Remora

I'm sunshine this week, ladies and germs. First I harangue you about Hiroshima, and now here's a link to a discussion of Rwanda:
Conversation with Philip Gourevitch, p. 4 of 7
I'm reading Gourevitch's book for a job I'm doing, and it is impressive. Here's a quote from the Conversation --
"People like to go to the Holocaust Museum and say, that's who I relate to, the guy who did right. Either they relate somehow to the victim and feel bad about themselves and sorry for themselves, or they relate to the good guy. Very few go in there and say, oh yeah I probably would have been just like an ordinary conformist Nazi murderer, right? But probably the great majority of people who go through that museum would have been, because that's what the great majority of people in Europe were. They were either bystanders, collaborators, or in some other way morally reprehensible positions which are all too understandable. But there they are. But no, this museum allows you to fantasize that you're sort of morally excellent. And reality doesn't allow that fantasy much room, sadly."

The flip side is that people refrain from violence out of conformism too. There have been times that I wonder why I've never murdered, and certainly it is amazing that I know no murderers. Or I think I know none. The first human quarrel in the Bible ends with murder - Cain killing Abel. It must have made sense to Cain, since he had no example of what you do in a quarrel - how you keep yourself from hurting someone you don't like. The first thing that occurs to him is end his brother - just as he ended other irritants: swatted mosquitos, squashed spiders. It must have seemed so logical. Of course, the story goes on to gift Cain with the kind of foresight he could only have if he'd been living among a group of people for some time - remember, he cries out that the mark God puts upon him will make him a target for other people. Maybe the act of murdering Abel gave him second sight, and he saw both how easy it was and how futile it was. The recoil from murdering is in our system as much as the lust to do it.

Remora.

Alan suggested I visit this site:The Simple Living Newsletter - The Simple Living Network I like what these people stand for - better living through less stuff - but they lack a certain --- punchiness. This opinion might say more about me than the Simple Living guys, however - lately I've just felt aggressive. Hmm, time for a vacation, I think.

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.

Remora
Hey - I've always been anti-work - or workin for the steal, if that is how that line from the Public Enemy song goes - but an organization that takes up where the situationalists left off - an anti-economy league, in short - was a pipe-dream. Others couldn't possibly feel the way I do, right? No, wrong! Check out the Committee for Full Enjoyment, and the anti-economy manifesto: The Anti-Economy League

Dope.

In 1995, for the 50th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, the Smithsonian planned on a special exhibit on the Enola Gay, using information that had been gradually released since the war. An ad hoc coalition of the American Legion and a lobbying front group supported by defense contractors mounted a successful resistance to the exhibit, portraying it as some kind of weird propaganda coup for communism and the Imperial Japanese Army Headquarters. This line was eagerly taken up by the Washington Post, the tone being set by a Charles Krauthammer column.

The controversy replayed a battle that has been going on a long time. The locus classicus of the defense of the bombing is a piece by Paul Fussell entitled, "Thank God for the Atom Bomb". Sorry, guys, no copy of this is available on-line. I'm going to reduce it to its arguments, although the piece really relies on its rhetoric. Still, the Fussell's three arguments for the bomb are common to his camp. I�ve seen them repeated, with the same rhetorical flourish of contempt for those who don't buy it, among most of the Atom Bombadiers:

1. The bombing can�t be judged by non-combatants.
2. Since war is an unconditional evil, there are no morally justified constraints on how war is fought � the only moral course is to end war as quickly as possible.
3. The bombing prevented an invasion of Japan.

Fussell spends quite a bit of time in his essay explaining the special, mystic experience of the non-combatant. Although Fussell doesn�t quite explain it � mysticism is always a little too deep for mere language � his point seems to be that the experience of seeing one�s comrade�s shot up produces a sort of hive consciousness among GIs. They meld into a collective mind, wishing for � well, the destruction of the enemy by whatever means necessary. The justification for this is irrelevant. Like German youth groups in the 20s, who claimed that non-Aryans just didn�t get the Teutonic mythos and the groovy blut-und-erdness of it all, Fussell claims that our boys in the Pacific Theater wished for Hiroshima, and so we had to give it to them. An early birthday present for the boys. Fired with this knowledge, Fussell can dismiss critics of the bombing, like John Kenneth Galbraith, as desk jockeys at best, second guessing (or is it stabbing in the back?) our best sons.

Even Fussell knows this is argument, or anti-argument (since it premises lie outside of rationality), is insufficient. Combatants, after all, don�t direct or organize combat � they perform it. It was the Truman administration that ordered the bombing, after a bunch of non-combatant ephebes in Los Alamos built the damn explosive. But Fussell goes for the Fuhrer principle � Truman, you see, had an intuitive connection to the grunts. He�d been a soldier himself. Like, in fact, that other soldier/leader, Adolf Hitler. In fact, Hitler compares favorably to Truman and truly aces Roosevelt. He had been more of a soldier than either � after all, he was gassed in WWI.

Well, hmm. Forgive me, but any argument that ends up supporting Hitler�s leadership during the war makes me worry. Besides, when the chips are down, the intuitive business fades away - leaders order their men into life threatening situations while remaining, themselves, out of life-threatening situations. The man who ordered Stalingrad held to the last soldier, and who planned, late in the war, to bring the army, hive spirit and all, down with him, was surely not connected to the Soldaten Wunsch-pool, and neither was Truman. In fact, by Truman's account, during most of the war he was out of the loop. The argument is absurd and insulting to the soldiers it is ostensibly defending, who werre more varied and intelligent than Fussell gives them credit for. Furthermore, it allows Fussell to commit a little intellectual blackguardism vis � a � vis the critics of Hiroshima � with the non-subtle implication that these guys, and of course women here are excluded from the discussion utterly, are, let�s say, limp wrested.

