Terror
August is the birth month of four of my six children.
It is also when most of us in the human race observe the anniversary of the nuclear holocaust in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first and only time such new and terrifying weapons were deliberately unleashed upon a largely civilian population. Its denouement was hardly more edifying. Possessing a monopoly of such weaponry emboldened Truman to commit mass murder, while opening a Pandora’s box of instant generalized annihilation.
All this to scare Stalin and grab the crumbling empires of Europe and Japan.
It worked, but not in quite the way Truman and his colleagues envisaged. The Soviet Union redoubled its efforts to match America, missle for missle, and the arms race was on. But, no matter who was to later claim “victory” in this devilish affair, the course set in motion by the Americans in 1945 has continued apace and in ways that neither side could have reasonably forseen.
Today, of course, weapons of mass destruction have been “democratized” to such an extent that virtually any individual or group of individuals can possess and use them with as much abandon and deadly effect as sovereign states. Tom Friedman once remarked that eight people, each carrying a nuclear bomb in a briefcase the size of the ordinary laptop, could obliterate Israel in seconds.
And such a scenario would merely be the inaugaral act in a drama that promises to change forever not only relations between obsolete or failing states, but the very nature of war and peace itself.
The potential devastating efficiency of new and portable weapons serves to create an “equillibrium of terror” that achieves a sort of parity between enemies, almost regardless of their respective size and resources.
Weapons of mass destruction in the hands of the non-state actor carry two contradictory implications. On the one hand, the introduction of new technologies enable even the meanest slave to turn definitively on his tormenter and achieve a reckoning unattainable in other forums.
On the other, the prospect of impending national annihilation provides an opportunity for even fading regimes to rally popular support.
Thus, that which immediately threatens the safety and well-being of the state can, over the long haul, insure its survival. Yet, the effectiveness of the state as guardian and promoter of national capitalist interests is compromised by the increased mobility and firepower of its non-state adversary.
Such a paradox is at the heart of the current revival of the nation-state. Once thought to be an anachronism, the idea of the strong national government has been invigorated by the war on terror. Talk of international corporate entities increasingly assuming the functions and legitimacy of parliaments–once all the go in the halls of think-tanks and in the editorial pages of the capitalist press–has been completely eclipsed. Gone, too, is the notion of the gradual disappearance of the state–the “withering away”which was at the core of the ideologies of Adam Smith and Karl Marx–rendered superfluous by new and revolutionary contexts in which human nature would develop and flourish in a new world free of government.
The growing consensus around the need for a strong central governing body with far-reaching powers to defeat an omnipotent and shadowy enemy has important implications for contemporary politics.
Now, add to this two things. The new realities of the “equality of terror”, and the demise of the old dispensation upon which liberalism and its system of capitalist political democracy rests. If the employment of terror, either by the state or by its non-state adversaries, sufficiently armed and equipped to present a formidable threat to the legitimacy of the state itself, becomes part of the political norm, or, in time, even the norm itself, what happens next?
This denouement holds important implications for a Marxist Left that has travelled far from its Leninist roots. Should it continue down the parliamentary road the Left has increasingly chosen in the modern era? Or, should it rethink ancient strategies that risk becoming irrelevant or even dangerous given the new configuration in world politics?
Later: Lenin & Terror
Lee Kaplan
August 21, 2005 @ 1:39 am
Mr. Godena;
Your comments are so puerile, so ignorant, so self-serving that I was tempted to ignore you.
But reply I must to your comments about Truman and the atomic bombs unleashed on Japan.
Are you really so impossibly obtuse? My uncle, now deceased from old age, was a USAAF bombardier who flew 35 missions over Germany and was even wounded. In 1945 he was sweating bullets after Germany surrendered that he would next be assigned to fly over Japan, for that was the plan the Army had for him and millions of other GIs.
The Japanese were training children to throw themselves under tanks in the event of a US invasion of the mainland. Don’t forget the Japanese attacked the US in a sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, an attack today that had less casualties than on 9/11.
YOu at least mention Nagasaki. The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima with a demand the Japanese surrender. Depsite that enormous catastrophe the Japanese refused to do so. Nagasaki was a secondary target due to weather. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had military value, so your suggestion civilians were deliberately targeted is false. Had the Japanese, or rather the Emperor known that the US had only two A-bombs and not more it is likely they would still not have surrendered. Hirohito no doubt feared for his own life in the face of such destructive firepower. Still, even after he announced an end to hostilities, military factions in Japan attempted a coup to keep the war going. It was estimated one million Americans would be killed or wounded in a military invasion of a hostile Japan. The bomb ended the war, you silly man. It also probably saved my uncle’s life.
