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the responsibility of intellectuals in the shadow of
THE ATOMIC PLAGUE
by
HENRY A. GIROUX
__________________________________________
Henry
A. Giroux currently holds the Global TV Network Chair
Professorship at McMaster University in the English and Cultural
Studies Department and a Distinguished Visiting Professorship
at Ryerson University. He is the author of more than 50 books
including The Educational Deficit and the War on Youth
and Zombie
Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism.
Many of his essays, including The Spectacle of Illiteracy, appear
on his website at www.henryagiroux.com.
His interview with Bill
Moyers is must viewing.
Seventy
years after the horror of Hiroshima, intellectuals negotiate
a vastly changed cultural, political and moral geography. Pondering
what Hiroshima means for American history and consciousness
proves as fraught an intellectual exercise as taking up this
critical issue in the years and the decades that followed this
staggering inhumanity, albeit for vastly different reasons.
Now that we are living in a 24/7 screen culture hawking incessant
apocalypse, how we understand Foucault’s pregnant observation
that history is always a history of the present takes on a greater
significance, especially in light of the fact that historical
memory is not simply being rewritten but is disappearing. Once
an emancipatory pedagogical and political project predicated
on the right to study, and engage the past critically, history
has receded into a depoliticizing culture of consumerism, a
wholesale attack on science, the glorification of military ideals,
an embrace of the punishing state, and a nostalgic invocation
of the greatest generation. Inscribed in insipid patriotic platitudes
and decontextualized isolated facts, history under the reign
of neoliberalism has been either cleansed of its most critical
impulses and dangerous memories, or it has been reduced to a
contrived narrative that sustains the fictions and ideologies
of the rich and powerful. History has not only become a site
of collective amnesia but has also been appropriated so as to
transform “the past into a container full of colorful
or colorless, appetizing or insipid bits, all floating with
the same specific gravity.” Consequently, what intellectuals
now have to say about Hiroshima and history in general is not
of the slightest interest to nine tenths of the American population.
While writers of fiction might find such a generalized, public
indifference to their craft, freeing, even “inebriating”
as Philip Roth has recently written, for the chroniclers of
history it is a cry in the wilderness.
At
same time the legacy of Hiroshima is present but grasped, as
the existential anxieties and dread of nuclear annihilation
that racked the early 1950s to a contemporary fundamentalist
fatalism embodied in collective uncertainty, a predilection
for apocalyptic violence, a political economy of disposability,
and an expanding culture of cruelty that has fused with the
entertainment industry. We’ve not produced a generation
of war protestors or government agitators to be sure, but rather
a generation of youth who no longer believe they have a future
that will be any different from the present. That such connections
tying the past to the present are lost signal not merely the
emergence of a disimagination machine that wages an assault
on historical memory, civic literacy, and civic agency. It also
points to a historical shift in which the perpetual disappearance
of that atomic moment signals a further deepening in our own
national psychosis.
If,
as Edward Glover once observed, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki
had rendered actual the most extreme fantasies of world destruction
encountered in the insane or in the nightmares of ordinary people,”
the neoliberal disimagination machine has rendered such horrific
reality a collective fantasy driven by the spectacle of violence,
nourished by sensationalism, and reinforced by scourge of commodified
and trivialized entertainment. The disimagination machine threatens
democratic public life by devaluing social agency, historical
memory, and critical consciousness and in doing so it creates
the conditions for people to be ethically compromised and politically
infantilized. Returning to Hiroshima is not only necessary to
break out of the moral cocoon that puts reason and memory to
sleep but also to rediscover both our imaginative capacities
for civic literacy on behalf of the public good, especially
if such action demands that we remember as Robert Jay Lifton
and Greg Mitchell remark “Every small act of violence,
then, has some connection with, if not sanction from, the violence
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”
On
Monday August 6, 1945 the United States unleashed an atomic
bomb on Hiroshima killing 70,000 people instantly and another
70,000 within five years—an opening volley in a nuclear
campaign visited on Nagasaki in the days that followed. In the
immediate aftermath, the incineration of mostly innocent civilians
was buried in official government pronouncements about the victory
of the bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic bomb
was celebrated by those who argued that its use was responsible
for concluding the war with Japan. Also applauded was the power
of the bomb and the wonder of science in creating it, especially
“the atmosphere of technological fanaticism” in
which scientists worked to create the most powerful weapon of
destruction then known to the world. Conventional justification
for dropping the atomic bombs held that “it was the most
expedient measure to securing Japan’s surrender [and]
that the bomb was used to shorten the agony of war and to save
American lives.” Left out of that succinct legitimating
narrative were the growing objections to the use of atomic weaponry
put forth by a number of top military leaders and politicians,
including General Dwight Eisenhower, who was then the Supreme
Allied Commander in Europe, former President Herbert Hoover,
and General Douglas MacArthur, all of whom argued it was not
necessary to end the war. A position later proven to be correct.
