A vital piece by Henry Giroux that is deeply illuminating, needed, and relevant today. What is not owned, seen, healed, and transformed will continue to be tragically repeated. I also need to add that my Brigadier General grandfather, who we buried on his 99th birthday at West Point and who served in both World Wars, was haunted throughout his lifetime by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which he railed against as ever being "necessary" or anything other than profound evil. We must stop all these many faces of madness and stand strongly for peace and the conscious evolution of our species. It is long past time to stand courageously in conscious awareness of these lessons we humans must learn now. Another world is possible. - Molly
****
In re-posting this piece, Henry Giroux writes: "I am posting my essay on Hiroshima as part of the 72 anniversary of this horrible act of barbarism and as a warning for the current moment in which ignorance and war fever are haunting the Unites States."
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.
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 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. (1) 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." (2)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. (3)
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. (4) 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 the scourge of commodified and trivialized entertainment. (5) 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." (6)
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. (7) 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 were 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. (8) 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." (9) 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. (10)
Please continue this essay here: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/26086-remembering-hiroshima-in-an-age-of-neoliberal-barbarism
No comments:
Post a Comment