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It's strange to have your past life called up out of the blue, but that's what TomDispatch regular Kelly Denton-Borhaug did for me in her piece today. After all, she focuses in part on War Without Mercy, John Dower's classic 1986 history of "race and power in the Pacific War." (In the New Yorker, he was recently called "the finest American historian of modern Japan.") As it happens, all those long years ago, while I was working as an editor at Pantheon Books, I edited and published that very volume, of which Studs Terkel once wrote: "John Dower in his shattering book reveals a hidden dimension to World War II. It is more than a scholarly book. It may become a classic" and indeed it has all these years later.
In addition, long, long ago, as an editor, I spoke with an author who had interviewed the mothers of young children and pregnant women belatedly evacuated from the danger zone around the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania when its nuclear core was experiencing a partial meltdown. None of them, it turned out, had heard of the once-atomized cities of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. At that moment when I felt I needed to do something, Dower introduced me to a memorable Japanese book, Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors, which I published in the U.S. That, in turn, led the amazed Japanese editor of the book to invite me to visit Hiroshima, a memorable, if deeply unsettling, moment in my life.
It's true that no nuclear weapon has yet gone off in the Middle East, but I hate to think about what either the children of Israel or those now in circumstances almost beyond imagining in Gaza have experienced over these last weeks. The human urge to make war (amid so much else that needs our attention) couldn't be more unsettling or, as Denton-Borhaug, author of And Then Your Soul is Gone: Moral Injury and U.S. War-Culture, writes today, dehumanizing. As Veterans Day approaches this November 11th, let her explore our unsettling world of endless destruction. Tom
The Dehumanization of War
A Meditation for Veterans Day
When humans embrace the dehumanization of others, we release our ugliest, most destructive selves. Dehumanization is a perverse force that propagates violence and justifies the lust for war and its atrocities.
On August 6, 1945, Sakue Shimohira was 10 years old when an atomic blast obliterated her home in Hiroshima, Japan, burning her mother into an unrecognizable block of ash. Afterward, the only feature that could identify her was a single gold tooth.
Sakue struggled to survive in Hiroshima's post-apocalyptic, postwar landscape, while her older sister soon fell into despair and threw herself in front of a train. When the American soldiers of the occupying army arrived, Sakue remembered that they constructed an airstrip in front of the shack where she was living. "There were skeletons all over the area," she said, "so when they built the airstrip, the bones were crushed into dust."
The American soldiers handed out chewing gum and chocolate to orphans like her. Some of the Japanese children quickly learned how to say "hello" in English, but Sakue confronted the soldiers in her native Japanese. "Why?" she insisted. "Why did you kill my family? Why did they deserve to die?" She added, "Of course, they didn't understand Japanese. They just smiled at me. 'Give them back to me!' I shouted."
Recalling such memories so many decades later, Sakue's face still reveals how that historically disastrous bombing blotted out her inner light. As she put it, "I carried this pain that I couldn't talk about. Even today, I can't say my sister's name aloud. It hurts too much."
Dehumanization and People Living Under the Mushroom Cloud
In recent years, I've traveled to Japan numerous times with university students to study the legacy of the first and only use of atomic weapons as World War II ended. In that way, my students and I became moral witnesses to the consequences of the terror for people under those mushroom clouds that shattered, incinerated, and flattened the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But in my own country, the United States, the continuing specter of nuclear catastrophe generally fails to pierce a commonplace apathy toward such weaponry. Instead, most Americans hold war's ultimate horror at arm's length, while rationalizing the way our country and so many others on this planet all too regularly lurch into such conflicts as the only right and just way to address human greed, tyranny, and fear.
Almost 80 years after those first atomic blasts, Americans have yet to seriously reckon with how easily we learned to rationalize such structural violence. Meanwhile, our country continues to pour endless money into the wasteful creation, stockpiling, maintenance, and now the "modernization" of those weapons of mass, even global, destruction. In his poignant diagnosis, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton concluded that we developed a deep "psychic numbing," while becoming detached and morally disengaged from the growing possibility that such weaponry could, in the end, create a "nuclear winter" and destroy humanity.
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