[UFO Chicago] Re: [sklyarov-chicago] September 11th, 2001

[Larry Garfield]

Nate Riffe wrote:

> > The United States (as well as everyone else) committed unforgivable
> > atrocities during that war, but I don't believe that the Hiroshima bombing
> > was one of them.
> >
>
> I disagree.  Of course, the firebombings were terrible, and perhaps more
> people died, but I belive the atomic bomb had a much greater impact on
> Japan as a nation.  Everything used against Japan before the atomic bomb
> was tactics the Japanese were familiar with, and many of them were used by
> the Japanese as well.  But the atomic bomb was unprecedented and
> completely unanticipatable.  As a result, it had a tremendous
> psychological impact.  You can see the cultural trauma to this day, just
> look for the hugh explosions in anime that engulf whole towns, or in the
> case of Giant Robo, whole hemispheres.  No other film genre so
> consistently has this feature, and no other nation has had an atomic bomb
> dropped on it.  I don't think that's a coincidence, and I'm not even sure
> many Japanese have made the correlation.

Maybe so, but that wasn't an issue for either side in 1945.  In 1945, the choice
was between dropping a nuke on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (75,000 each, or so), a
conventional land invasion (3 million dead, minimum), or the earliest biological
weapons, which were even more experimental than the atom bomb (unknown dead,
likely mutation, uncontrollable spread).  Given those options, there was only the
one choice.

No one in 1945 had any idea of the nuclear fallout that would result.  And when
you're dealing with a war of that scale, the impact on the arts 50 years later is
not something anyone, on any side, anytime, anywhere in history is thinking about.

Although as an interesting aside:  I wonder what affect the attack in New York
will have on American arts....

--
Larry Garfield
lgarfiel@students.depaul.edu

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