The Smithsonian Museum in Washington has “reassembled the enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945”:www.nytimes.com/2003/08/19/national/19MUSe.html. Trying to avoid the controversy that accompanied a 1995 exhibition, the current museum director says this exhibit will:
bq. “focus on the technological achievements, because we are a technological museum… This plane was the largest and most technologically advanced airplane for its time.”
This continues the moral blindness that created the bloodiest century in human history. Instead of looking at how politics, war and technology intersected in an event that instantly killed 80,000 people, we shine up the metal and blabber on about technology. The bombing’s death count far overshadows the 3,000 deaths at the World Trade Center two years ago. If the sight of the towers collapsing is a horror we can never forget or minimize, then so too is Hiroshima’s mushroom cloud.
The only way militarism and nationalism survives is by abstracting war and ignoring the very real death, blood and tragedy. The Japanese people caught up in their country’s lust for war were victims as soon as the fighting started. Their participating in their country’s war was a result of propaganda and nationalistic fervor, the same mix that led so many Americans to support the war in Iraq.
The overwhelming majority of people killed on August 8, 1945 were people who never fired a gun. They were simply trying to stay alive in a world full of human-made terror. They were ordinary people who watched as their country’s leaders plotted and warred. Most were afraid to say no to war, to unite with pacifists around the world, or to denounce militarism wherever it existed and with whatever excuse it gave for its horror.
The roots of World War II were oil and terror: Japanese leaders attacked its neighbors to gain control of the industrial resources the home islands didn’t have. American leaders (industrial and political) had waged war against Hawaii and the Philippines for control of Pacific shipping lanes. The plotting for war started long before Pearl Harbor and involved the leaders in both countries. In a very real way, the war in Iraq is just the latest chapter in the century-long war over oil.
But history, truth and morality will all be stripped out of the Smithsonian’s new exhibit, as spokespeople for the American Legion and Air Force have declared:
bq. “As long as the enola Gay is presented in the light that it was used — to end the war and save lives — that’s fine.”
bq. “We are satisfied that it is in historical context this time and does not make comments about U.S. aggression in the Pacific.”
No, schoolchildren visiting Washington won’t learn the truth about the bombing. Another generation will be spoon-fed propaganda about its country’s greatness and goodness. Another generation will not pause to consider its country’s old sins and tragic mistakes. A typical blog entry about the Smithsonian exhibit that claims “no single plane did more to save lives in World War II”:http://www.hobbsonline.blogspot.com/2003_08_01_hobbsonline_archive.html#106130896137661056 . Abstract death and claim righteousness to your country, keep militarism going and keep peaceful people from uniting across national boundaries.
Quaker Ranter
A Weekly Newsletter and Blog from Martin Kelley
Tag Archives ⇒ iraq
Proposal: Armed Forces Pledge to Support Dissent
August 5, 2003
By Martin Kelley. Should armed forces personnel threaten dissenters by telling them to leave the country? Here’s my proposal for an Armed Forces pledge to support dissent.
Confessions of an Anti-Sactions Activist
July 30, 2003
There are a bunch of fascinating rants against the contemporary peace movement as the result of an article by Charles M. Brown, an anti-sanctions activist that has somewhat-unfairly challenged his former colleagues at the Nonviolence.org-affiliated Voices in the Wilderness. Brown talks quite frankly about his feelings that Saddam Hussein used the peace group for propaganda purposes and he challenges many of the cultural norms of the peace movement. I don’t know if Brown realized just how much the anti-peace movement crowd would jump at his article. It’s gotten play in InstaPundit and In Context: None So Blind.
Brown’s critique is interesting but not really fair: he faults Voices for having a single focus (sanctions) and single goal (changing U.S. policy) but what else should be expected of a small group with no significant budget? Over the course of his work against sanctions Brown started studying Iraqi history as an academic and he began to worry that Voices disregarded historical analysis that “did not take … Desert Storm as their point of departure.” But was he surprised? Of course an academic is going to have a longer historical view than an underfunded peace group. The sharp focus of Voices made it a welcome anomaly in the peace movement and gave it a strength of a clear message. Yes it was a prophetic voice and yes it was a largely U.S.-centric voice but as I understand it, that was much of the point behind its work: We can do better in the world. It was Americans taking responsibility for our own people’s blindness and disregard for human life. That Iraq has problems doesn’t let us off the hook of looking at our own culture’s skeletons.
What I do find fascinating is his behind-the-scenes description of the culture of the 1990s peace movement. He talks about the roots of the anti-sanctions activism in Catholic-Worker “dramaturgy.” He’s undoubtedly right that peace activists didn’t challenge Baathist party propaganda enough, that we used the suffering of Iraqi people for our own anti-war propaganda, and that our analysis was often too simplistic. That doesn’t change the fact that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died from sanctions that most Americans knew little about.
The peace movement doesn’t challenge its own assumptions enough and I’m glad Brown is sharing a self-critique. I wish he were a bit gentler and suspect he’ll look back at his work with Voices with more charity in years to come. Did he know the fodder his critique would give to the hawkish groups? Rather than recant his past as per the neo-conservative playbook, he could had offered his reflections and critique with an acknowlegment that there are plenty of good motivations behind the work of many peace activists. I like a lot of what Brown has to say but I wonder if peace activists will be able to hear it now. I think Brown will eventually find his new hawkish friends are at least as caught up in group-think, historical myopia, and propaganda propagation as the people he critiques.
