In 2024 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, the grassroots collective of Hibakusha and Hibakusha Nisei (first and second generation surviving the atomic bombs).

Since forming in 1956, they have urged governments globally to free the earth from weapons of mass destruction, while lobbying for trees, fish, cats, birds and all of life. The significance of this Peace Prize centres on the fact that the Hibakusha were oppressed and censored under the American Occupation (1945-1952). Now 80 years on, Hibakusha truths call out like a Shinto temple bell. But beneath these vibrations, they endured forced silence and enforced censorship under the American Occupation.

Archived photographs shot just after the Pikidon (flash-boom of 1945) when America dropped uranium and plutonium bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are as dystopian as photos of pulverised Gaza today. In Japan, undefended life was vaporised and infected by radiation in that flash. In Gaza, bone is sieved out of rubble — everyday.

For nearly a year, I have tracked Netanyahu’s systematic cruelty as a scholar of genocide and a torture-trauma psychologist. Make no mistake, what Netanyahu embarks on in Gaza fits the definition of genocide like a glove.

However, he cannot be charged and tried within an International Criminal Court (or International Tribunal for Genocide) without evidence that his regime has ‘intentionally’ targeted people of a national, ethnic, religious, cultural, and/or racial group.

This week as I reviewed America’s intentional sequence of censorship in Japan (covertly censor, bomb to oblivion, occupy, overtly censor), I began tracking Netanyahu’s covert censorship sequence (allege ‘our right to protect ourselves’ as the intent, bomb, censor independent investigations into alleged intent to destroy, then repeat sequence). It is likely that material and events........

© Pearls and Irritations