"I should make it clear that I consider Lifton a Left wing academic who hides behind his specialty to claim to speak as a man of science:"
What a weird remark?! I don't know how Dr. Lifton votes; but, what on earth does a person's vote have to do with the value or worthiness of their ideas in their field of expertise? The world is happy to honor the thinking and the accomplishments of exceptionable people from all countries, and of all political persuasions.
Intellectual racism is a recipe for sterile, unimaginative, and frozen thinking.
The credentials of Lifton are impeccable, and he is held in high esteem by his peers in higher learning.
You are, of course, free to find fault with his ideas, and to argue against them if you feel qualified to discuss psychiatry, human meaning, and the manner in which history interacts with the individual and the collective in a dance of adaptation and integration. If you are a Master in his fields of excellence, I suppose that might be enjoyable. However, your flippant remarks about his lack of seriousness, or his being what you call "left wing" are just too pathetic.
I mean, really Neocon: to attempt to discredit an expert's opinions and research by the obnoxious suggestion that his politics invalidates the soundness of his ideas...well, that is poppycock, and it reveals a rather childish outlook.
I am surprised that you would express such blatant resentments to academics, especially to such a one who worked hands on in so many wars...
As to your remark that he hides behind his specialty to "claim" to speak as a man of science...what on earth is that supposed to mean? I have never heard him claim to be a expert in any sciences other than certain clinical and social sciences where he has been honored for his mastery of the subject matter. Furthermore, he writes with strict objectivity and without any pretentiousness of any kind. There is no way for me to tell who he votes for from his award winning writings. But if you have managed to get to this private matter which reflects the American ideal of freedom...then, you apparently feel that you know sufficient to reject his thought unread.
Thank you for that review, though. Most excellent!!
MIKE MOORE
Shortly after the war in the Pacific ended, Lt. Daniel McGovern, a member of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, began working with a Japanese film crew to document the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The end product of the Japanese-American collaboration: A three-hour documentary called The Effects of the Atomic Bombs Against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was shipped to the United States in May 1946, amid much fanfare in the American press. Then it fell into a deep well without a splash. Classified "Top Secret," it was locked away for 22 years until the Japanese government managed to break it loose.
In Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, authors Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell suggest that the fate of that documentary footage was just one of many examples flowing from the "mother of coverups"-- the suppression of information that might put a human face on what happened to the men, women, and children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"It is not hard to imagine why American officials were uncomfortable with the footage," write Lifton and Mitchell. "The Japanese newsreel team had gone into hospitals to document the burn and radiation effects. They not only photographed a burned- out trolley car, but the rows of skulls and bones that surrounded it. Even the footage of strictly physical phenomena featured troublesome imagery: radioactive sand clogging wells used for drinking water; dead stalks of rice seven miles from the hypocenter; the silhouette of a painter on a ladder, his brush outstretched, permanently etched onto the surface of a concrete wall by the flash of the bomb."
"Troublesome imagery." In the end, it came down to that. Somehow the United States--and that meant everyone from President Harry S. Truman to the men and women at the local coffee shop--had to square their image of America the Good with the fact that crews of the Enola Gay and Bock's Car had vaporized, melted, cremated, and poisoned upwards of a hundred thousand people in the amount of time it takes to have fried chicken, apple pie, and lemonade at Grandma's house.
In the following weeks, months, and years, the U.S. government engaged in heroic efforts to control and censor the press, thus insuring that the American people remained insulated from troublesome imagery regarding the use of atomic bombs. As top-secret vaults bulged ever outward with suppressed film, the "official narrative" of the bombing was pushed with unseemly enthusiasm.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were essentially military targets, went the official line, and the only reason the bombs were used against them was to end the war quickly. Because of them, it was not necessary to invade the Japanese home islands, a bloodletting that would have claimed a quarter million American lives, or a half million, or a million, and which would have condemned many more Japanese to certain destruction. End of story.
Thanks to a host of historians who have ably mined the terrain over the past 30 years--notably, Gar Alperovitz, Martin Sherwin, and Barton Bernstein--we now know that the decision to use the bombs was far more complex than that, as major decisions usually are.
To be sure, the mainstream view among most historians is that the United States did indeed use the bombs because it wanted to end the war quickly, just as President Truman and Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson said. But the decision was also colored by a host of background factors that went unmentioned by Messrs. Truman and Stimson--including the fact that the nation had devoted considerable treasure and brainpower to the atomic bomb project, and that in itself was a politically compelling reason to use the bombs.
And, too, it is now clear to everyone, except to the eternally bemused and benighted, that the United States also wanted to use the bombs to send a signal to Stalin, to let him know that the United States had the means and the will to keep him from sweeping across Europe and Asia after the war. The Soviet Union had more divisions; but the United States had the great equalizer.
