Dope

In last night�s post, I bastinadoed the defenders of the Hiroshima bombing � many of whom came out in force in 1995, like ancient ghouls, to censor the Smithsonian�s exhibit on the Enola Gay.

Let�s start out tonight by conceding one thing to that crowd. The revisionist historians � led by Gar Alperowitz - who so expertly mapped the evasions and maneuvers of war policy in the Truman administration messed up big time by concluding, in one of the often sited proto-scripts to introduce the exhibit's theme, that �for most Japanese, it was a war to defend their unique culture against Western imperialism.� That is an outrageously stupid claim � as well claim that German Einsatzgruppen in the Ukraine were trying to spread the sweetness and light of high German culture. No, the Japanese empire, from around 1932 to 1945, were one of the century�s great criminal regimes. From the looting of Manchuria to the rape of Nanking to the horrific �defense� of Manila, in 1945, when Japanese soldiers slaughtered up to 100, 000 Filipinos, the point of the empire was to enrich a clique consisting of the upper echelon military, financial and industrial leaders, as well as the Imperial Court. The project was sustained by a virulent racist ideology, and its overt aim was to enslave other Asian countries. To say that this was about Japan�s �unique culture� is a very sick joke, indeed. What the Communists called the fascists in the 30s � gansters � was especially relevant to the Japanese Imperium.

Now, to understand MY position on the bomb � and hey, isn�t that what this post is all about � we need some entering vector. Those hapless historians trying to set the bombing record straight are as good as any other... Why would they display such amnesia about events that happened a mere fifty years ago? Why has the criminality of the Japanese military command disappeared from the public consciousness?

One answer is that activist historians, motivated to find out the truth about the bomb, are operating in the circuit of the famous Binary Os � if bombing Hiroshima was evil, than the people of Hiroshima were, well, good. And by extension the Japanese. This is an understandable extrapolation. After the war, good liberals were ashamed of the incarceration of Japanese-Americans, and the racist rhetoric that was unleashed to describe the war in the Pacific theater and to motivate military performance.

However, that explanation doesn�t satisfy me. I have a more Foucauldian tale to unfold.

Which leads to a brief excursus about Foucault.
I was having lunch last year with an intelligent English Prof and he casually said, a propos of I believe it was Delillo � well, it is like Foucault says, power is total, right?

I gritted my teeth. But I didn�t say anything, because really, this is the most common American interpretation of Foucault � he was the man who said power is �totalizing�. And in the system of total power - raise your hands if you've heard this, y'all - resistance is always already coopted, infected with the codes and cyphers of hegemonic power � as though some virus out of a J.C. Ballard novel had crawled inside our brains.

If this was what Foucault had meant, we could flush him down the toilet. That�s a piss-poor view of history. But of course it isn�t what he said.

Foucault was concerned about both the form of coercion and its content. It is important to separate those two domains. A form of coercion can be state power, it can be a sales pitch, it can be a manifesto. A content, on the other hand, is some enonciation - it can be a bombing raid, a vacuum cleaner, or a cubist painting. It can be an idea. To understand his theory about these things, compare the liberal and the Marxist view of coercion and content.

For the liberal, the content determines the form of coercion � or as the liberal would have it, the form of legitimate governance. For the Marxist, the picture is different: famously, the forms of production determine the modes of culture - which translates into the forms of coercion determining content. What Foucault says is something a little weirder. For him, content is semi-autonomous from the form of coercion. This might seem like a straddle, and it does make the question of the provenance of content important. But the important thing for us to emphasize is that, given this Foucauldian perspective, a content - let's say the bombing of a city - can co-exist with another content - say a pledge not to kill civilians - within the same coercive form. Given one content alone, you cannot read into it where it fits in a form of coercion, or to which form it belongs. The same content can exist in two overlapping forms of coercion.