The Japanese committed atrocities on a par with the Nazis in Europe on the Chinese and even American and British prisoners of war. GIs were used for germ warfare experiments and many died of starvation. You suggest America and Truman did wrong to drop those bombs, in fact make the Japanese out as victims. Like I said, are you really so obtuse?
You fancy yourself a Marxist so attack capitalist America and “imperialism.” The fact is you are all talk. YOu live in the ivory tower of HArvard and preach the glories of communism yet are too afraid to live in Cuba or North Korea. The Soviets already abandoned your Nirvana long ago but only as the cost of millions of lives.
How sad that Harvard has to be a refuge for the ignorant and those who preach for the murder of others under the guise of some kind of imaginary
economic justice. Please grow up. The worls is endeavoring to move into the 21st century, yet it is people like you who keep it back in the dark ages of totalitarianism for others, while not living under such a system yourself.
God save our universities from false academics who create revisionist history out of whole cloth as you did about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Louis Godena
August 21, 2005 @ 12:01 pm
Lee, first of all congratulations for being able to write something of this length and still have it posted. Some miscreant in my computer system (and, I think, in the systems of some others) decrees that any response over three sentences gets a “forbidden” code that must have been devised by that guy in the Capitol One commercials. I think the problem may have been fixed but I won’t swear by it. Also, I want to make it clear that I am not “at Harvard”. I am an alumnus of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences there and I occasionally attend meetings of the Berkman Group over at the Law School, but I have no formal affiliation whatsoever. Not that it makes any difference or should insofar as my politics is concerned. And, though I am mostly talk, I am not all talk. I ran in three political campaigns openly as a Communist in Massachusetts in the late 80s and early 90s, work (again, openly) as a Communist in my trade union work, and am unabashedly pro-Communist in my sympathies. I do not especially savor the prospect of getting into endless debates about who made how many more unhappy at what time in history, but I think it is obvioushe US, by dropping both bombs, was sending a clear signal to Stalin and our allies that we fully intended to inherit the dying empires of the decadent European powers and Japan. Yours is the Henry “Scoop” Jackson version of history which holds that the US can do no wrong because it is the chief guarantor of the State of Israel and the subsequent realization of apocalyptic bible prophesies. Yes, the Japanese militarists like the Nazis and like militarists everywhere did vile things, and for all the wrong reasons. I do not see the Japanese militarists as victims. The very worse were executed, but many more were drafted into murderous anti-Communist campaigns by the US after 1945. This was a pattern that was to be applied throughout the world and led to some pretty awful atrocities, as you know. The Americans wanted to win the war, but in ways that did not result in Stalin setting up shop in Paris, or in Japan “going Communist”. You should take a look at the literature surrounding the campaign to open a “second front” in Europe before June, 1944. Yes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki had “military value” (defense industries), but the population was civilian. Does that excuse the bombing? Do you believe the people who died in New York on 9/11 were “little Eichmanns”? Do ask this idiotic question is to answer it. You cannot excuse the deliberate killing of civilians, regardless of your cause. You of all people should know that.
Louis Godena
August 22, 2005 @ 1:41 pm
Lee, reading this over, I see that the paragraphs relating to the bombings and the reasons behind them were omitted. I had spoken of Eisenhower’s belief that dropping the bombs were “completely unnecessary…and no longer mandatory to save American lives” Air Force General Henry “Hap” Arnold concurs. “It always appeared to us that atomic bomb or no atomic bomb, the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.” And the US War Department itself concluded in its *Strategic Bombing Survey* of the following year that “Japan would have surrendered by [the end of 1945] even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.” And, remember Secretary of State James Byrnes told atomic scientist Leo Szilard that the US dropped the bombs in order to “make Russia more manageable in Europe”. Yes, Lee, my own father was with Patton’s Third Army (4th Armoured Division) in Europe. He too heard the alibis offered by the German people in defense of *their* government. “Only Jews who did not wish to work,” were sent to the camps, he was told by “ordinary” Germans, and those who were made out “alright”. My point is that governments do evil things; exculpatory explanations depend on the nature of the change being sought and resisted, not whether the action was necessarily “right” or “wrong”.