For
a brief time, the Atom Bomb was celebrated as a kind of magic
talisman entwining salvation and scientific inventiveness and
in doing so functioned to “simultaneously domesticate
the unimaginable while charging the mundane surroundings of
our everyday lives with a weight and sense of importance unmatched
in modern times.” In spite of the initial celebration
of the effects of the bomb and the orthodox defense that accompanied
it, whatever positive value the bomb may have had among the
American public, intellectuals, and popular media began to dissipate
as more and more people became aware of the massive deaths along
with suffering and misery it caused.
Kenzaburo
Oe, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature, noted that in spite
of attempts to justify the bombing “from the instant the
atomic bomb exploded, it [soon] became the symbol of human evil,
[embodying] the absolute evil of war.”
What
particularly troubled Oe was the scientific and intellectual
complicity in the creation of and in the lobbying for its use,
with acute awareness that it would turn Hiroshima into a “vast
ugly death chamber.” More pointedly, it revealed a new
stage in the merging of military actions and scientific methods,
indeed a new era in which the technology of destruction could
destroy the earth in roughly the time it takes to boil an egg.
The bombing of Hiroshima extended a new industrially enabled
kind of violence and warfare in which the distinction between
soldiers and civilians disappeared and the indiscriminate bombing
of civilians was normalized. But more than this, the American
government exhibited a ‘total embrace of the atom bomb,”
that signaled support for the first time of a “notion
of unbounded annihilation [and] “the totality of destruction.”
Hiroshima designated the beginning of the nuclear era in which
as Oh Jung points out “Combatants were engaged on a path
toward total war in which technological advances, coupled with
the increasing effectiveness of an air strategy, began to undermine
the ethical view that civilians should not be targeted . . .
This pattern of wholesale destruction blurred the distinction
between military and civilian casualties.” The destructive
power of the bomb and its use on civilians also marked a turning
point in American self-identity in which the United States began
to think of itself as a superpower, which as Robert Jay. Lifton
points out refers to “a national mindset–put forward
strongly by a tight-knit leadership group–that takes on
a sense of omnipotence, of unique standing in the world that
grants it the right to hold sway over all other nations.”
The power of the scientific imagination and its murderous deployment
gave birth simultaneously to the American disimagination machine
with its capacity to rewrite history in order to render it an
irrelevant relic best forgotten.
What
remains particularly ghastly about the rationale for dropping
two atomic bombs was the attempt on the part of its defenders
to construct a redemptive narrative through a perversion of
humanistic commitment, of mass slaughter justified in the name
of saving lives and winning the war. This was a humanism under
siege, transformed into its terrifying opposite and placed on
the side of what Edmund Wilson called the Faustian possibility
of a grotesque “plague and annihilation.” In part,
Hiroshima represented the achieved transcendence of military
metaphysics now a defining feature of national identity, its
more poisonous and powerful investment in the cult of scientism,
instrumental rationality, and technological fanaticism—and
the simultaneous marginalization of scientific evidence and
intellectual rigour, even reason itself. That Hiroshima was
used to redefine America’s “national mission and
its utopian possibilities” was nothing short of what the
late historian Howard Zinn called a “devastating commentary
on our moral culture.” More pointedly it serves as a grim
commentary on our national sanity. In most of these cases, matters
of morality and justice were dissolved into technical questions
and reductive chauvinism relating matters of governmentally
massaged efficiency, scientific “expertise”, and
American exceptionalism. As Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell
stated, the atom bomb was symbolic of the power of post-war
America rather than a “ruthless weapon of indiscriminate
destruction” which conveniently put to rest painful questions
concerning justice, morality, and ethical responsibility. They
write:
Our
official narrative precluded anything suggesting atonement.
