War is Hell, LeMay is Hell & the A-Bomb Rules!

[Cal McInvale]

Having ignited a bit of lively discussion (at last: all that talk about
fractals & structure was beginning to taste like chalk!), I will respond
herein to each comment I received today.

1. THE LEMAY QUOTE. It's almost a cliche to say "war is hell" or "war is
immoral" -- both sides of the coin have trucked out those phrases so often
that they've lost any power they may have once possessed. LeMay's statement
struck me in its rawness. In order to better illustrate that, I decided to
dig up that full quote & give it to ya'll:

        "I'll tell you what war is about. You've got to kill people, and
        when you've killed enough, they stop fighting."

In the China theater of WWII, roughly 10 million people died as a result of
combat & other war-associated phenomena (starvation, disease, torture,
etc.). 20,000 U.S. soldiers died in the central Pacific. When the U.S.
invaded Saipan they discovered 27,040 corpses of Japanese soldiers, many of
whom had committed suicide rather than be captured. In 76 hours of fighting
in Tarawa, 984 Marines & 29 Navy men were killed. So you may denigrate
Major General Curtis LeMay (I do; he was a nutcase. Just read DARK SUN &
you'll find out!), but he was damn right about what war is about.


2. THE HORROR OF WAR. Steelhead (sitka at teleport.com) points out:

>The most horrible act of war? How about Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen, Dachau,
>Auschwitz...How about the use of Docktors to perfect a killing machine, a
>system of genocide, precisely geared for the extinction of a life force, of
>a language, of a culture. If we're voting on these things, they'd get mine.

Mine, too, Steely. But most of the people who continue to point out the
horrors of the Holocaust are, in some way, its victims: namely, people of
Jewish descent. Most of the people who were protesting at Trinity Site a
few weeks ago seemed to be white, middle-class Americans. I've never heard
anyone (other than neo-Nazis & their ilk) claim that the Nazis were victims
of Russian or American atrocities: the sheer weight of the Holocaust seems
to overwhelm any thought that Germany was at any point by the Allies. Yet
this is the argument that is made regarding the bombing of Hiroshima: that
the Japanese were victims.

3. "FORGOTTEN" NAGASAKI. Of course we, as educated people, remember
Nagasaki. But I recall a poll that TIME magazine did several years ago, the
results of which showed that while the majority of Americans could name
where the FIRST atomic bomb was dropped, very few (I think it was only like
15%) could remember the name of the city that got the second bomb. Maybe
this speaks to a number of things: the poor educational system in the US,
the short memory of most Americans, the difficulty many Americans seem to
have with foreign words... but perhaps it speaks to a more terrible thing,
something along the lines of the "banality of evil" that Hannah Arendt
wrote about in her book on Eichmann.

Your point about "history repeating itself, quickly" is well-taken, Steely.
But I don't think people really think of Nagasaki when they think of the
bomb. They think of the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, Oppenheimer, Enola
Gay, Hiroshima, the mushroom cloud, and the skeletal remains of "the peace
dome."

4. DEMONIZATION. jporter (jp4321 at soho.ios.com) comments that "this
demonization is not supported by common sense." I would have to disagree
with this: I believe it is deep within our nature to mythologize the
so-called banal. (Although how anyone could think the atomic bomb is
banal...) We raise to the status of "hero" those who can swing a bat, throw
a football or slam-dunk a basketball; their abilities & power are beyond
our everyday experience. So too we raise the A-bomb to the status of
"demon."

Perhaps this is where the answer lies, then, as Steely astutely points out:

>Hiroshima was something new. In a flash, in a microsecond, everything had
>changed.   All our old fears were morphed and new titanic ones raised in
>their place. Shadow gods, the size of mushroom clouds, towering over the
>planet, infecting our dreams and our waking selves.

We unleashed new gods with the bomb, plucked the forbidden fruit from the
tree of knowledge & incurred the wrath of the old god(s). Oppenheimer & his
crew became terrible Prometheans at Trinity Site. The whole A-bomb package
-- the project, the scientists, the military, the device -- strikes
something at the mythic core, causing us to react in so many ways.

In my case, it is with awe & wonder, a bit of terror around the edges. But
not revulsion: more like, fascination. Maybe these are the emotions Eve had
when looking at the fruit as it dangled lusciously from the tree and the
serpent enticed her. And when she brought the fruit to Adam, he reacted in
perhaps the way many react to the bomb: shock, horror, revulsion: "How dare
you take the power that is the gods' alone! It will bring evil &
destruction upon us." But Adam eats anyway, unable to resist the call of
wonder & curiosity. If you've read your mythology (or just watched Joseph
Campbell on TV with Bill Moyers), you know that this tale is as old as the
hills.

Maybe we're stumbling onto something here.

I've got to get a copy of that Doctorow article, man: any chance you might
post it, Steely? (lazy ole me... I should jes' put on my Gore-tex [TM] &
trudge down to the Capitol Hill branch of the Seattle Public Library. I'll
have to unpack my flannels, though, and get me a breve grande. Oh, and I
should load up a Pearl Jam CD in the Walkman[TM] & put on my Rockports[TM].
Too bad parking's so bad around here or I could take the Subaru[TM].)

Apologies for the last bit of sarcasm...








Cal McInvale       e-mail:  godot at wolfe.net
WWW: http://www.wolfe.com/~godot/index.html
--------------
What is most appealing about young folks, after all, is the changes, not
the still photographs of finished character but the movie, the soul in
flux.  -- Thomas Pynchon