Voices in the Wilderness has done a lot of good educating Americans about the effects of our policies overseas. It’s been hard and often-thankless work in a climate that didn’t support peace workers either morally or financially. The U.S. is a much better place because of Voices and the peace movement was certainly invigorated by its breath of fresh air.
Betting on Terror
July 29, 2003
The news sites are all reporting a Pentagon plan to bet on future terrorist activity (BBC). It’s reported as a stock market-style system in which sucessful predictions by investors would win them money.
Someone at the Pentagon has read a little too many books about the infinite wisdom of the free market. There are those who have a religious faith in the power of unfettered capitalism, who posit it as a kind of all-knowing, self-correcting God. With the input of enough self-interested actors, the truth can be discerned. I’d argue that stock markets are more like blogs (the highly-linked New York Times version of the article), with everyone rushing to make the same links (Associated Press).
The truth of the matter is that recent intelligence lapses have been the result of political meddling in the collection and analytical processes. When the boss wants a certain result (proof of weapons in Iraq, proof of Al Qaeda links), then the group-think pressure to conform will warp the sifting process. A stock market-style system for predicting terror would be about as accurate as a poll of CNN and Fox News watchers – it will tell you what everyone thinks but it probably won’t tell you the truth.
Blunt assertions, no evidence, no investigation
July 21, 2003
The Washington Post has an article about the Bush White House’s common practice of making unattributed statements about Iraq without getting CIA feedback. Some of the whoppers include:
Sept 26: Iraq “could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given.“Sept 28: “there are al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq”
Oct 7: “Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda.”
All of these claims were strongly disputed by intelligence experts at the time and only the most die-heart Adminstration-booster would want to claim now that any of them are true.
The 45 minute claim has gotten a thorough rebuking in the U.K.
This is the second time in as many weeks where a Bush quote has suddenly taken me back to the Reagan years. That 45 minute claim just echos in my head of Reagan’s “the Sandinistas are just two days drive from Harlingen, Texas.” They both have that “oh my god, the barbarians are at the door” urgency. Both also posit an arch-enemy that turned out to be a paper tiger when all the propaganda was peeled back. (For the young’ins out there, Reagan responded to the two-drive fear by mining Nicaragua’s harbors, an act which was later declared illegal by the World Court).
White House smear campaign: Gay and Canadian
July 18, 2003
This would be funny if it weren’t serious. This would be serious if it weren’t pathetic. A few days ago ABC News correspondent Jeffrey Kofman ran a story about low morale among U.S. troops stationed in Iraq. The next day someone in the White House tipped off gossip king Matt Drudge that Kofman was openly gay and (maybe worse) a Canadian. Lapdog Drudge complied with the headline “ABC NEWS REPORTER WHO FILED TROOP COMPLAINT STORY IS CANADIAN.” It’s amazing what tidbits the White House thinks are newsworthy. You’d think the milestone that U.S. casulties in Iraq have surpassed those of the 1991 War might just get the President’s attention.
“Have you ever felt like the fall guy?”
July 18, 2003
In strange and sad news, the man who was probably the unnamed “senior official” who first told the BBC that Britain “sexed up” its Iraq weapons dossier has turned up dead in the woods near his home. Dr. David Kelly gave evidence to the UK foreign affairs committee just days ago, where he asked the committee “Have you ever felt like the fall guy?” One member of the committee told the Guardian that “We thought he’d been put up quite deliberately to distract us from the case of the government’s case for war.”
David Kelly has been described as a “soft spoken” man not used to the public glare he’s been under. Reports haven’t even given the cause of death, so conspiracy theories will have to be put on hold. It’s quite possible that this faithful civil servant and scientist finally cracked under the pressure of the media onslaught and took his life. It is a tragedy for his family.
North Korean nukes and cowboy politics
July 16, 2003
Yesterday North Korea claimed that it has processed enough plutonium to make six nuclear weapons. I’ve often argued that wars don’t begin when the shooting actually begins, that we need to look at the militaristic decisions made years before to see how they planted the seeds for war. After the First World War, the victorious allies constructed a peace treaty designed to humiliate Germany and keep its economy stagnant. With the onslaught of the Great Depression, the country was ripe for a mad demagogue like Hitler to take over with talk of a Greater Germany.
In his January 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush’s team added North Korea to the “axis of evil” that needed to be challenged. By all accounts it was a last minute addition. The speechwriting team never bothered to consult with the State Department’s east Asia experts. In all likelihood North Korea was added so that the evil three countries wouldn’t all be Muslim (the other two were Iraq and Iran) and the “War on Terror” wouldn’t be seen as a war against Islam.
North Korea saw a bulldog president in the White House and judged that its best chance to stay safe was to make a U.S. attack too dangerous to contemplate. It’s a sound strategy, really only a variation on the Cold War’s “Mutually Assured Destruction” doctrine. When faced with a hostile and militaristically-strong country that wants to overthrow your government, you make yourself too dangerous to take on. Let’s call it the Rattlesnake Defense.
Militarism reinforces itself when countries beef up their militaries to stave off the militaries of other countries. With North Korea going nuclear, pressure will now build on South Korea, China and Japan to defend themselves against possible threat. We might be in for a new east Asian arms race, perhaps an east Asian Cold War. Being a pacifist means stopping not only the current war but the next one and the one after that. In the 1980s activists were speaking out against the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein, an American friend who was gassing his own people. Now we need to speak out against the cowboy politics that is feeding instability on the Korean Peninsula, to prevent the horror and mass death that a Second Korean War would unleash.