Rather the bomb itself had to be “redeemed”: As
“a frightening manifestation of technological evil …
it needed to be reformed, transformed, managed, or turned into
the vehicle of a promising future,” [as historian M. Susan]
Lindee argued. “It was necessary, somehow, to redeem the
bomb.” In other words, to avoid historical and moral responsibility,
we acted immorally and claimed virtue. We sank deeper, that
is, into moral inversion.
This
narrative of redemption was soon challenged by a number of historians
who argued that the dropping of the atom bomb had less to do
with winning the war than with an attempt to put pressure on
the Soviet Union to not expand their empire into territory deemed
essential to American interests. Protecting America’s
superiority in a potential Soviet-American conflict was a decisive
factor in dropping the bomb. In addition, the Truman administration
needed to provide legitimation to Congress for the staggering
sums of money spent on the Manhattan Project in developing the
atomic weapons program and for procuring future funding necessary
to continue military appropriations for ongoing research long
after the war ended. Howard Zinn goes even further asserting
that the government’s weak defense for the bombing of
Hiroshima was not only false but was complicitous with an act
of terrorism. Refusing to relinquish his role as a public intellectual
willing to hold power accountable, he writes “Can we …
comprehend the killing of 200,000 people to make a point about
American power?” A number of historians, including Gar
Alperowitz and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, also attempted to deflate
this official defense of Hiroshima by providing counter-evidence
that the Japanese were ready to surrender as a result of a number
of factors including the nonstop bombing of 26 cities before
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the success of the naval and military
blockade of Japan, and the Soviet’s entrance into the
war on August 9th.
The
narrative of redemption and the criticism it provoked are important
for understanding the role that intellectuals assumed at this
historical moment to address what would be the beginning of
the nuclear weapons era and how that role for critics of the
nuclear arms race has faded somewhat at the beginning of the
twenty-first century. Historical reflection on this tragic foray
into the nuclear age reveals the decades long dismantling of
a culture’s infrastructure of ideas, its growing intolerance
for critical thought in light of the pressures placed on media,
on universities and increasingly isolated intellectuals to support
comforting mythologies and official narratives and thus cede
the responsibility to give effective voice to unpopular realities.
Within
a short time after the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, John Hersey wrote a devastating description of
the misery and suffering caused by the bomb. Removing the bomb
from abstract arguments endorsing matters of technique, efficiency,
and national honor, Hersey first published in The New Yorker
and later in a widely read book an exhausting and terrifying
description of the bombs effects on the people of Hiroshima,
portraying in detail the horror of the suffering caused by the
bomb. There is one haunting passage that not only illustrates
the horror of the pain and suffering, but also offers a powerful
metaphor for the blindness that overtook both the victims and
the perpetrators. He writes:
On
his way back with the water, [Father Kleinsorge] got lost on
a detour around a fallen tree, and as he looked for his way
through the woods, he heard a voice ask from the underbrush,
‘Have you anything to drink?’ He saw a uniform.
Thinking there was just one soldier, he approached with the
water. When he had penetrated the bushes, he saw there were
about twenty men, they were all in exactly the same nightmarish
state: their faces were wholly burned, their eye sockets were
hollow, the fluid from their melted eyes had run down their
cheeks. Their mouths were mere swollen, pus-covered wounds,
which they could not bear to stretch enough to admit the spout
of the teapot.
The
nightmarish image of fallen soldiers staring with hollow sockets,
eyes liquidated on cheeks and mouths swollen and pus-filled
stands as a warning to those who would refuse blindly the moral
witnessing necessary to keep alive for future generations the
memory of the horror of nuclear weapons and the need to eliminate
them. Hersey’s literal depiction of mass violence against
civilians serves as a kind of mirrored doubling, referring at
one level to nations blindly driven by militarism and hyper-nationalism.
