March 1st is Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day in the Marshall Islands. It is a time for Marshallese people to reflect on their nuclear legacy, honor survivors, and remind the US and the world that they are still facing the consequences of nuclear testing that devastated their communities. This day, and every other day, they demand justice.
From 1946 to 1958 the US dropped more than 67 bombs on the Marshall Islands. The US was not at war with the Marshallese people, in fact the US “liberated” them from a cruel Japanese occupation during WWII. Yet shortly after, amidst Cold War fears of nuclear war, the US created an apocalypse in the Marshall Islands. Almost 70 of the most destructive weapons known to humankind were detonated on the islands, just for an experiment.
It’s not widely known how insidious the nuclear testing program really was. What little I learned in school, was that the people were unjustly forced to relocate the sake of US weapons tests. I didn’t learn about all of the people intentionally exposed to deadly radiation. The US essentially waged chemical warfare on innocent people because they saw them as disposable. The stories of those experiments are the stuff of nightmares. People’s stories as horrific and shocking as those from Nazi concentration camps.
The atrocities against the Marshallese people were carried out when the barbarous acts of the Nazi party were still a recent memory. It was barely a year after WWII ended. In fact, the first bomb was dropped on Bikini Atoll while the Nuremberg Trials were still ongoing. Let that sink in. The US joined the Allied Forces and went to war to stop the Nazis and while the Allies were still prosecuting Nazi leaders for genocide—sentencing many to death—they began testing nuclear weapons on innocent people.
Although it’s absurd to compare the depravity of one mass murder to another, I find it almost more incomprehensibly evil that there was really no reason at all, other than convenience and Cold War hysteria, for the US to unleash apocalyptic fury on the Marshall Islands. They were not considered a threat, they were not our enemies, they were not scapegoated or resented like the Jews were. Yet the US, like the Nazis, deemed Marshallese people unworthy of consideration callously destroyed their lives. That is the true banality of evil.
On my dad’s side, most of my family died at the hands of Nazis. My grandmother survived several concentration camps and my grandfather was in hiding. At the time of my grandmother’s liberation, she was extremely ill. Had the British liberated her camp even a week later, she might have died and I would not exist. My grandparents met after the war having both lost their spouses. They eventually moved to San Francisco and within only decades, I was born a privileged, white, Jewish-American.
My family history has never limited my opportunities in life. In fact, I have opportunities thrown at me like candy in a parade. My family has been paid reparations. It’s illegal in Germany to deny what was done in the holocaust. Most of the world learns in school about the holocaust and the world will never forget.
Yet reparations have not been sufficiently made in the Marshall Islands. Cancer rates remain high, atolls remain uninhabitable, and the US refuses to tell the whole truth about what happened here or to take responsibility for it. The US consistently downplays the threat of the radioactive tomb in Eniwetok. Americans are not taught in school to remember what our government did to the Marshall Islands in effort to ensure it can never happen again.
As a Jew, knowledge of my family history in the holocaust juxtaposed with the amount of privilege I’ve attained only a generation later have shaped my entire life. I know just how arbitrarily it can be decided that a group of people are not worthy of basic human rights or even existence. It’s still hard for me to reconcile that the world eventually stepped up to put an end to the Holocaust but has let so many other genocides and other injustices continue. So many communities have been deeply shaped by WWII, yet some are still struggling significantly more than others. Solidarity means not turning our backs on people suffering the afteraffects of WWII after we’ve overcome our own injustice.
We cannot even begin to proclaim that “Never again” will we allow the world to see another holocaust, because it’s not really even over yet. The Marshallese people are still dealing with the fallout. The messes need to be cleaned up and reparations need to be made in Micronesia and elsewhere.
