01Jan04-Sarah Benton-Fantasy of the final solution
By SARAH BENTON
LONDON -- WMD: a new acronym for a new century and what a terrible augury of the century. If weapons of mass destruction are ever used for their intended purpose -- to annihilate mankind -- this century will be mankind's last. Perhaps the flippancy of the new century's young adults should after all be welcomed, since the most powerful nations of the world appear to be organizing this new millennium on the basis of WMD.
Some nations will make them and boast of them; some will make them and hide them; others will pretend to make them and boast of them; some will be destroyed for wanting to make them. And the rest, not having them, will be the voiceless supplicants at the gates.
The one exception in this WMD travesty of civilization is Japan, neither an WMD possessor nor a supplicant. But its special role comes from being the only nation in the world to have had suffered the catastrophe of having atomic bombs dropped on it. When the hydrogen bomb was developed, there were many voices raised in despair and fury predicting that the 20th century would be last of human civilization. And here we still are.
The tremendous irony is that in the last 60 years of unprecedented genocide, more people have been killed by humble means than by sophisticated new WMD. The most recent horrible genocide of our time, in Rwanda in 1994, was carried out using the humble machete.
The unique horror of the European Holocaust is often attributed to the fiendish invention of gas ovens by German Nazis. Yet many millions more were shot, or died of exhaustion, starvation and disease. It was exhaustion, starvation and disease that killed most in the Soviet Gulag, and in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. These were techniques that required moral depravity by the commanders, not expensive technology.
More people were killed by the British firebombing of Dresden and Cologne, in Germany, than by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. And the weapons that killed 3,000 people so quickly in New York's twin towers on 9/11 were small commercial airplanes, seized by men armed with small commercial box-cutters.
Even the Holocaust could not have been carried out had it not been for the humble and ubiquitous railway train; as Primo Levi, the greatest witness to the Holocaust, has written in "The Drowned and the Saved": "There is not a diary or story (of the camp) in which the train does not appear, the sealed boxcar changed from a commercial vehicle into an ambulatory prison."
Of course, it is far safer to the human imagination to believe the James Bond version of danger: One, rich, crazy megalomaniac invents some ingenious, huge and shiny contraption with which he can destroy everything, but is prevented from doing so by a brave and insouciant man.
This is the version that the morally shriveled men around U.S. President George W. Bush wish us to believe. They point us to a few "rogue" men -- sinister, dark-skinned men with black mustaches -- who have massive underground bunkers concealing huge and shiny contraptions with which they can destroy everything unless they are prevented from doing so by the brave and insouciant GI Joe.
It seems of the utmost importance that we are not seduced by this Hollywood fantasy. It is true that Saddam Hussein, like Hitler, used gas and chemical weapons to kill thousands (rather than millions). It is also true that the Ba'ath Party, like the Nazis, instituted and maintained a reign of terror with old-fashioned beatings and torture. Had Hussein's whole regime not developed its barbarity and paranoia over a decade of routine barbarity, it would not have been possible for it to destroy part of its own population with chemical weapons.
It is commonplace that the most dire threats to human dignity and life itself are simple lacks: lack of knowledge, lack of clean water, lack of food, lack of stable community, lack of mundane power. If human ingenuity were organized and financed to solve these lacks, then more people would hope that humanity could learn from history.
At the time that some countries were feverishly and secretively developing WMD, science had created separate, more peaceful fantasies for a better world. There was the fantasy that one day world hunger would be solved by the production of a few nutrient pills that would replace food. The glittering success of penicillin in quelling infections -- followed by vaccines against polio and the elimination of smallpox -- all promised a future in which whole communities would no longer be decimated by disease and infection.
Not all those hopes were wrong. But the potential of a virus to transmute, or of bacteria to "learn" and become resistant, told the peace scientist that every life form, from a bacterium to Hussein, will do what it can to survive and perpetuate itself. In medicine, as in politics, there are no final solutions.
It is a lazy commonplace in Britain to claim that Americans always want quick and final solutions, and do not have the temperament, or political system, for the patient negotiations and compromises that produce good-enough progress rather than perfection. But on Iraq's WMD, it seems that it is British Prime Minister Tony Blair who truly believed in the fantasy of a wicked tyrant with his underground cavern of high-tech machines of destruction, while Bush was the sophisticate who had no such illusions; he simply wanted to get his enemy.
This too, of course, was a simplistic cartoon version, in which many Americans believe: The good guys go in, the masses rise up from their chains and cheer and everyone is happy.
As Primo Levi again reports, when the concentration camps in Poland were liberated by Russian and American troops in 1945, the soldiers expected energetic rejoicing from the inmates. Instead, most of the inmates were too apathetic to respond, and most, released from the daily tension of having to survive, simply died. This truth has never fitted the fantasy so it could never be learned.
Sarah Benton, a former political editor of The New Statesman and Society, writes for the Guardian international edition.
The Japan Times: Jan. 1, 2004
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