November 10,
2023
When humans
embrace the dehumanization of others, we release our ugliest, most destructive
selves. Dehumanization is a perverse force that propagates violence and
justifies the lust for war and its atrocities.
On August 6,
1945, Sakue Shimohira was 10 years old when an atomic blast obliterated her
home in Hiroshima, Japan, burning her mother into an unrecognizable block of
ash. Afterward, the only feature that could identify her was a single gold
tooth.
Sakue struggled
to survive in Hiroshima’s post-apocalyptic, postwar landscape, while her older
sister soon fell into despair and threw herself in front of a train. When the
American soldiers of the occupying army arrived, Sakue remembered that they
constructed an airstrip in front of the shack where she was living. “There were
skeletons all over the area,” she said, “so when they built the airstrip, the
bones were crushed into dust.”
The American
soldiers handed out chewing gum and chocolate to orphans like her. Some of the
Japanese children quickly learned how to say “hello” in English, but Sakue
confronted the soldiers in her native Japanese. “Why?” she insisted. “Why did
you kill my family? Why did they deserve to die?” She added, “Of course, they
didn’t understand Japanese. They just smiled at me. ‘Give them back to me!’ I
shouted.”
Recalling such
memories so many decades later, Sakue’s face still reveals how that
historically disastrous bombing blotted out her inner light. As she put it, “I
carried this pain that I couldn’t talk about. Even today, I can’t say my
sister’s name aloud. It hurts too much.”
Dehumanization
and People Living Under the Mushroom Cloud
In recent years,
I’ve traveled to Japan numerous times with university students to study the
legacy of the first and only use of atomic weapons as World War II ended. In
that way, my students and I became moral witnesses to the consequences of the
terror for people under those mushroom clouds that shattered, incinerated, and
flattened the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But in my own
country, the United States, the continuing specter of nuclear catastrophe
generally fails to pierce a commonplace apathy toward such weaponry. Instead,
most Americans hold war’s ultimate horror at arm’s length, while rationalizing
the way our country and so many others on this planet all too regularly lurch
into such conflicts as the only right and just way to address human greed,
tyranny, and fear.
Almost 80 years
after those first atomic blasts, Americans have yet to seriously reckon with
how easily we learned to rationalize such structural violence. Meanwhile, our
country continues to pour endless money into the wasteful creation,
stockpiling, maintenance, and now the “modernization” of those weapons of mass,
even global, destruction. In his poignant diagnosis, psychiatrist Robert Jay
Lifton concluded that we developed a deep “psychic numbing,” while becoming
detached and morally disengaged from the growing possibility that such weaponry
could, in the end, create a “nuclear winter” and destroy humanity.
In Japan, my
students and I have had the distinct privilege of meeting atomic bomb
survivors, or hibakusha as they are known there. One hibakusha, an elderly,
somewhat stern man, told us that he was outside of the city of Nagasaki with
his brother when the second bomb exploded. The two boys rushed into the city to
search for their father and finally found his body near his workplace, burned
(like Sakue’s mother) almost beyond recognition.
We listened as
his testimony viscerally evoked that horror from so long ago as if it had only
taken place days earlier. He remembered how, as a child, when he tried to
prepare the body for burial, he touched his father’s head and the skull
crumbled beneath his fingers, while parts of the brain oozed into his hands.
In those
precious moments in Japan when my students and I heard the stories of
hibakusha, we could also ask questions. “Do you hate Americans?” the students
often asked. “What kind of assistance was there for you and other hibakusha in
the terrible aftermath of months and years after the war?” And we would thank
them for sharing their painful and invaluable stories with us, but it never
felt like enough. So many of them have a single request: that we take their
words back to the United States with us and share them with others here.