If we compare the post-war histories of Japan and Germany, we see an interesting thing. Japan was the only Axis power to retain its pre-defeat leader, Hirohito. Japan became, basically, a one-party democracy, with the personnel and the money for the Liberal party flowing from circles that formerly supported the militarists. In Japan, the amnesia about Japanese aggression is so widespread that the government can even get away with approving school textbooks that attribute the Japanese incursion into China to Chinese aggression. The current governor of Tokyo has publicly denied the rape of Nanking happened. Imagine the outcry if the mayor of Berlin, say, denied that Auschwitz happened.

In Germany, on the other hand, a normal, continental two-party parliamentary system has become rooted in the political culture. Germany paid reparations to the victims of its aggression up until the nineties � Japan stopped these payments in 1951. Germany is periodically embroiled in discussions of war guilt. The question is still a major theme in German intellectual culture.

Why did the outcomes of two occupations turn out so differently? A Foucauldian answer would go something like this: in the German case, there were constituencies of memory that prevented the historic experience of Nazi rule and occupation from being forgotten. At first, these constituencies were other Western nations � the French, British, Dutch, etc. The second wave was Jewish. Constituencies of memory are formed around preserving historic experiences that are often, ironically, not remembered by the particular individuals in the set. Those particular individuals being unavailable � i.e. dead � are given a post-mortem existence by groups that gradually gain their identity from this act of transferred memory.

In the Japanese case, however, the formation of constituencies of memory underwent a different course. After the fall of Peking in 1949, the American interest, which was a dominant consideration in such Asian client states as Taiwan and South Korea, was not to awake the memory of recent Japanese aggression. It was, rather, to normalize Japan � incorporate it into the American military and industrial sphere of influence. To use the vocabulary I introduced above, the form of coercion serving the American interest became anti-racist. And to that interest was sacrificed the memory of what happened in Asia in the 30s and 40s.

This is pertinent to the bomb because we see, in the history of American involvement with Japan from 1945 to 1951, a remarkable shift. The same agents who, during the war, supported a racist agenda, now promoted a pro-Japanese agenda. Why?

Another way of putting this is: why, during the debate between the Hiroshima revisionists and the defenders of the bombing, was it simply assumed that the surrender of Japan brought to a close that particular historic epoch?

Here�s what I am going to briefly contend: that the U.S., after V-J day, was in the same condition as the hapless fisherman in the Grimm�s tale who wished for the wrong thing. The U.S., in its occupation of Japan, tacitly renegotiated the Potsdam declaration on its own. That declaration, insofar as it concerns Japan, states:

"There must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest, for we insist that a new order of peace security and justice will be impossible until irresponsible militarism is driven from the world."


IN other words, the official U.S. position, before the bomb, was that Japan had to be de-militarized, and the elite that lead the Japanese during the war had to be forever kept from power. After the war, what happened? The U.S. tried to re-militarize Japan. After the first wave of war crime trials, it was MacArthur's game to quietly re-instate sections of the old elite. Why? Because U.S. interests shifted in Asia, especially after Mao overthrew the nationalist government in China.

Was this shift in interest totally unexpected? No. In 1945, Truman, Stimson, and the U.S. military had a very strong sense that competition in Asia would come from Stalin � although of course they misjudged the strength of Mao. In this sense, the motivation for dropping the bomb was partly to impress the Russians. That was not the whole motivation, however � surely one should factor in the casualty rates being taken by the troops in the Pacific Theater. But those American casualties were supposedly dying for a sort of New Deal foreign policy, one that found expression in the Potsdam accords. Certainly most of them never gave a thought to the Potsdam pronouncement, but they did have a vague sense that they were fighting for democracy, and what that meant. And the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were supposedly sacrificed for the same goal. Since the Truman administration even at the time was envisioning large-scale changes in the New Deal foreign policy, the refusal to negotiate the Japanese surrender was an act of sheer hypocrisy. On the Japanese side, Hirohito�s attempt to save his skin by putting up conditions for a surrender he knew was inevitable was also an act of� well, what shall we call it? Self-interestedness in the highest degree? The blame for the bombing can�t rest on Truman�s shoulders alone - both of these leaders are, as Nobile says, war criminals. Even in the terms of the war itself, even if we expand the legitimate targets of war to include, as Fussell wants to, civilians, there�s only one conclusion about the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: they died in vain.