At another level, perpetrators become victims who soon mimic
their perpetrators, seizing upon their own victimization as
a rationale to become blind to their own injustices.
Pearl
Harbor enabled Americans to view themselves as the victims but
then assumed the identity of the perpetrators and became willfully
blind to the United States’ own escalation of violence
and injustice. Employing both a poisonous racism and a weapon
of mad violence against the Japanese people, the US government
imagined Japan as the ultimate enemy, and then pursued tactics
that blinded the American public to its own humanity and in
doing so became its own worst enemy by turning against its most
cherished democratic principles. In a sense, this self-imposed
sightlessness functioned as part of what Jacques Derrida once
called a societal autoimmune response, one in which the body’s
immune system attacked its own bodily defenses. Fortunately,
this state of political and moral blindness did not extend to
a number of critics for the next fifty years who railed aggressively
against the dropping of the atomic bombs and the beginning of
the nuclear age.
Responding
to Hersey’s article on the bombing of Hiroshima published
in The New Yorker, Mary McCarthy argued that he had
reduced the bombing to the same level of journalism used to
report natural catastrophes such as “fires, floods, and
earthquakes” and in doing so had reduced a grotesque act
of barbarism to “a human interest story” that had
failed to grasp the bomb’s nihilism, and the role that
“bombers, the scientists, the government” and others
played in producing this monstrous act. McCarthy was alarmed
that Hersey had “failed to consider why it was used, who
was responsible, and whether it had been necessary.” McCarthy
was only partly right. While it was true that Hersey didn’t
tackle the larger political, cultural and social conditions
of the event’s unfolding, his article provided one of
the few detailed reports at the time of the horrors the bomb
inflicted, stoking a sense of trepidation about nuclear weapons
along with a modicum of moral outrage over the decision to drop
the bomb—dispositions that most Americans had not considered
at the time. Hersey was not alone. Wilfred Burchett, writing
for the London Daily Express, was the first journalist
to provide an independent account of the suffering, misery,
and death that engulfed Hiroshima after the bomb was dropped
on the city. For Burchett, the cataclysm and horror he witnessed
first-hand resembled a vision of hell that he aptly termed “the
Atomic Plague.” He writes:
Hiroshima
does not look like a bombed city. It looks as if a monster steamroller
had passed over it and squashed it out of existence. I write
these facts as dispassionately as I can in the hope that they
will act as a warning to the world. In this first testing ground
of the atomic bomb I have seen the most terrible and frightening
desolation in four years of war. It makes a blitzed Pacific
island seem like an Eden. The damage is far greater than photographs
can show.
In
the end in spite of such accounts, fear and moral outrage did
little to put an end to the nuclear arms race, but it did prompt
a number of intellectuals to enter into the public realm to
denounce the bombing and the ongoing advance of a nuclear weapons
program and the ever-present threat of annihilation it posed.
In the end, fear and moral outrage did little to put an end
to the nuclear arms race, but it did prompt a number of intellectuals
to enter into the public realm to denounce the bombing and the
ongoing advance of a nuclear weapons program and the ever-present
threat of annihilation it posed.
A number
of important questions emerge from the above analysis, but two
issues in particular stand out for me in light of the role that
academics and public intellectuals have played in addressing
the bombing of Hiroshima and the emergence of a nuclear weapons
on a global scale, and the imminent threat of human annihilation
posed by the continuing existence and danger posed by the potential
use of such weapons. The first question focuses on what has
been learned from the bombing of Hiroshima and the second question
concerns the disturbing issue of how violence and hence Hiroshima
itself have become normalized in the collective American psyche.
In
the aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima, there was a major
debate not just about how the emergence of the atomic age and
the moral, economic, scientific, military, and political forced
that gave rise to it. There was also a heated debate about the
ways in which the embrace of the atomic age altered the emerging
nature of state power, gave rise to new forms of militarism,
put American lives at risk, created environmental hazards, produced
an emergent surveillance state, furthered the politics of state
secrecy, and put into play a series of deadly diplomatic crisis,
reinforced by the logic of brinkmanship and a belief in the
totality of war.
