Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

August 9, 2010

Sixty-five years ago today, the Japanese port city of Nagasaki was destroyed by an atomic bomb. The victims included most of Japan?s persecuted Christian population. They were vaporized in a nanosecond, some of them memorialized by eerie shadows etched into walls by the nuclear fireball that turned them into radioactive mist.

Many of the most notable American military figures of the time ? including Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur ? condemned the use of the atomic bomb on Japan, which had been trying to surrender for months.

Ironically, forty years before the bombing ? almost to the day ? then-U.S. Secretary of War William Howard Taft visited Nagasaki. In a public speech he led a Japanese war chant in praise of the Imperial Army, which at the time was fighting Russian troops in Manchuria. Washington quietly abetted the rise of the Japanese Empire, which it hoped would be a junior partner in dominating the Pacific. What a good idea that turned out to be.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.