Article by Howard Zinn • The Progressive • August 2000
Near the end of the novel The English Patient there is a passage in which Kip, the Sikh defuser of mines, begin to speak bitterly to the burned, near-death patient about British and American imperialism: “You and then the Americans converted us …. You had wars like cricket. How did you fool us into this? Here, listen to what you people have done.” He puts earphones on the blackened head. The radio is telling about the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Kip goes on: “All those speeches of civilization from kings and queens and presidents … such voices of abstract order . . . American, French, I don’t care. When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you’re an Englishman. You had King Leopold of Belgium, and now you have fucking Harry Truman of the USA.” You probably don’t remember those lines in the movie made from The English Patient. That’s because they were not there.
Hardly a surprise. The bombing of Hiroshima remains sacred to the American Establishment and to a very large part of the population in this country.
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