During our
conversation with that elderly man in Nagasaki, one moment was particularly
unforgettable. Despite the harsh struggle and war-time brutalization he endured
as a child, the elder we now experienced was a soul of deep reflection and
humane philosophical searching. During the question-and-answer period following
his testimony, he told us about his life-long struggle to understand what had
happened to him and why. He mentioned a book that helped him better grasp how
the world arrived at such a place of inhumanity and violence, historian John
Dower’s award-winning history, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific
War.
“I know that
book!” I blurted out. He stared at me, and I stared back. Dower’s history had
also deeply impacted my life and thought, so I felt a sudden powerful
connection with that hibakusha and was simultaneously rendered speechless after
my outburst, overwhelmed and amazed by the journey that man had taken in his
life to meet me then and there.
Two Truths About
War and Dehumanization
Dower’s
investigation helped me better understand two truths about violence. First,
dehumanization always precedes and paves the way for the horrors of war. Human
beings won’t kill other humans if they truly believe their lives are as worthy
as their own. In his book, Dower vividly exposes the dehumanizing, racist
imagery that enveloped both the United States and Japan in the early 1940s. The
Japanese were portrayed here as “vermin” and “apes,” “inferior men and women,”
“primitive and childish” creatures. They were “the Yellow Peril” or “the
menacing Asian horde.” Versions of such tropes of dehumanization lubricated the
eruption of violence that followed and have emerged repeatedly in human
history.
And it wasn’t
just the Americans. Japanese cartoons from the era depicted Westerners as a
kind of vermin like lice, caricatured President Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a
demon, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and FDR as “debauched
ogres” looming over Mount Fuji, a sacred symbol of Japan. American cartoons
typically drew Japanese bodies in bright yellow.
I remember my
mother, who grew up in California during that war, remarking on a Japanese flag
I brought home from one of my trips. “That was such a symbol of hatred when I
was a child,” she told me. And such dehumanization paved the way for
devastating violence as the only possible solution. Both sides plummeted into
“victimage rhetoric” that portrayed the “enemy” as barbaric, irrational, and
irredeemably violent, while “we” were moral, rational, and sensible.
Tragically, this way of thinking justified the horrors to come. Given such an
enemy, only through colossal destruction could we save the world, or so people
came to think.
Dower’s book
reveals a second truth about violence as well: dehumanization does more than
just enable war. It also generates an annihilating energy all its own through
which the atrocity-laden destruction of war multiplies exponentially. In the
case of the Pacific front in World War II, violence begat ever greater violence
and the hunger for it grew ever deeper and more insatiable until there was a
veritable “frenzy of violence” on both sides in the final year of that war.
More than half of all American deaths occurred in that single year and that was
when the kamikaze, or suicide plane, became “the consummate symbol of the pure
spirit of the Japanese” to “turn back the demonic onslaught.”
Meanwhile, the
Americans abandoned precision bombing and initiated the full-scale firebombing
of Japanese cities. The firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 burned to death more
than 100,000 civilians in a single night. More than 60 cities were similarly
targeted, killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese in a final paroxysm of
violence that preceded Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Today’s
Escalation of the Drumbeats of Dehumanization
In these
terrible recent days, we again can hear the drumbeats of dehumanization in
Ukraine, Israel, and the Gaza Strip, as grief explodes in the face of
unimaginable violence, loss, injury, and the sort of pain that rips at the very
fabric of our world. Human beings are once again being described as “animals.”
The other side is pure “evil.” The only remedy for such a conflict, people
imagine, is to wipe the enemy out and achieve “full victory.” Indescribable
destructive force against the other is rationalized as necessary because of the
terrible violence wreaked on us.
But we won’t
find our way out of such a morass of violence through more of the same, or
through the further dehumanization of people we call our enemy. In the end,
dehumanization destroys us, too, even if we don’t realize it. The perennial
question facing the world is this: Is there a way for us to move toward a
greater rehumanization?
In reality, we
don’t have to accept psychic numbing or endless dehumanization and violence as
the only possible responses to our broken world. We can glimpse a different way
forward when we turn our attention to people whose experiences of horrific
violence, amazingly enough, didn’t destroy them. Instead, their awareness was
crystalized, leaving them with so much to share with the rest of us about the
deep, irreplaceable importance of every human being and the immeasurable value
of our fragile planet.
