffering for thousand of survivors.
In May, President Barack Obama became the first sitting U.S. president to visit the site of the 1945 attack on Hiroshima. At that historic site he met with the hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) and spoke eloquently of the horrors of the atomic age and the scourge of using war as an instrument of policy. President Obama’s visit was a gesture of good faith — but the actions of his administration contradict these efforts. On April 13, the New York Times warned that the U.S. plan to spend $1 trillion to “modernize” its nuclear arsenal raises the specter of a new arms race with Russia and China.
Today, military spending accounts for more than half of the federal government’s entire discretionary budget. Nuclear weapons spending alone accounts for over $40 billion annually. There is a connection between the bloated Pentagon budget and the critical budget shortfalls facing communities in the U.S.
The schedule for Sunday, August 7, 2016:
7:30 p.m. – Silent Vigil – Watertown Square
8 p.m. – Music and Testimonials
8:30 p.m. – Launching of the Candle boats – Watertown Dock
Sponsored by Watertown Citizens for Peace, Justice and the Environment, New England American Friends Service Committee, and Mass Peace Action.
Visit www.watertowncitizens.org and www.facebook.com/WatertownCitizensPJE
or email us at watertowncitizens@gmail.com
For a listing of other activities in the Boston area remembering the events of August 6 and 9, visit www.masspeaceaction.org
Will this group also hold a ceremony for the U.S. military forces killed at Pearl Harbor, those tortured in Japanese prison camps, and the peoples of all of the occupied Japanese countries that the Japanese tortured, killed, made into prostitutes, and those who they performed medical experimentations on? I do not think that we started that war and we ended it the only way possible that did not require our invading Japan which would have cost the US many more lives (perhaps the relatives of those who are attending this ceremony).