July 12, 2010

• The Abolition Of Man!

  (Day 6: Your Favourite Music Video.)

  (There will be no comment on this one. For one thing I don’t really have one. There are many music videos I enjoy but I’m so much more about the songs than the videos. More so, when the subject discussed in this update becomes evident I think you’ll agree it hardly would be appropriate to feature one anyway…)

   

  Nathan and I spent the weekend in Hiroshima. Two very polarised days. The first was good fun. We both got going early and were in Hiroshima by 10:30 am. We spent most of the day at Miyajima, just taking in the sights and walking round the island. That evening we had pizza at a tucked-away little Italian food-place that I can only describe as “High Class Steam Punk!” We’d not booked a hotel so opted for the bare-bones approach; manga cafe. For those not familiar with Japan a manga cafe is like a huge library full of manga, also containing small booths with internet access, that operate 24 hours. Whilst bed-less and bathroom-less they do allow for large reclining chairs and, at less than 2000 yen for 8 hours (just enough to see us through from midnight to 8 the next morning) we took it. Not the most comfortable of nights… but not the most uncomfortable either.

  The next day it was on to the heavy stuff; the A-Bomb Dome, Peace Park and Museum. Though it was Nathan’s first visit it was my second to the Memorial Museum and it left an impression the first time. This time was far more profound for me, however, for one simple reason. Looking at the map a building not 200 metres from the centre of the explosion was identified as an elementary school. A school that would have been full of kids just like the kids I see everyday. There were of course more elementaries and junior highs, not unlike my own, throughout Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Kids, just like my own, were incinerated instantaneously. Some had their skin seared away by the heat of the blast and died agonising and painful deaths as they wandered the streets in search of help they’d never find. Some survived for years, even decades, only to die from the damage the radiation cause their bodies. It is a common lamentation of mine that we only truly understand the suffering of others when it becomes personal for us. But in light of how severely it affects us when it does we all have a duty to empathise, to stop distancing ourselves from any suffering that does not touch us personally. To, at the very least, show kindness and compassion to those whose hardships we don’t understand or appreciate.

  But that is not my point. What I took from that day was two-fold. Firstly, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a war crime. A war crime as heinous in nature as the evils the Japanese Imperial Army and the Nazis inflicted. The Nanking Massacre, Unit 731, Concentration Camps, the Holocaust; they were all war crimes of an utterly detestable nature and those responsible were tried as war criminals. But history is written by the victors and no such accountability lies in wait for the Allied leaders who decided to unleash the power of a small star on the men, women and children of two cities in August 1945. Harry S. Truman was a war criminal. Winston Churchill was an accessory to war crimes. Viler still, Nathan informs me that a survey taken amongst the American public shortly after the war ended turned out a shocking 25% in favour of further atomic bombings of Japan. The world today stands outraged at the attempted genocide of the Jews. Yet sizable parties amongst our own Allied Forces, the forces combatting this evil, were calling for the complete eradication of Japan.

  My second point. In trying to identify what terrifying evils exist in the heart of man to allow such inhumanity to his own kind I’ve identified one pivotal factor; empathy. Or, to be precise, lack thereof. War makes a necessity out of dehumanising one’s enemy. Propaganda designed to remove any trace of empathy for our fellow man is employed throughout wartime, turning our adversary into vile, inhuman monsters, enemies to civilised society and our very way of life. It is not hard, through the lens of the Victor’s History, to view ourselves as the heroes. And, ideologically, I find it hard not to too. We were opposing the totalitarian fascism and genocidal insanity of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The imperialist Manifest Destiny and religiously nationalistic zeal of Japan. But when you look beyond the ideologies to the actual actions the waters become muddy. Political posturing and militaristic dominion played puppeteer to America’s decision to utilise its newfound nuclear capabilities. The war could have been ended without the bombs. But the Soviets were closing in. Their involvement in Japan would mean further footholds for Communist Russia following the war’s end. Money and time had been invested to create these weapons. Germany had capitulated. And outside of a wartime setting the use of a nuclear weapon on living human subjects would be considered an act of inhuman evil. Money and political maneuverings led to the decision to annihilate over a hundred thousand lives. And this was from “the good guys.” The only way one can commit such atrocities, outside of being a sociopath, is to willfully dehumanise your foe. To cut yourself off from them, to see them as “other.” To deny yourself the burden of empathy. But they are human. They are very human. They are flesh and blood. They are parents, children, brothers, sisters, friends, lovers. They laugh, they cry, they love, they fear, they hurt.

  I went to school today and saw several hundred Japanese children, aged between 6 and 12. At lunch time the 2nd graders wanted to play with me, asking for piggy-back rides and shoulder-carries, trying to hang off my arms, giving me hugs, laughing, chatting, playing. Now I imagine them dead, charred bodies lifelessly strewn across a barren earth. Everything that was their lives annihilated. I imagine an incredibly sweet little 7 year old girl, named Toa, immolated beyond recognition, screaming and crying for help in a manner so terrible it freezes the blood. Now I imagine the justifications of the politicians, the celebrations of the public at the destruction of their enemy, and I feel physically sick. I force myself to think of these things, to imagine such a terrible pain so close to myself, for one reason; because it is the truth. It is the absolute truth of what has happened and people all-too easily seek to avoid it and that is how these atrocities come to pass. Remember 9/11? Remember the scenes of celebration in the streets of those Arab nations we saw on TV? Remember how it made you feel? Now kindly take a moment to realise that our own countries knowingly brought down devastation of a magnitude many times greater than 10 9/11s and, whilst the still-living remains of a mother amidst the black rain and charred landscape of a nuclear wasteland the likes of which we’ve only seen in movies stood over a river choked with the immolated corpses of men, women and children screaming her son’s name, our people cheered.

  What makes a monster? I would argue it is not one’s actions but how one allows oneself to commit them. Hitler’s persecution of the Jews was only possible because he closed himself to their humanity, and indoctrinated others to do the same. But whilst our nations fought this evil we were actively committing the same evil ourselves. But it is not always so blatant as the wartime propaganda that fueled the fires of genocide. It still happens now, day-to-day. Every bigoted remark, every line drawn in the sand, every nationalistic proclamation of one’s country or people over anothers, every denial of another person’s rights, every perception of ‘them VS us.’ I am not usually one for the “slippery slope” argument but consider this; these lines of thinking are the seeds from which the world’s most terrible evils have sprouted. When one closes one’s heart to others, when one dehumanises another to the extent that they no longer are capable of feeling for them, when one sees others as only monsters, that is when we become monsters ourselves.

  

  Peace.

  • 8:14 am
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