Hiroshima
not only unleashed immense misery, unimaginable suffering, and
wanton death on Japanese civilians, it also gave rise to anti-democratic
tendencies in the United States government that put the health,
safety, and liberty of the American people at risk. Shrouded
in secrecy, the government machinery of death that produced
the bomb did everything possible to cover up the most grotesque
effects of the bomb on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
but also the dangerous hazards it posed to the American people.
Lifton and Mitchell argue convincingly that if the development
of the bomb and its immediate effects were shrouded in concealment
by the government that before long concealment developed into
a cover up marked by government lies and the falsification of
information. With respect to the horrors visited upon Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, films taken by Japanese and American photographers
were hidden for years from the American public for fear that
they would create both a moral panic and a backlash against
the funding for nuclear weapons. For example, the Atomic Energy
Commission lied about the extent and danger of radiation fallout
going so far as to mount a campaign claiming that “fallout
does not constitute a serious hazard to any living thing outside
the test site.” This act of falsification took place in
spite of the fact that thousands of military personal were exposed
to high levels of radiation within and outside of the test sites.
In
addition, the Atomic Energy Commission in conjunction with the
Departments of Defense, Department of Veterans’ Affairs,
the Central Intelligence Agency, and other government departments
engaged in a series of medical experiments designed to test
the effects of different levels radiation exposure on military
personal, medical patients, prisoners, and others in various
sites. According to Lifton and Mitchell, these experiments took
the shape of exposing people intentionally to “radiation
releases or by placing military personnel at or near ground
zero of bomb tests.” It gets worse. They also note that
“from 1945 through 1947, bomb-grade plutonium injections
were given to thirty-one patients [in a variety of hospitals
and medical centers] and that all of these “experiments
were shrouded in secrecy and, when deemed necessary, in lies….the
experiments were intended to show what type or amount of exposure
would cause damage to normal, healthy people in a nuclear war.”
Some of the long lasting legacies of the birth of the atomic
bomb also included the rise of plutonium dumps, environmental
and health risks, the cult of expertise, and the subordination
of the peaceful development technology to a large scale interest
in using technology for the organized production of violence.
Another notable development raised by many critics in the years
following the launch of the atomic age was the rise of a government
mired in secrecy, the repression of dissent, and the legitimation
for a type of civic illiteracy in which Americans were told
to leave “the gravest problems, military and social, completely
in the hands of experts and political leaders who claimed to
have them under control.”
All
of these anti-democratic tendencies unleashed by the atomic
age came under scrutiny during the latter half of the twentieth
century. The terror of a nuclear holocaust, an intense sense
of alienation from the commanding institutions of power, and
deep anxiety about the demise of the future spawned growing
unrest, ideological dissent, and massive outbursts of resistance
among students and intellectuals all over the globe from the
sixties until the beginning of the twenty-first century calling
for the outlawing of militarism, nuclear production and stockpiling,
and the nuclear propaganda machine. Literary writers extending
from James Agee to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. condemned the death-saturated
machinery launched by the atomic age. Moreover, public intellectuals
from Dwight Macdonald and Bertrand Russell to Helen Caldicott,
Ronald Takaki, Noam Chomsky, and Howard Zinn, fanned the flames
of resistance to both the nuclear arms race and weapons as well
as the development of nuclear technologies. Others such as George
Monbiot, an environmental activist, have supported the nuclear
industry but denounced the nuclear arms race. In doing so, he
has argued that “The anti-nuclear movement … has
misled the world about the impacts of radiation on human health
[producing] claims … ungrounded in science, unsupportable
when challenged and wildly wrong [and] have done other people,
and ourselves, a terrible disservice.”
