|
As this elegy nears publication we are also nearing August 6th and people around the world are preparing to mark the deaths and injuries of the inhabitants of the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (many of whom where children, women and noncombatants), who were the victims of the first atomic bomb attacks. In spite of the passing of half a century, many Americans are still unreconciled to the tragic events of World War II, and especially to those of August, 1945. I am one of those Americans.
The aspect of World War II that I find most disturbing is that, as concerns the methods of war, Hitler won. The war was portrayed at the time as a conflict over high principles. And in the end one of Hitler's most important principles prevailed: the mass murder of civilians in order to achieve military and/or political goals. Early in the war Hitler began gassing, incinerating or otherwise killing large numbers of civilians. By the end of the war American and British air forces were fully engaged in the mass murder of civilians through the fire-bombing of entire cities. That this fire-bombing campaign began as righteous revenge for Hitler's air raids against British cities only demonstrates how quickly the participants in war can come to resemble one another.
The atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented a stunning leap forward in the technology of murder by fire and poison. By August, 1945, massive fire-bombing air raids had already burned most large Japanese cities to the ground. But these raids required thousands of planes and days of conflagration. Now it could be done in a moment, with a single B-29: a portable Auschwitz that the United States could inflict on anyone, anywhere.
Well, you may say, that was half a century ago. Why should we continue to think about these tragic and unfortunate events when there are plenty of current tragedies to lament?
For me, the answer is that we Americans have still not acknowledged our capacity for mass murder, which we continue to euphemize and depersonalize with such terms as "collateral damage." Collateral damage consists of all the people we have killed or injured, whom we did not particularly intend to kill or maim, but who just happened to be in the way, and whose presence we have consistently refused to acknowledge. According to various sources, there were at least half a million civilian casualties in Japan, another million in Vietnam and who knows how many in Korea, Iraq and so on. It seems to me, as an American, that Americans have taken the moral principle that intentions matter and applied it mind-numbingly backwards. Since we can tell ourselves that we did not specifically intend to kill these many persons, the tragedy of their deaths does not seem to matter to us.
The technologization of violence plays a key role in making these victims invisible. High technology weapons intoxicate their possessors with God-like powers of destruction, distract their possessors with the complex details of their operation, and remove their possessors from the scenes of injury and death. Thus for decades the United States, from a giant, electronics-packed bunker carved into a mountain, has targeted its complex and all-powerful missiles on various military installations in what was the Soviet Union, willfully ignoring the fact that a nuclear strike on those targets would result in the death by incineration and radiation poisoning of millions of nearby civilians. It just did not seem to matter. Tell me, then: Although we had the war crimes trials, whose rules of war prevailed after World War II? Ours, or Hitler's?
If a team of evil geniuses had come to Harry Truman in August of 1945 with a dozen Japanese babies and a blowtorch, and said, "Mr. President, just take this blowtorch in your hands and burn these infants to death one at a time, live on worldwide radio, and we guarantee that the Japanese will surrender right away," Truman, I'm sure, would have turned away in disgust. But, under the multiple spells of revenge, racism, weapons-intoxication, and self-deceiving abstrac-tions like "the enemy" and "military target," Harry Truman and his earnest, sober colleagues consigned thousands of infants and children to their fiery deaths. ("To avoid a bloody invasion of Japan," some say, even to this day, perhaps not realizing the grisly pragmatism they are espousing: kill the children and you can bend the adults to your will.)
Unfortunately, the same hypnotic spells and fevered rationalizations that led to the first use of nuclear weapons continue to circulate in the collective psyche of the entire world, tempting people everywhere to try to resolve their conflicts or defend their interests with the latest whiz-bang, laser-blinding death ray, land mine, Stealth fighter, poison gas or supposed "smart bomb," never mind who's down there on the ground. Mechanized violence is a sort of underground religion of the twentieth century, a cult of the explosion, worshipped in a thousand movies and ritually enacted each day by millions of video game players exulting in virtual mayhem.
Only by acknowledging how vulnerable we all are to these murderous enthusiasms, confu-sions and self-deceptions, to which the souls of the Hiroshima dead bear silent witness, can we avoid repeating the moral catastrophes of our past.
Why remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki? If the memory of those who suffered there continues to remind us of how easily we can slip into the blind trance of violence, then those who suffered may yet save the lives of innumerable others, perhaps even our own lives. With this in mind we can add our voices to Toby Lurie's elegy and, full of both hope and sorrow, "weep for the mothers, weep for the sons, weep for the dying ones."
|