President Obama made a single, vague reference to “evil” during his prepared remarks in Hiroshima: “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 that hold nuclear stockpiles, we must have the courage to escape the logic of fear and pursue a world without them.”
He spoke at length about the horrors experienced by the populace of Hiroshima:
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 arc of that terrible war and 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.
“Let all the souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil,” he said, when reading the inscription on a monument at the Peace Memorial Park.
He somehow forgot to mention the evils perpetrated by Imperial Japan or the unspeakable suffering it inflicted upon POWs and civilians who fell into its clutches.
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