This August 6 marked the 78th anniversary of the worst terrorist attack in world history: the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, a defenseless Japanese city of some 340,000 inhabitants. Its explosion occurred in the air, some six hundred meters above the city, and in a fraction of a second, it generated a gigantic fireball with a temperature estimated at 4000 degrees Celsius covering an initial radius of two kilometers and incinerating everything in its path: houses, temples, factories, stores, schools. At that moment, 8:15 am, students were in classes and people in cars and offices... Very few human remains were found when, days later, Japanese medical relief and rescue patrols scoured the "ground zero" area just below where the blast had occurred. They came across nothing but rubble and ashes. The inhabitants of the doomed city were incinerated leaving no traces of their bodies. The shock wave generated by the explosion did the rest on the periphery of the blast. It is because of this that the debate about the number of victims continues to this day. The prestigious Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of the United States has two estimates of casualties in Hiroshima: a minimum of 70,000 victims and a maximum of 140,000. It is impossible to arrive at an exact number. But the minimum is frightening enough, especially if we remember that it does not include the tens of thousands who died in the following weeks or months due to the intense radiation generated by the blast. Those who perished three days later when an even more powerful bomb was dropped on Nagasaki should also be added to the list.

Reviewing this piece of data, one cannot but be outraged by the permanent concealment of who was responsible for these two criminal attacks: the government of the United States, the self-proclaimed leader of the free world, the champion of human rights, and the world custodian of justice and democracy. By an ominous twist of history, the greatest terrorist on the planet disguises himself as the staunchest enemy of terrorism and as a haughty despot who has never apologized for having committed the crimes perpetrated in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "The reason is simple," says James L. Schoff, an expert on Japan-US relations at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, "neither Japan demanded an apology nor did the United States contemplate offering one." And American public opinion, conveniently manipulated by the media oligarchy that stultifies that country's citizenry, confirmed on the eve of Obama's 2016 visit to Japan that 56 percent of those polled justified the massacre perpetrated in 1945.

But there is more. The arrogant impunity of the empire requires as a complement the undignified genuflection of all Japanese governments since the end of World War II. None of the politicians and officials who participated in this year's memorial service for the victims made any mention in their speeches of the sole cause of the tragedy, the US government. Neither the current mayor of Hiroshima, Kazumi Matsui, nor the prefectural governor, Hidehiko Yuzaki, nor the Japanese premier, Fumio Kishida, at any time referred to the executioner of the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “On this day, 78 years ago, hundreds and tens of thousands of precious lives were lost because of a single atomic bomb. A city became scorched earth, in an instant, people were robbed of their dreams and their bright future," Kishida said. Who was responsible for that tragedy? No one of the official speakers said so. It would seem to have been a biblical curse or a product of chance. Worse was the case of the governor of Hiroshima Prefecture, who in his speech elaborated on the alleged threats of "Russia's nuclear weapons" and DPRK's nuclear and missile programs. Those were the only two countries named in his infamous speech. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres fared no better, sending a message recalling that "Nearly eight decades ago, Hiroshima was scorched by a nuclear bomb," omitting, like his Japanese hosts, any mention of the country that perpetrated such a crime against humanity.

Unfortunately, Washington has succeeded in completely subjugating the governments of the world's most powerful countries, which have been turned into despicable American protectorates where honor, dignity and national self-determination have been thrown into the dustbin. Despite this, nothing can stop the movement of the tectonic plates of the international system, which highlights the irreversible emergence of a polycentric and multipolar world. And this structural process cannot be stopped even if the United States and its allies resort to the most brutal methods and aggressions with which the empire has sustained itself for decades at the apex of the world power structure.