Remembering Hiroshima

He: “You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing.”

She: “I saw everything. I saw the hospital – I’m sure of it. The hospital in Hiroshima exists. How could I not have seen it?”

He: “You didn’t see the hospital in Hiroshima. You saw nothing in Hiroshima.”      

…

She: “Four times at the museum in Hiroshima. People walk around, lost in thought, among the photographs, the reconstructions, for lack of anything else. The photographs, the reconstructions, for lack of anything else. The explanations, for lack of anything else.”

(from Alain Resnais’ 1959 film Hiroshima Mon Amour.)

Trying to put a title to my post, “Remembering Hiroshima” was a reflexive response. Then I realized it posed an ethical challenge in that I couldn’t possibly remember Hiroshima, similar to the characters in the film. In my case of course the event itself happened way before my time. What we go by in the absence of memory is memorializing; this has served in modern history to preserve collective memory in the form of historical archives, museums, public education; as exemplified by memorials to suffering under Nazism throughout Europe.

In America, this creates the other challenge, since Hiroshima and Nagasaki are hardly present in public narratives. When they are, they are presented as events that occurred during WWII, not as studies in morality. Part of it is not specific to America but a tradition of WWII narratives in general in the western hemisphere, which clearly define the aggressor and the responder, and consequently acts of violence follow where their perpetrators belong rather than where the acts should belong based on a consistent set of moral standards. The rape of nearly a million German women by the advancing Red Army hardly occupies the same space in public discourse compared to any atrocity committed by the Axis powers.

Hiroshima is an extension of that principle, just at a much more staggering level. Not just because of the numbers and scope committed by one single act. But every time Hiroshima is remembered in the form of an intellectual debate on the necessity of the use of that weapon, humanity takes a step back. Auschwitz, Babi Yar could be out of the realm of debate, but no such inviolability is accorded to Hiroshima. It was a necessary destruction to end the war, and no one talks about it.

Our moral judgments come from our moral position, which interestingly, can shift depending on what narrative we adhere to. Rationalization for Hiroshima and Nagasaki is usually the result of consequentialist thought, which “locates morality in the consequence of the action”¹. Destruction of these cities was justified in the “greater good” of limiting further casualties by expediting the end of war. If, on the other hand, we ever find ourselves in harm’s way, our adversary’s world view is not relevant any longer; end does not justify the means any more. At that precise moment we take a position exactly opposite of consequentialism – a deontological philosophy like Kant’s, which “locates morality in the action itself”².

The irony is that our moral philosophies simply don’t matter to the monumental suffering we inflicted – a suffering beyond death, into sterile lives that somehow trudged along after death. Disfigured, transformed, scarred existences. In the searing images of Shohei Imamura’s “Black Rain” where a man cannot tell his own brother because he is so unrecognizable.

He: “What did Hiroshima mean to you in France?”

She: “The end of the war. I mean completely. Astonishment that they dared do it, and astonishment that they succeeded….”