Looking at history
Tzvetan Tedorov's commentary ("Learning both sides of his-tory," Aug. 5, page 9) is an shining example of bad thinking and writing on a complex historical topic that, after blithely making indefensible claims, manages to appear profound while saying nothing at all.
Any exploration of the various debates about the atomic bomb should take as its starting point not the acknowledgement that there are "two sides," but that there has been, since the end of the war, propaganda campaigns from US, Japanese and other sources on the bomb that have profoundly shaped the discourse on it. All discussion of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (note that the latter has disappeared from Tederov's piece) takes place against that background. Thus, Tederov's tedious regurgitation of the old cliches that "history is written by the victors" is both shallow and false.
In all cases, history is written, and contested, and the "victors" do not necessarily establish their point of view, especially when the "losers" are themselves the second-richest nation on earth with excellent propaganda skills in a society where information has historically been heavily controlled, while the "winners" reside in a diverse multicultural society that welcomes open debate and free exchange of information.
In this case, "history" has been written by the losers. Western leftist and centrist scholars, have, for example, adopted to an astounding degree the position of the Japanese fascist right on the use of the A-bomb, one of history's more astonishing ironies. Humans may well "choose the point of view that fits them best" as Tederov claims (in an incredible slap at the integrity of scholars the world over) but they do not do so in a vacuum.
Tederov tenditiously claims that "US patriotic groups" pressured the Smithsonian into canceling the controversial exhibition. This is only half the truth; the reality is that the Japanese attempted to gain control over the exhibition by restricting the flow of artifacts and other methods, as the curator of the exhibit confessed in his discussion of the issue. The original exhibit, as its opponents (not all of whom came from "patriotic" groups) correctly realized, more or less parroted the propaganda line of the Japanese right, was strongly biased and replete with historical errors, and hence had to be revised. After the exhibit was killed, the Japanese went on to stage their own exhibition at American University, where they could retain control of the presentation.
Tederov's use of Dower's point of view of Hiroshima as victimization/Hiroshima as triumph misses a critical point. The "American" and "Japanese" views are not "authentic" views that have emerged autochthonously from some nebulous "culture" or "victor/loser" dichotomy but creations of propaganda machines with a number of definite political ends -- the Americans, to support their postwar military and non-military usage of nuclear power, and the Japanese, to present the Bomb as the ultimate validation of the victimhood which they claim "forced" them to start World War II.
Thus, the real meaning of Hiroshima is not that "it was a tragedy." World War II was full of tragedies, many much greater than the A-bombs, and calling something a "tragedy" simply adumbrates, rather than clarifies, its historical meaning. Rather, the real meaning of Hiroshima is that "history" does not lie in striking easy balances between cliches, but in doing the hard slogging through the scholarly literature, in this case, on US and Japanese history, on World War II, on the technological and social background and effects of the Bomb, and on the postwar writing about it, in order to understand why well-meaning people like Tederov write and think as uncritically as they do about Hiroshima and its meaning.
Michael Turton
Taichung
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