Obama's Hiroshima speech
JapanFriday, May 27
71 years ago, on a bright, cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city, and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself. Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder the 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 in prison. Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of "Who we are!" and "What we might become!".
71年前、晴れた、雲一つない或る朝、破滅がその空から降り注ぎ何もかも変えられた。一条の閃光と一枚の火炎の障壁は、一つの街を消失させ、人類がその身を滅ぼし兼ねない媒体を手に入れたという事を実物宣伝した。何故我々はこの地へ、ヒ口シマへと向かうのか？我々は恐しい武力が、そう久しくはない過去に、束縛を解かれた事をよくよく考えるべくやって来る。
21:35 2016/05/28土
我々は彼の死者、合計10万を越える日本の男性、女性、そして子供達に、哀悼の意を表す為にやって来る。幾干のコリアン、一ダ―スのアメリ力ンが刑務所で耐えた。彼らの魂は我々に語り掛ける。彼らは内情を調ベてほしい、「僕達は誰！」そして「僕達は一体何になったんだ！」という木偶の坊を理解してほしいと我々に求める。
23:35 2016/05/29日
It is not the fact of war that sets Hiroshima apart. Artifacts tell us that violent conflict appeared with the very first man. Our early ancestors, having learned to make blades from flint, and spears from wood, used these tools not just for hunting but against their own kind. On every continent, the history of civilization is filled with war, whether driven by the scarcity of grain, or hunger for gold, compelled by nationalist fervor or religious zeal. Empires have risen and fallen. Peoples have been subjugated, and liberated, and at each juncture innocents have suffered a countless toll, their name’s forgotten by time.
ヒ口シマを別扱いすると戦争の実態と懸け離れる。古器物は暴力的な衝突が最古の人間と共に出現したと我々に語り掛ける。我々の遥か昔の祖先は、火打石から刃身を、そして木から投げ槍を作れるようになったが、単に狩りという目的だけでなくそれ自体の本質に反してこうした道具を利用した。
21:17 2016/05/30月
どの大陸にあっても文明の史実は争いで占められている。穀物の不足に、或いは金を求める強い欲求に動かされたとしても、国粋主義者の白熱に、或いは宗教的熱狂に強いられたとしても。帝国は昇り詰め陥落した。人々は服従させられ、やがて解放された。各々の時点で罪のない人々は数え切れない程の犠牲を許した。彼らの名は時の傍らに置き去りにされた。
21:14 2016/05/31火
The world war that reached its brutal end in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was fought among the wealthiest and most powerful of nations. Their civilizations had given the world great cities, and magnificent arts. Their thinkers had advanced ideas of justice, and harmony, and truth. And yet, the war grew out of the same base instinct for domination or conquest, that had caused conflicts among the simplest tribes. An old pattern amplified by new capabilities, and without new constraints. In the span of a few years, some sixty million people would die. Men, women, children. No different than us. Shot, beaten, marched, bombed, jailed, starved, gassed to death.
ヒ口シマやナガサキでその無情な結末を印象付けた世界戦争は最も豊かで最も武力のある国家間で争われた。そうした文明は世界の卓越した都市や、優れた技術を生じさせた。それらの考案者は公正や、協調や、誠実という概念を提案した。しかし今尚、戦争は支配と征服を求める同じようなさもしい本能から成り、それが極めて愚かな部族間の衝突の原因となって来た。
21:06 2016/06/01水
There are many sites around the world that chronicle this war, memorials that tell stories of courage, and heroism, graves and empty camps that echo of unspeakable depravity. Yet in the image of a mushroom cloud, that rose into these skies, we are most starkly reminded of humanity’s core contradiction, of the very spark that marks us as a species, our thoughts, our imagination, our language, our tool making, our ability to set ourselves apart from nature and bend it to our will. Those very things also give us the capacity for unmatched destruction.
How often does material advancement or social innovation blind us to this truth? How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause. Every great religion promises a pathway to love and peace and righteousness, and yet no religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith is a license to kill. Nations arise, telling a story that binds people together, and sacrifice, and cooperation, allowing for remarkable feats, but those same stories have so often been used to oppress, and dehumanize those who are different. Science allows us to communicate across the seas, fly above the clouds, to cure disease, and understand the cosmos, but those same discovieries can be turned into ever more efficient killing machines.
The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well. That is why we come to this place. We stand here, in the middle of this city, and force ourselves to imagine the moment the bomb fell. We force ourselves to feel the dread of children confused by what they see. We listen to a silent cry. We remember all the innocents killed across the arch of that terrible war, and in the wars that came before, and the wars that would follow. Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering, but we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.
Someday, the voices of the Hibakusha will no longer be with us to bear witness, but the memory of the morning of August 6, 1945, must never fade. That memory allows us to fight complacency. It fuels our moral imagination. It allows us to change. And since that fateful day, we have made choices that give us hope. The United States and Japan forged not only an alliance, but a friendship that is one, far more for our people than we could ever claim through war. The nations of Europe built a union that replaced battlefields with bonds of commerce and democracy. Oppressed peoples and nations want liberation. And the international community established istitutions and treaties that work to avoid war, and aspire to restrict, and roll back, and ultimately eliminate the existence of nuclear weapons.
Still, every act of aggression between nations, every act of terror, and corruption, and cruelty, and oppression that we see around the world shows our work is never done. We may not be able to eliminate man’s capacity to do evil, so nations, and the alliances that we form, must possess the means to defend ourselves. But among those nations like my own who hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear, and pursue a world without them. We may not realize this goal in my lifetime, but persistent effort 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 secure deadly materials from fanatics.
And yet, that is not enough. For we see around the world today how even the crudest rifles and barrel bombs can serve up violence on a terrible scale. We must change our mindset about war itself to prevent conflict through diplomacy, and strive to end conflicts after they’ve begun. To see our growing interdependence as a cause for peaceful cooperation and not violent competition. To define our nations not by our capacity to destroy but by what we build. And perhaps above all, we must reimagine our connection to one another as members of one human race.
For this 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 easily accepted. We see these stories in the hibakusha, the woman who forgave the pilot who flew the plane that dropped the atomic bomb because she recognized that what she really hated was war itself. The man who sought out families of Americans killed here because he believed their loss was equal to his own.
My own nation’s story began with simple words: all men are created equal, and endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Realizing that ideal has never been easy, even within our own borders, even among our own citizens. But staying true to that story is worth the effort. It is an ideal to be strived for, an ideal that extends across continents, and across oceans. The irreducible worth of every person. The insistence that every life is precious. The radical, and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family, that is the story that we all must tell.
That is why we come to Hiroshima. So we might think of people we love - the first smile from our children in the morning, the gentle touch from a spouse over the kitchen table, the comforting embrace of a parent. We can think of those things and know that those same precious moments took place here 71 years ago.
Those who died, they are like us. Ordinary people understand this, I think, they do not want more war. They would rather that the wonders of science be focused on improving life and not eliminating it. When the choice is made by nations, when the choices made by leaders reflect this simple wisdom, then the lesson of Hiroshima is done. The world was forever changed here, but today, the children of this city will go through their day in peace. What a precious thing that is. It is worth protecting, and then extending to every child. That is a future we can choose, a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare, but as the start of our own moral awakening