Hiroshima Day, 2014

06 Aug 2014

##En Route to Grassy Narrows

As I write this post, I’m in transit, travelling to my first experience as part of Christian Peacemaker Teams, as part of an Aboriginal Justice delegation to the Grassy Narrows First Nation. It seems both odd and fitting that part of our journey from the UK to the forests of northwest Ontario is taking place on the anniversary of the US’s destruction of Hiroshima by a nuclear weapon. Funny enough, this particular leg of the journey also takes us through the US, where I’m reminded of some disturbing conversations over the last months regarding the Obama administration’s murder of civilians and suspected militants by drones, and the US’s military reentry into Iraq. (Indeed, these are often defended by people who would identiy as a liberals.)

In my mind at this particular moment, these seemingly disparate issues come together under the topic of the normalisation of violence and oppression. In other words, violence, particularly as a means to prop up economic exploitation, becomes so common and assumed in our society that we become conditioned to it. At a certain point, it becomes hard to even see the violence, let alone resist it.

##Normalcy

Before I say anything more, if you get one thing out of this post, make it this: read John Hersey’s beautiful, thin book, Hiroshima. It contains the self-reported accounts of 6 Hiroshima survivors, 5 Japanese and 1 German, based closely on interviews that Hersey took with them in the year after the war ended. The book is a concise, detailed account of what it felt like to suffer a nuclear attack, and the memories of Hiroshima on that day were fresh in the minds of the survivors at the time they gave their stories to Hersey. It should be required reading in every schoolroom, and yet no one seems to know about it.

If you talk to an American about the decision to drop the atomic bomb, there is a considerable chance you’ll get an immediate response like the following (paraphrased from my own experience): “Well, yes it’s regrettable, but we had to do it or otherwise we would have had to invade. And many more people would have died in an invasion.” Sometimes that last sentence is even amended to the more honest, “more American soldiers would have died”. It’s worth unpacking all of the assumptions that underlie such an answer: that lives can be counted and weighed against each other, that violence is inevitable in the face of conflict, that the Pacific War was justified, and finally (for some people), that the life of a Japanese civilian is not worth as much as that of an American soldier. There’s also a sutble, hidden lack of compassion for soldiers themselves: is it evil to make a single aircrew responsbible for killing an entire city? Soldiers are treated as instruments to be used, without regard for how that damages their souls.

But someone has taught so many of us not to ask these questions, and just assume that the use of violence is justified, as long as we do the grim mathematics of (supposedly) “saving” as many lives as possible. And what is it that justifies the conflict? Again, people learn to justify conflicts with vague notions like “freedom”, or “security”. But when one looks deeper, the source of most violent conlficts in economic in nature.

Autobiographical note: my grandfather, Ellis A. Wallenberg Jr. flew P-47s in the Pacific War, killed people in that war, and died himself when his plane crashed in the Pacific a few months before the war ended. At the age of 22, he left behind my father, unborn in my grandmother’s womb. And I have no trouble admitting that the Pacific War was a nasty war for economic ascendency in much of Asia. Both Japan and the US/UK wanted greater scope to exploit workers and natural resources such as oil and rubber in places like China, Indonesia, and Myanmar, and the US ultimately won the right to be the big capitalist dog in the area. If one reads the negotiations between US Secretary of State Hull and Japanese diplomats prior to the Pacific War, it’s entirely clear that the dispute was over the exploitation of capital in Southeast Asia and China. No one had any illusions on this point, and senior American politicians knew that war was coming. I wish my grandfather hadn’t died for that, and I wish more that he hadn’t killed for it.

But more than just one soldier who happened to be related to me, our societies allowed millions to be burned and poisoned to death with radiation on this day in 1945, and perversely, so many of us go on justifying it. No amount of rationalization is going to make it alright to torture millions of people to death, nor to ask soldiers to do such a thing. Then, having done it once, we went on to do it again in Nagasaki. Nothing will make up for that. As members of militaristic, capitalist societies, we get put to sleep with regard to:

the horrors of violent conflict, both for soldiers and civilians (and what is a soldier, but a civilian with a weapon who someone orders to murder others?)
the economic motives for the conflict
that there are nonviolent alternatives to conflict

And why are we put to sleep? Because such violent conflicts are of economic benefit to the owning classes of our societies, and only of harm to was has become known as “the 99%”. And violence is fairly cheap compared to the profit at stake, particularly since the lives of the 99%, particularly its poorest members, are expendable to the owning classes. So we are taught to ignore most of this, and to trick ourselves into believing that violence is necessary and justified. Note that the idea of an all-volunteer military makes this situation much worse: since no one with enough money to avoid the military will volunteer to be killed, it becomes easy for everyone but the poorest to ignore the deaths of soldiers and foreign civilians.

##Grassy Narrows

This brings us to Grassy Narrows, and the journey I’m actually on at the moment. You can read a detailed account of the Grassy Narrows First Nation’s struggle here, but in short: this group of indigenous people have had their land logged without their consent, their children stolen to residential schools, and their rivers poisened with mercury. As usual, the motive is economic: the exploitation of natural resources and, to some extent, workers in the area. It’s simply a recent series of events that’s a small part of a long history of wresting the land from its original inhabitants. And as has been done since the first Europeans came to North America, exploiting the land is carried out at the same time as systematic extermination of the indigenous people who are in the way, both by erasing their culture and killing them.

Again, as members of the exploiter societies we are put to sleep. The violence is hidden, downplayed, and we are taught to not see these present-day disputes as a piece of a larger pattern of genocide that has been happening for the last few hundred years. The violence is also further hidden by the fact that the perpetrators are private citizens, corporatins, or “police” under orders from a government, rather than a “military”. But And we are put to sleep as native cultures are romanticized, exoticized, made fun of in other ways. Should we refer to a hairstyle as “Mohawk”? Or more sick, as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, why does the US name weapons of mass murder after victims of its own genocide, such as the “Apache” helicopter or “tomahawk” missile?

These are just some of the ways that we have gone to sleep and accepted violence and exploitation around us. I often wonder if people felt similarly “Well, that’s just the way things are” in Nazi Germany. (And I strongly suspect they did. I just watched The Book Thief, which is an interesting cinematic treatment of this feeling.)

Well, time to wake up.