In
addition, in light of the nuclear crises that extend from the
Three Mile accident in 1979, the Chernobyl disaster in 1986
and the more recent Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, a myriad
of social movements along with a number of mass demonstrations
against nuclear power have developed and taken place all over
the world. While deep moral and political concerns over the
legacy of Hiroshima seemed to be fading in the United States,
the tragedy of 9/11 and the endlessly replayed images of the
two planes crashing into the twin towers of the World Trade
Center resurrected once again the frightening image of what
Colonel Paul Tibbetts, Jr., the Enola Gay’s pilot, referred
to as “that awful cloud… boiling up, mushrooming,
terrible and incredibly tall” after “Little Boy,”
a 700-pound uranium bomb was released over Hiroshima. Though
this time, collective anxieties were focused not on the atomic
bombing of Hiroshima and its implications for a nuclear Armageddon
but on the fear of terrorists using a nuclear weapon to wreak
havoc on Americans. But a decade later even that fear, however
parochially framed, seems to have been diminished if not entirely,
erased even though it has produced an aggressive attack on civil
liberties and given even more power to an egregious and dangerous
surveillance state.
Atomic
anxiety confronts a world in which 9 states have nuclear weapons
and a number of them such as North Korea, Pakistan, and India
have threatened to use them. James McCluskey points out that
“there are over 20,0000 nuclear weapons in existence,
sufficient destructive power to incinerate every human being
on the planet three times over [and] there are more than 2000
held on hair trigger alert, already mounted on board their missiles
and ready to be launched at a moment’s notice.”
These weapons are far more powerful and deadly than the atomic
bomb and the possibility that they might be used, even inadvertently,
is high. This threat becomes all the more real in light of the
fact that the world has seen a history of miscommunications
and technological malfunctions, suggesting both the fragility
of such weapons and the dire stupidity of positions defending
their safety and value as a nuclear deterrent. The 2014 report,
To Close for Comfort—Cases of Near Nuclear Use and
Options for Policy not only outlines a history of such
near misses in great detail, it also makes terrifyingly clear
that “the risk associated with nuclear weapons is high.”
It is also worth noting that an enormous amount of money is
wasted to maintain these weapons and missiles, develop more
sophisticated nuclear weaponries, and invest in ever more weapons
laboratories. McCluskey estimates world funding for such weapons
at $1trillion per decade while Arms Control Today reported
in 2012 that yearly funding for U.S. nuclear weapons activity
was $31 billion.
In
the United States, the mushroom cloud connected to Hiroshima
is now connected to much larger forces of destruction, including
a turn to instrumental reason over moral considerations, the
normalization of violence in America, the militarization of
local police forces, an attack on civil liberties, the rise
of the surveillance state, a dangerous turn towards state secrecy
under President Obama, the rise of the carceral state, and the
elevation of war as a central organizing principle of society.
Rather than stand in opposition to preventing a nuclear mishap
or the expansion of the arms industry, the United States places
high up on the list of those nations that could trigger what
Amy Goodman calls that “horrible moment when hubris, accident
or inhumanity triggers the next nuclear attack.” Given
the history of lies, deceptions, falsifications, and retreat
into secrecy that characterizes the American government’s
strangulating hold by the military-industrial-surveillance complex,
it would be naïve to assume that the U.S. government can
be trusted to act with good intentions when it comes to matters
of domestic and foreign policy. State terrorism has increasingly
become the DNA of American governance and politics and is evident
in government cover ups, corruption, and numerous acts of bad
faith. Secrecy, lies, and deception have a long history in the
United States and the issue is not merely to uncover such instances
of state deception but to connect the dots over time and to
map the connections, for instance, between the actions of the
NSA in the early aftermath of the attempts to cover up the inhumane
destruction unleashed by the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
and the role the NSA and other intelligence agencies play today
in distorting the truth about government policies while embracing
an all-compassing notion of surveillance and squelching of civil
liberties, privacy, and freedom.