While Hiroshima in America sums up the historical controversies about the use of the bomb with admirable economy, it is not yet another book about why the bombs were used. Rather, its main purpose is to explore the impact of the bombs' use on America over the past 50 years--the "mythology Americans have constructed around Hiroshima, and its cost to ourselves and to the world."
This is familiar territory to Lifton, a prominent psychiatrist and the author of such books as Home From the War: Vietnam Veterans Neither Victims Nor Executioners; The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide; and Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. (Mitchell is no lightweight, either. He was editor of Nuclear Times during Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" phase, and his work has appeared in some of the nation's best editorial venues.)
Not unexpectedly, the authors' verdict is that the A-bombs have had a devastating effect on the people of the United States. There's an irony in that, which they explore fully. Governmental efforts, they argue, were relatively successful at keeping troublesome imagery from ordinary people. As a consequence, Americans have been reasonably comfortable with the self-serving myths supplied by the government as to why the bombs were used.
But the American people were not spared the discomfort that comes with knowing that the use of atomic bombs had irrevocably changed the rhythms and purposes of everyday life. "Hiroshima," say the authors, "signified the pointless apocalypse-- the sudden realization that we could extinguish ourselves as a species, with our own technology, by our own hand, and to no purpose." After Hiroshima, it has been difficult to separate individual death from a vast, collective "death event." Even today, in these postCold War years, too many of us are consumed by the idea of "doom and futurelessness."
This may strike the reader as an odd assessment. Even in the darkest days of the Cold War, most Americans seemed focused on getting on with their own lives, not on nuclear Armageddon. The Beat poets, who howled ceaselessly about the meaninglessness of life in the Atomic Age, were only able to fill a coffee house now and then. Elvis Presley, who merely howled, packed arenas. Today, far more people seem to fret about the fictional Murphy Brown's marital prospects than about the possibility of nuclear war.
But that's just on the surface, say the authors. "While overt fear of nuclear war has diminished somewhat since the end of the Cold War, it has by no means disappeared. Our own interviews suggest a merging of nuclear fear with other apocalyptic threats, such as environmental destruction and global warming. However altered in its expression, futurelessness initiated by Hiroshima remains."
Hiroshima in America, despite its title, is not a work of history. It's an extended essay into the psychological consequences of the first use of atomic weapons. It is full of keen insight. "For American presidents," write Lifton and Mitchell, "historical memory of Hiroshima cuts both ways. On the one hand, it conveys the idea of nuclear weapons as usable, fortifying the official U.S. first-use policy from which no president has deviated. On the other hand, recalling the effects of the bomb contributes to a sense that the weapons are not usable."
But now and then the book overreaches as it attempts to put nearly everything into a deeper psychological context. In a much-too-long section on Truman, for instance, we learn that his much-praised decisiveness was at least partly rooted in his life-long "quest for vitality." As a child he had to wear thick eyeglasses, which made it impossible for him to engage in rough-and-tumble play. Instead, he studied the piano. But at 13, he stopped because he was worried about being labeled a "sissy."
Eventually, that compulsion to be manly may have contributed to his quick post-Roosevelt decision to use atom bombs. Maybe. But one can just as reasonably suggest--as many historians do--that Truman used the bombs because they had been a major part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's master plan to end the war, and because virtually all of his advisers recommended it.
Sometimes-unpersuasive psychological analyses aside--we learn that nuclear weapons represent some sort of "power surge"--Hiroshima in America is an evocative book that ought to be read by anyone who believes that the people of the United States have never faced up to horror that was committed in their name 50 years ago. Only by acknowledging that an essentially decent nation committed a grossly immoral act can we Americans renew ourselves and take command of our "lethal technology."
We Americans can "disenthrall" ourselves from the "nuclear megamachine" only if we come "to recognize the extent to which that [official] Hiroshima narrative has blunted our senses and subverted our moral imagination. For achieving that disenthrallment, nothing is more powerful than images of the actual Hiroshima experience, of what the bomb did there to fellow human beings."
The United States almost took a step toward "disenthrallment" when the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution decided to mount a major fiftieth anniversary exhibition probing the role of the atom bomb in ending the war, which was to have opened in May 1995. Lifton and Mitchell, in a lively and poignant chapter, chronicle how that effort was dismembered and shredded as it was relentlessly savaged by people who were well pleased with the official history.
That official history has "numbed" the American people for five decades, say the authors, cutting them off literally from important moral truths, and metaphorically from past and future generations of Americans. But if we can someday, somehow, come to grips with the troublesome imagery of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we can finally begin to "divest ourselves of a debilitating sense of futurelessness and once more feel bonded to past and future generations."
Lifton and Mitchell may be right about that On the other hand, history suggests that human beings have a near-infinite capacity for self-delusion and self-denial, even unto the darkness of the grave.
Mike Moore is the Bulletin's editor. |
