Dear Editor,
I watched Barack Obama during his visit to Hiroshima to remember the victims of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on that city 71 years ago. He was accompanied by the Japanese Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe in the presence of a very small number of survivors of that evil massacre of the innocent in August 1945.
He felt he could not apologise for this atrocity as a politician and he would not as a fellow human being. He sadly repeated the call for a moral revolution echoing the same call by Einstein among others when the atomic bomb was discovered.
This moral revolution would create the conditions where a way would be found by humanity to make atomic warfare impossible and put an end to all other kinds of warfare and violent conflict that have beset the world since mankind lost its innocence.
Here was the most powerful political leader on the planet confessing his inability to stop war and this proves the ineffectiveness of all politics to end war and violent conflict. The reason for this shocking lack of will is that national self-interest is the only ethic recognised by politics and may I add it is usually unenlightened self-interest.
It is therefore the work of the Churches and the religions in dialogue to work might and main to bring about this moral revolution, which means finding a common ethic that all, including those of no faith, can commit to.
Yours etc.,
Peter Leonard,
Raheny, Dublin 5.