Hiroshima
symbolizes the fact that the United States commits unspeakable
acts making it easier to refuse to rely on politicians, academics,
and alleged experts who refuse to support a politics of transparency
and serve mostly to legitimate anti-democratic, if not totalitarian
policies. Questioning a monstrous war machine whose roots lie
in Hiroshima is the first step in declaring nuclear weapons
unacceptable ethically and politically. This suggests a further
mode of inquiry that focuses on how the rise of the military-industrial
complex contributes to the escalation of nuclear weapons and
what can we learn by tracing it roots to the development and
use of the atom bomb. Moreover, it raises questions about the
role played by intellectuals both in an out of the academy in
conspiring to build the bomb and hide its effects from the American
people? These are only some of the questions that need to be
made visible, interrogated, and pursued in a variety of sites
and public forums.
One
crucial issue today is what role might intellectuals and matters
of civic courage, engaged citizenship, and the educative nature
of politics play as part of a sustained effort to resurrect
the memory of Hiroshima as both a warning and a signpost for
rethinking the nature of collective struggle, reclaiming the
radical imagination, and producing a sustained politics aimed
at abolishing nuclear weapons forever? One issue would be to
revisit the conditions that made Hiroshima and Nagasaki possible,
to explore how militarism and a kind of technological fanaticism
merged under the star of scientific rationality. Another step
forward would be to make clear what the effects of such weapons
are, to disclose the manufactured lie that such weapons make
us safe. Indeed, this suggests the need for intellectuals, artists,
and other cultural workers to use their skills, resources, and
connections to develop massive educational campaigns.
Such
campaigns not only make education, consciousness, and collective
struggle the center of politics, but also systemically work
to both inform the public about the history of such weapons,
the misery and suffering they have caused, and how they benefit
the financial, government, and corporate elite who make huge
amounts of money off the arms race and the promotion of nuclear
deterrence and the need for a permanent warfare state. Intellectuals
today appear numbed by ever developing disasters, statistics
of suffering and death, the Hollywood disimagination machine
with its investment in the celluloid Apocalypse for which only
superheroes can respond, and a consumer culture that thrives
on self-interests and deplores collective political and ethical
responsibility.
There
are no rationales or escapes from the responsibility of preventing
mass destruction due to nuclear annihilation; the appeal to
military necessity is no excuse for the indiscriminate bombing
of civilians whether in Hiroshima or Afghanistan. The sense
of horror, fear, doubt, anxiety, and powerless that followed
Hiroshima and Nagasaki up until the beginning of the 21st century
seems to have faded in light of both the Hollywood apocalypse
machine, the mindlessness of celebrity and consumer cultures,
the growing spectacles of violence, and a militarism that is
now celebrated as one of the highest ideals of American life.
In a society governed by militarism, consumerism, and neoliberal
savagery, it has become more difficult to assume a position
of moral, social, and political responsibility, to believe that
politics matters, to imagine a future in which responding to
the suffering of others is a central element of democratic life.
When historical memory fades and people turn inward, remove
themselves from politics, and embrace cynicism over educated
hope, a culture of evil, suffering, and existential despair.
Americans now life amid a culture of indifference sustained
by an endless series of manufactured catastrophes that offer
a source of entertainment, sensation, and instant pleasure.
We
live in a neoliberal culture that subordinates human needs to
the demand for unchecked profits, trumps exchange values over
the public good, and embraces commerce as the only viable model
of social relations to shape the entirety of social life. Under
such circumstances, violence becomes a form of entertainment
rather than a source of alarm, individuals no longer question
society and become incapable of translating private troubles
into larger public considerations. In the age following the
use of the atom bomb on civilians, talk about evil, militarism,
and the end of the world once stirred public debate and diverse
resistance movements, now it promotes a culture of fear, moral
panics, and a retreat into the black hole of the disimagination
machine. The good news is that neoliberalism now makes clear
that it cannot provide a vision to sustain society and works
largely to destroy it. It is a metaphor for the atom bomb, a
social, political, and moral embodiment of global destruction
that needs to be stopped before it is too late. The future will
look much brighter without the glow of atomic energy and the
recognition that the legacy of death and destruction that extends
from Hiroshima to Fukushima makes clear that no one can be a
bystander if democracy is to survive.
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![Canadian Tire Repair Scam [2211 boul Roland-Therrien, Longueuil] = documents-proofs](../2010_v9_n5/images/mapleleaf.jpg)
