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I just came across this COTO post by accident, not looking for anything in particular. It cries out for exposure. Bold emphasis in the following extract is mine.

Happy Savages, By Robert C. Koehler

“Thirty seconds to zero . . . six, five, four, three, two, one.”

Suddenly a big orange blossom fills the screen, accompanied by ukuleles and lovely — I mean Strangelovian — Polynesian music. The blossom is actually Castle Bravo, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb blast, the largest U.S. test ever, detonated over Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954.

This is a few minutes into Nuclear Savage: The Island Experiments of Secret Project 4.1, one of the most disturbing documentaries I’ve ever seen, and one of seven feature-length films that are part of Chicago’s fourth annual Peace on Earth Film Festival, Feb. 23-26, at the Chicago Cultural Center. The event, once again, is free of charge.

Peace on earth?

The film festival seeks to “enlighten and to empower individuals, families and communities to step out of the ignorance of conflict . . .”

I take a deep breath and think about Nuclear Savage, a film by former Greenpeace activist Adam Jonas Horowitz, which opens up one of the hidden horrors of American history — analogous to our history of slavery, lynching and Jim Crow — but perpetrated on the far side of the world, with nuclear weapons.

Nuclear Savage is the story of what we did to the Marshall Islanders throughout the Cold War with our nuclear testing program. Not only did we expose many thousands of them to ghastly — often lethal — levels of radiation with 67 nuclear blasts, with glaring evidence that at least some of the exposure was intentional, done for the purpose of studying the effects of radiation on human guinea pigs; not only did we wreck the Marshall Islanders’ way of life and pristine paradise, creating a nation of internal refugees confined to a Western-style slum on the island of Ebeye; not only did we cower, as a nation, from any real responsibility for what our fallout did to these people, settling our genocidal debt to them with $150 million “for all claims, past, present and future”; but also, throughout our dealing with them as nuclear conquistadors, we displayed a racism so profound, so cold-blooded, its exposure must forever shatter the myth of American exceptionalism.

And we’re still doing it. The tiny, impoverished Republic of the Marshall Islands recently signed a 75-year lease agreement with the United States, guaranteeing that the Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site on Kwajalien Atoll, where Star Wars testing is still being conducted (for unfathomable billions of dollars), will be operational at least through 2086.

Continues here.

Perhaps ‘cruel’ is too soft a word, maybe ‘evil’ suits better.

Related articles

• Rikvin Offers Marshall Islands Offshore Company Incorporation Services (prweb.com)
• Does nuclear waste ever break down? (greenanswers.com)