Along with the
remarkable hibakusha I’ve been privileged to meet, I also have come to know
U.S. veterans of war with the same astonishing kinds of awareness. I wrote a
book about them and their struggles to remain human in a world all too
saturated with violence titled And Then Your Soul is Gone: Moral Injury and
U.S. War Culture.
Imagining a
Different Veterans Day
As Veterans Day
approaches, I’m thinking about those veterans I respect so dearly who have
themselves come through such crucibles of horror. Many live with the deep
despair that accompanies military moral injuries. Yet they refuse to give up on
life, hope, and the belief that there could be a different way forward. They
remind me of Sakue who, in the end, offered this reflection: “There are two
kinds of courage. One type of courage is
the courage to die. I chose the courage to live.”
American veteran
and former Iraq War medic Jenny Pacanowski witnessed that conflict’s calamitous
effects on Iraqi children. She shared her agony with a military chaplain,
asking him, “Why would God do this to the children of Iraq, to the soldiers, to
the medics who only want to bring healing?” The chaplain responded, “God works
in mysterious ways.”
Such a facile
response made her deeply angry. It was as though her soul could no longer
occupy her physical body and left her to float above it, connected by only the
most fragile tether, as she screamed in anger and sorrow. That was close to 20
years ago. As she told me, “To truly reintegrate, and invite my soul back into
my body, I needed to tell my story in a secure space.” Today, Jenny is like a
comet blazing a trail to support the peace-building activities of women
veterans.
Recently, I was
introduced to the poetry of Vietnam War veteran Doug Rawlings. He was in his
early twenties when he was drafted and sent to Vietnam. Returning to the United
States, like so many others, he was “confused, angry, and lost.” But he’s been
writing poetry for more than 50 years and, in his most recent collection, he
explains, “Most of us do not want to be vulnerable, especially men, and,
exponentially, veterans. However, the vulnerability in the poet invites
vulnerability in the reader/listener.”
One of Rawlings’
poems speaks to me strongly in this painful moment on our planet. Near the U.S.
Army base at Long Binh in what was then South Vietnam, there was “a beautiful
if dilapidated French villa.” During the war, it was repurposed as an orphanage.
A hand-painted sign in front of it read in English: “Please don’t shoot the
orphans.”
In response to
that memory, Rawlings wrote:
“Imagine all the
interstates in and out of our cities
Clogged with
cars brought to a standstill by
‘Please don’t
shoot the orphans’ plastered on placards
Their drivers
stumbling out of their seats
Onto the median
strips crisscrossing this land
Of the mobile
and free to question
If not just for
a minute
How their own
busy lives can possibly be
Intertwined with
the lives of orphans
Their hearts in
their mouths when they realize
The hands on
their steering wheels
The fingers
dancing across their radio dials
Hold the answer
to those questions”
The answer is
directly in front of us if only we would pay attention. Please don’t kidnap,
maim, starve, or deny water, electricity, or healthcare to children anywhere.
Don’t separate them from their parents, drown, bomb, rape, burn, imprison,
shoot, bury in rubble, use as human shields, or kill the children. Please, do
not find ways to justify such horrors. Instead, look them squarely in the eye
and decide that you will demand an alternative.
If we are to
remain human on this planet in this devastating moment, there is — or at least,
should be — no other way.
Follow
TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch
Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his
Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and
Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the
Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power,
John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II,
and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars:
The Untold Story.
Kelly Denton-Borhaug, a
TomDispatch regular, has long been investigating how religion and violence
collide in American war-culture. She teaches in the global religions department
at Moravian University. She is the author of two books, U.S. War-Culture, Sacrifice
and Salvation and, more recently, And Then Your Soul is Gone: Moral Injury and
U.S. War-Culture.
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