August 14, 2023, 6:27 am
"Maybe one day, archaeologists from another planet will have the idea of erecting a monument in our memory. If this were to be the case, they could not choose a better epitaph than this: here lies a species endowed with intelligence, extinct for lack of knowing how to use it..." This is what John Brunner wrote, in the introduction to the novel The End of the Dream by Philip Wylie, (1972)...
Today is August 14, 2023, 6:27 a.m. The sun rises on the East...
The more time passes, the more this sentence from John Brunner haunts me. Many, however, are the authors of fiction who have published premonitory works whose relevance and accuracy are as astonishing as, apparently, vain... But, even if Philip Wylie's vision were to come true (we are not so far from it...), there would always remain this affirmation: The Sun rises in the East... Even if there were no longer anyone to witness it. "In the beginning was the Word", that's already narrative…
Doesn't a good part of the problems of the human specie come from the fact that it seems to have always preferred a narrative to the real. It seems to me that, just as much as the study of History, current events give us confirmation of this day after day.
A good example, since this series of articles would like to chronicle the events that we are given to experience at this moment in history, the characteristics of which, if we take a step back even for a few years, paradoxically seem to be of the order of the unimaginable, is provided to us by the sad anniversary at this beginning of August, of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
That the "new masters of the world" in '45 imposed the propaganda narrative, since then taught as historical truth to generations of Western schoolchildren, claiming that these bombings were necessary to force Japan to capitulate, while they were just trying, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of human lives, to demonstrate that they were "the one with the biggest" (and to send the message to Stalin), is particularly monstrous but quite understandable. Transformation of the worst war crime in human history into a "pacifist" act...
But why on earth, you will ask me, this version was, and still is, corroborated by the Japanese themselves?... There are, at least, three reasons why this narrative, just as much for Japan as for the US was, and remains, preferable to reality.
For the Emperor, personally, a surrender on the grounds that the enemy was suddenly in possession of a new, terrifying and incomparable weapon, was infinitely preferable to having to admit his own responsibility, and his strategic errors which led to this outcome anyway inevitable for the imperial army.
For the future relations that the country had to prepare to have with the "international community", this terrible demonstration of US force made it possible to mitigate the image of executioner, given the way in which the Japanese treated the occupied countries, by endorsing that of victim of a horrible tragedy.
As an occupied country, finally, adopting the occupier's version was necessary to ensure its good graces. If the Americans were so keen on this version, why upset them?...
And, once the trick is taken... Nothing is more difficult than going back on a lie. And who would dare, in the current geopolitical situation, to suggest that perhaps it was following the crushing of the coalition of Manchu and Japanese armies by the Red Army that the collapse of Japanese imperialism in China left no choice for Japan but to capitulate?... What Japan was doing, and what the US was well aware of while they were preparing their "demonstration for example"... Moreover as the entire so-called "security architecture" of the Cold War, nuclear deterrence and NATO is based on this lie... Pretending that "nuclear deterrence is necessary to impose peace ". By manufacturing weapons "not to use them", whereas for there to be deterrence, one must precisely be ready to use those (which is why the Hiroshima bombs and Nagasaki were build)... That imposes nothing other than the escalation of the reciprocal threat.
"We are told, in fact, - wrote Albert Camus in his editorial for Combat on August 8, 1945 - in the midst of a crowd of enthusiastic comments that any city of average importance can be completely razed by a bomb from the the size of a soccer ball. American, English and French newspapers spread elegant dissertations on the future, the past, the inventors, the cost, the pacifist vocation and the warlike effects, the political consequences and even the independent character of the atomic bomb. We will summarize ourselves in one sentence: mechanical civilization has just reached its last degree of savagery. We will have to choose, in a more or less near future, between collective suicide or the intelligent use of scientific conquests. ."
It is clear that the question remains open... The choice remains uncertain... Suspended... On the edge...