We are now roughly 80 years removed from WWII and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Very very few people are alive today that were alive back then, and even fewer still that had anything to do with WWII. I know the rationalization is that the U. S. had to do something to end the war, but it's just that: a rationalization.

"White Light/Black Rain" is a documentary with interviews and footage of survivors of the bombings that occurred on August 6th and 9th, 1945 (Hiroshima & Nagasaki). The "white light" was the intense light from the detonation of the bomb. The "black rain" was the radioactive wet ash that rained down afterwards.

There are also interviews of some of the American scientists and soldiers who were involved with the bombing-- each one doing his duty. Still, it's one of those things that after you've done it you ask, "What have we done?"

When I visited Hiroshima less than two months ago I thought that I knew quite a lot about the the events at the end of the second world war in the Pacific including the atomic bombs that were dropped upon Japan in order to reach a faster end of the war. Nothing was however comparable with seeing the destruction of Hiroshima at first hand in the Peace Museum, as well as the impressing memorial monuments in the Hiroshima Peace Park. Now comes this documentary by American-born Steven Okazaki which complements the images and the information that I acquired during my visit in Japan.

Let me say that it's one of the best historical and investigative documentaries that I have seen in years, if not the best. There are many direct witnesses that present the two sides of the event - the Japanese survivors of the atomic bombardments in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who were most of them kids in 1945 and who carried for the rest of their lives the physical pain in their flesh and the psychological traumas in their souls, and the American crewmen who seem to have gained awareness about the dimensions of the event they participated in, but show almost no trace of guilt or remorse for their actions. Some of the pictures taken immediately after the bombing which some of them - it is said in the film - are being seen for the first time in public are shocking and succeed to convey the intensity and dimensions of the destruction and sufferings that were inflicted on the civilian population of the two bombed cities.

Yet, it is the opening sequence that impressed me the most. It is filmed today, in some big city of Japan. Young Japanese folks in the teens or twenties are asked 'what historical event happened on August 6, 1945'. None of them knows the answer! Such films as 'White light, Black Rain' can help however bring down completely the walls of silence that still exist.

Shortly after ascending to the throne of American power, know-nothing President Harry Truman took the cagey advice of his virulently anti-communist Secretary of State, James Byrnes, and, in the dying days of World War II, approved the use of the atomic bomb against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Framing the bomb as a way to avoid a mythical 'one million American casualties' in a seaborne invasion of Japan, Byrnes sold Truman a bill of goods: he actually intended to use the bomb to warn off the Soviet Union from any ideas of flexing their military muscle in the post-war world. As a result, approximately 140,000 people were incinerated, and thousands more condemned to a slow death, all in the name of furthering the foreign policy goals of the United States.

Here are the fruits of Byrnes' unconscionable wickedness. Interviews with a dozen survivors of these terrible war crimes are interwoven with horrifying footage of the carnage, deeply moving artwork created by those same survivors, and commentary by surviving crew members of the Enola Gay mission. The survivors are, each and every one, dignified and thoughtful reminders that the old 'eye for an eye' adage is pure, unadulterated bunkum. And have we learned any lessons from August 1945? Have we Hell. Watch this film and peer into the heart of darkness past and the heart of darkness yet to come.