That�s to be expected from the fascism of this kind of argument/non-argument. That it goes over so easily in the Beltway press is to be expected, too - those guys always love a bully.

2. The second argument actually has a cognitive content, so I am not debasing my readers by presenting it.
George Orwell might have been the first to remark on a strange conjunction in World War II. English pacifists, who started out simply opposing all combat, slowly turned to pro-fascism as the war continued. This represents a fact in history of the spirit, as Hegel would say � the synthesis of pacifist assumptions with warmongering conclusions.
The pacifist assumption � which generates an enormous amount of unthinking agreement � is that killing for a political program is unconditionally wrong. Fussell, who has represented this view elsewhere, quotes General Sherman�s war is hell remark to give us a feel for this view.

The warmonger takes the pacifist interpretation one step further: since war is unconditionally bad, if a war occurs, the only good thing is to end it as quickly as possible, using all means necessary.

The first thing to say about this is � I see no reason to cede the pacifist point. I can think of killing for a political program that was good, and killing that was bad. To put it bluntly: Hooray for the shooting of Czar Alexander, the beheading of Louis XVI, and the shooting of as many Confederates as possible at Shiloh.

If, however, violence isn�t unconditionally wrong in these circumstances � which was really the attitude of the governments that, after all, fought the wars - it makes sense to talk of constraints on violence. It makes sense, in other words, to dispute with Sherman. Sherman�s remark is often quoted because he made it in the context of a war which freed the slaves, a result no sane person can dispute. The historical codicil to the Sherman doctrine was the war against the Plains and Southwestern Indians � funny how the Fussells of the world forget this. In the Indian wars, it was typical for Americans to induce Indian chiefs (the apache chief Mangas Coloradas and Sitting Bull are good examples) to parlay under a flag of truce, and then murder them. If war is hell, of course, who cares � it brought these conflicts to a quicker end. But if there are just wars and revolutions, then we are right to feel this kind of death is repulsive and thoroughly dishonors the murderers. We are right to say prisoners shouldn�t be shot, and the safety of civilians should, to the greatest extent possible, be preserved.

There�s a fake history that goes along with the claim that the era of total war was inevitable. It is that war is technologically determined. Once you have the plane, you inevitably have the bombing of cities.
This isn�t true. Even a cursory glance at the history of warfare shows no necessary connection between the level of technology and the level of allowed ferocity. If you compare the Europe�s continental wars in the 19th century with those of the 17th century, you�ll find the 17th century�s were much more total, much more wrenching to the civilian population. Yet the technology employed by, say, the Prussians against the French in 1870, is much more sophisticated than the arquebuses of Gustave Adolphus� soldiery.

3. The defenders of the Hiroshima bombing often talk about the casualties suffered by American troops in the last months of the war, as if these rates lead to a self-evident inference. The casualty rate was astonishing. But normally, this is not a signal that you attack civilians. It means that you continue, as Grant did in Virginia, taking the count in order to achieve a complete victory �or you negotiate. In other words, you reconsider the option of unconditional surrender. It doesn�t mean you firebomb Tokyo and wipe out two largely civilian cities with atom weapons.

Here I want to make a case that is, I believe, unique. The partisans on both sides agree that the surrender of Japan was wholly on the terms laid out by the Potsdam agreement. In other words, the Imperial Japanese government unconditionally surrendered. Now, formally, this is true. But I�d like to argue that in reality, not only was the Potsdam agreement violated in the course of Japanese reconstruction, but that it was in the American interest to violate it. In other words, the unconditional surrender for which so many fought, and for which 75 to 100 thousand died in Hiroshima, was a cynical sham.

I�ll make this argument tomorrow.

Dope

A day that will live in infamy passed without it being properly anathematized by your humble spirit this month. No, it was not the day the movie Pearl Harbor outgrossed the cost of the real thing, but August 6. The 56th anniversary of Hiroshima.

When I was a kid in 1968 or 9, my best friend was Mike Sears. It was Mike Sears who brought the John Hershey book, Hiroshima, to class. And I read a little bit of it. And it scared the living shit out of me. I had nightmares about it � oddly erotic nightmares. Since the bomb�s effect was to burn the clothing into the skin or off the skin, Hershey�s account shows a dazed city of survivors wandering about naked, a landscape of burned and flowing skin, and this impressed my prurient sixth grade subconscious. The first nightmare I had about Hiroshima, I woke and discovered that I wet myself � and then I discovered that this fluid was stickier than urine.

For a long time, Hiroshima was too frightening for me to read about � and I am still scared of looking at photos of Hiroshima victims.

Well, this week I am going to write a little bit about the justification for bombing Hiroshima � what Philip Nobile calls Hiroshima holocaust denial.

Remora I've always thought Christopher Hitchens was right about Mother Theresa - a nasty ghoul with an uncanny knack for palling around with the most unsavory rich people in the world, when she wasn't forcibly converting the dying, for breadcrumbs and a bed, to an ersatz belief in Jesus Christ . My favorite heroine from India is the anti- Mother Theresa - Phoolan Devi, the bandit queen, who kicked ass - and knocked off 22 men, supposedly - after being given the usual gangbang treatment in rural India. No passive resistance for this girl. Bought, raped, misused, she was one lowcaste virgin/whore who danced her own return of the repressed on the heads of a typical village ruling clique. She even got elected to Parliment - hell, if she had only been running for the Senate in New York State, we would have had a real feminist in American politics, even. Anyway, she was murdered. Here's a depressing story about the wholse sordid affair. Fierce Struggle for Spoils of Slain 'Bandit Queen'