from “Happy Ever After” = Chapter Ten, Dr King's book’s last one

“You can’t judge the past by the present.  One of history’s grand maxims.  It’s convenient, and it’s specious.

This needs to be said.  In the history of Indian – White relations, it is clear that politicians, reformers, the clergy, the military, in fact the whole lot, knew the potential for destruction that their policies and actions could have ... ... 

... ... And they were able to make these decisions with easy confidence, because they weren’t betting with their money.  They weren’t betting with their communities.  

 They weren’t betting with their children.  

Ignorance has never been the problem.  The problem was and continues to be unexamined confidence in western civilization and the unwarranted certainty of Christianity.  And arrogance.  Perhaps it is unfair to judge the past by the present, but:  it is also necessary.” 

            

Dr Thomas King,  

     The Inconvenient Indian:  A Curious Account of Native People in North America, pp 264 – 265

WHY a Nagasaki at all ? After a Hiroshima, then WHY another at all ?

... ... from 06 August 2016's Daily Beast of http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/08/06/sifting-through-the-wreckage-of-nagasaki.html:

"Sifting Through the Wreckage of Nagasaki"

"In the hours after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, survivors tried to come to grips with the devastation created by the blast."

"Susan Southard’s award-winning book, Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War, was just released in paperback for the 71^st anniversary of the atomic bombings of Japan. Below is a short excerpt from Chapter 3-Embers, which takes place in the pre-dawn hours of August 10, 1945, some 16 hours after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.

Three young people are mentioned here. Taniguchi Sumiteru, 16, was just over a mile from the bomb, delivering mail on his bicycle through the hills of northern Nagasaki when the blast force of the bomb threw him off his bicycle. His entire back was burned off, and he lay on a hillside for three days before being found. Thirteen-year-old Yoshida Katsuji had been only a half-mile away and was facing the bomb; he was thrown back 130 feet across a field, a road, and an irrigation channel, then plunged to the ground, landing on his back in a rice paddy flooded with shallow water. Yoshida’s body and face were brutally scorched. Nagano Estsuko, 15 (no relation to Governor Nagano in this excerpt), had been further away from the blast, over the mountains that enclosed Nagasaki on three sides. She had raced toward the annihilated city and by sheer coincidence she had run into her father as they both tried to get to their home near the center of the blast."