[August 6th
marks the 75th anniversary of the bombing
of Hiroshima. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy that fraught moment and four
other histories of U.S. military massacres.]
On an
unanswerable question about the bombing, and how to reframe the conversation.
I’ve written hundreds
of online columns over the last six or seven years, many of which have prompted
debate (which of course is a good thing and a continual goal) and even
vitriol (which is significantly less of both), but one of the most
controversial has to be this Talking
Points Memo column from five years ago, on the 70th anniversary
of the
August 9th, 1945 dropping of an atomic bomb on Nagasaki. My specific
argument there that the Nagasaki bombing “was always intended to impact and
destroy a much more overtly and thoroughly civilian population” than the Hiroshima
bombing three days earlier still seems to me entirely borne out by the evidence
and difficult to dispute. But my broader connection of that framing to debates
over whether
the bombing was necessary and legal and thus to the
question of war crimes (both at the time and since) led to a great deal of
angry pushback, both in the
comments on that column (which are still visible if you want to wade in)
and in emails sent directly to me (the angriest of which got quite nasty
indeed).
If that was all
the case for a column on Nagasaki, I can only imagine how amplified the
pushback would be if I were to ask the same questions about the Hiroshima
bombing, the 75th
anniversary of which we commemorate
today. And in truth, while I believe it’s important to question and analyze
any military decision, especially one that results in more than 100,000 deaths
among many other destructive
and enduring effects, it’s also, specifically important to separate the
Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings when it comes to the question of necessity. There
is of course no way to know for sure what would have happened had the US not dropped
the bomb—what the casualties on all sides would have been like had an invasion
of mainland Japan later in 1945 become necessary, for example. That
hypothetical certainly factors into our debates over Hiroshima (and Nagasaki,
although I would separate the two as I say and as I argued in that TPM column),
but at the end of the day it’s a fundamentally unanswerable question, and one
that could thus always be framed differently depending on what one wanted to
argue when it comes to Hiroshima and the atomic bomb.
So how can we
talk about Hiroshima without falling into the trap of such answerable and
highly subjective questions? One key way to do so is to think about the bombing’s
human effects and stories, which took place and demand our attention regardless
of how we see the military action itself. And I know of few texts that better
depict such humanity than Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras’s film
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). I
wrote at length in that hyperlinked post about what that French film set in a
Japanese city can offer specifically American audiences, and won’t repeat all
that here. But on the bombing’s 75th anniversary, I will reiterate
what I argue in that post’s final paragraph—that the film is particularly
unique and evocative when it comes to the subject of memories, both individual and
collective (indeed, I first encountered the film through reading the screenplay
in a graduate course on memory with the great Professor Lyn Tribble).
Whatever we think and argue about the causes of Hiroshima, the question of its
effects—and the interconnected and perhaps even more fundamental question of
its memories—should be a shared one to consider, today most of all.
Last massacre
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other histories you’d highlight?
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