VIDEO: Seeing Nagasaki After the Atomic Bombing Made Lawrence Ferlinghetti an ‘Instant Pacifist’

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the American poet and founder of City Lights bookstore — who was in the U.S. Navy during World War II — said in the 2009 biographical documentary “Ferlinghetti: A Rebirth of Wonder” that visiting the bombed-out Japanese city of Nagasaki turned him into a lifelong pacifist.

This scene is from the recently released 60-minute cut edited for TV distribution by Manuel Tsingaris. In the clip, Ferlinghetti said he was “totally politically naive” before seeing “human flesh fused to a teacup, and bones and hair sticking out of this mulch, every single building flattened and pulverized.”

The U.S. “never would have dropped the bomb if the Japanese had had white skin,” he added. “It was a monstrous, racist act.”

Read The New York Times’ review of the film here. Director Christopher Felver can be reached at [email protected]

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.