Hiroshima as Gun Control…A defect in our arrangements.

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Richard Fernandez:

President Obama’s speech at Hiroshima, widely criticized as an indirect apology for the A-bomb, is shown in the text of his speech to be something else.  It is an interpretation of recent human history not as a contest between good versus evil, as the World War 2 generation saw it, but as an indictment of poor global human governance. The tragedy of Hiroshima, Obama argues, lay in technology escaping regulation to an intolerable level. He said:

It is not the fact of war that sets Hiroshima apart. Artifacts tell us that violent conflict appeared with the very first man. Our early ancestors having learned to make blades from flint and spears from wood used these tools not just for hunting but against their own kind. On every continent, the history of civilization is filled with war, whether driven by scarcity of grain or hunger for gold, compelled by nationalist fervor or religious zeal. Empires have risen and fallen. Peoples have been subjugated and liberated. And at each juncture, innocents have suffered, a countless toll, their names forgotten by time.

In his view war is old.  It was the Atomic Bomb which was new and therefore destabilizing.  Those who brought this unregulated thing into the world thus assumed a huge responsibility.  It’s an interesting formulation, for at a stroke the great moral issues of World War 2 are reduced to a narrative in which everyone — including militaristic Japan, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Soviet Russia — were alike victims of age-old human passions enabled by revolutionary weaponry.  No one is guilty.  We are all just victims.  But facts have to be faced, Obama argued. Since a “moral revolution” cannot be effected by the great religions which falsely promise a pathway to love while offering only a license to kill, then man is irredeemable without government.

Every great religion promises a pathway to love and peace and righteousness, and yet no religion has been spared from believers who have claimed their faith as a license to kill. … But those same stories have so often been used to oppress and dehumanize those who are different.Science allows us to communicate across the seas and fly above the clouds, to cure disease and understand the cosmos, but those same discoveries can be turned into ever more efficient killing machines.

The wars of the modern age teach us this truth. Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.

So more government we will have up to any extent necessary to make safety mandatory.   The moral drama of WW2 vanishes, leaving the Hiroshima speech as an unvarnished plea for an arms-control bureaucracy; the demand for a global safe space; a call for gun control on a planet-wide scale.

Hiroshima teaches this truth. Technological progress without an equivalent progress in human institutions can doom us. The scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well. …The United States and Japan have forged not only an alliance but a friendship that has won far more for our people than we could ever claim through war. The nations of Europe built a union that replaced battlefields with bonds of commerce and democracy. Oppressed people and nations won liberation. An international community established institutions and treaties that work to avoid war and aspire to restrict and roll back and ultimately eliminate the existence of nuclear weapons.

The Hiroshima speech is in fact intended as a springboard for more arms-control proposals, but Obama’s supporting narrative for more government and a closer control of things is at odds with the contemporaneous recollection of those who actually fought World War 2.  For them it was a struggle against what was then called fanaticism, what we would today call ideology.

The 1940s generation saw themselves reining in the Moloch gods that had eaten up the world, which forced state power into every nook and cranny such that it could order its citizens to commit suicide against a designated enemy, report their parents to secret police or endure death simply as  objects of punishment for having failed the Fuhrer or the Emperor.  They saw this as unnatural.

The historical World War 2 generation did not fight for more government but, on the contrary, to end a fanaticism which had run amuck.  They realized more acutely than we moderns that ideology meant the death of the body because it involved the death of the mind, a concept that would be alien to many today.  Thus in the end the Axis powers were perceived as doomed by their own madness. Japan was defeated long before the A-bomb was dropped and Germany many months before the final Götterdämmerung in Berlin against all reason.  They were finished yet none admitted to the handwriting on the wall because of fanaticism.

But angels and demons are gone from the modern landscape.  The modern idea is that fanaticism is overrated.  It is things we must beware of.  We are less wary of ideologies.  Though Nazi Germany and militarist Japan are now gone, ideology is with us still with the same potent certainty it possessed in 1940s.  It is still as sure as ever it will succeed however frequently it fails, in China, Russia, Cambodia, Cuba or North Korea. The president’s own party has a 2016 candidate who advocates the same policies that are destroying Venezuela without worrying it will do the same in America because Sanders is smarter than Maduro. Many of the president’s European allies are importing radical Islamists in gigantic numbers into their societies confident that EU “human institutions” can handle it, sure in the same way the Emperor knew the Divine Wind would repel the 3rd Fleet; assured to the same degree as Hitler, when he awaited the Steiner counterattack that would set everything to rights.

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What kind of moral revolution produces the human disaster of Venezuela? What kind of amoral fiends supports that system of government and wishes to make it more widespread?

These are people who have no right or business to be preaching to anyone. Didn’t Obama just give Iran, a nation determined to wipe Israel off the map, a wide avenue directly to the acquisition of nuclear weapons?

It is not the fact of war that sets Hiroshima apart. Artifacts tell us that violent conflict appeared with the very first man. Our early ancestors having learned to make blades from flint and spears from wood used these tools not just for hunting but against their own kind. On every continent, the history of civilization is filled with war, whether driven by scarcity of grain or hunger for gold, compelled by nationalist fervor or religious zeal. Empires have risen and fallen. Peoples have been subjugated and liberated. And at each juncture, innocents have suffered, a countless toll, their names forgotten by time.

Obama knows exactly what he’s talking about.

In truth, it is not the fact of war that sets Hiroshima apart. It’s the fact that a weapon had suddenly appeared that would soon make it possible for Man to utterly and literally eradicate himself, along with every other higher form of life on the planet. Humanity attained that capability only a few years after Hiroshima, with the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb, and it’s remained with us ever since.

In the history of the human species, the significance of the appearance of a weapon of total, planet-wide annihilation renders the moral issues of any war insignificant. That hideous power is real, not hypothetical, and with us every moment of every day. It must never slip the leash.

It doesn’t matter who was right, if no one is left to think about it.

@Greg: Obama doesn’t know jack shit. He gave Iran a blank check and they have already released their target list.

I think your hatred for Obama blinds you to any truth he speaks.

@Greg: And your love for Obama blinds you to obvious falsehoods he speaks and represents.

Regarding “The Bomb”, you realize that you’re parroting 90’s talking points, right? Any new material? It’s a new world, after all.

Nothing has changed regarding the threat nuclear weapons pose to end human existence since the 1990s. That’s not a “talking point.” It’s a reality. It’s a cocked and loaded pistol, pointed at the head of every man, woman, and child on the planet, waiting for one ill-considered, impulsive action, or one serious miscalculation.

Don’t you know what’s real?

@Greg:

It’s a cocked and loaded pistol, pointed at the head of every man, woman, and child on the planet, waiting for one ill-considered, impulsive action, or one serious miscalculation.

Or for one Islamic theocracy with a sworn intention of destroying Israel getting their hands on one.

Remember how the media went on and on as the Bush wars in Iraq/Afghanistan finally reached 1,000 dead Americans?
Obama has kept the media quiet while he’s racked up 2,500 dead Americans.
And Obama has said that ISIS/al Qaeda/Hamas/Hezb’allah/Boko Harum/etc., do not represent ”existential” threats to America.
But they have killed over 5,000 Americans since 9-10-01.
Well, not to worry, says Obama. According to him we can easily absorb more 9-11-01 type of attacks and casualties.
And Hillary would be Obama Admin #3.
She doesn’t care a whit about dead Americans.