Violence at UCLA: Open Letter to Chancellor Gene Block

3 May 2024

Chancellor Gene Block
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)

Dear Chancellor Block:

On the night of April 30, just before 11 PM, a violent and armed mob comprised of something like 100-150 “outside instigators” or “counter-protestors” entered the Palestine Solidarity Encampment which had been built at Dickson Plaza on the UCLA Campus, and unleashed horrific violence on the students, faculty, and staff in the encampment. According to multiple reports from various news outlets, none of which are disputed, this mob used sticks and other objects to beat the protestors who were offering nonviolent resistance and threw fireworks and metal barriers into the barricades in an attempt to breach the barricades. This grisly violence went on unchecked for nearly four hours. It is also not disputed, and once again this claim is attested to reports by multiple witnesses, that the campus police stood by idly while violence was being let loose upon the students.  Such an egregious dereliction of duty, indeed encouragement of violence, must be weighed against repeated assurances given by you that you value nothing more than the safety of students and everyone else from the “Bruin community”. You apparently called the mayor of Los Angeles around 1 am on May 1^st and it is not until 3 am that the LAPD and other police offers moved in and sought to separate the mob from the protestors in the encampment.

This round of violence, in which the complete abdication of duty and moral responsibility on the part of the UCLA administration headed by you is all too transparent to any observer, and to which I shall return momentarily, was followed by the events of the morning of May 2^nd starting around 2 am.  For nearly the entire day of Wednesday, May 1, the campus had been turned into a garrison or police state. I was on campus for most of the day and left the campus around 12:40 am and saw well over 150 policemen armed to the teeth and apparently prepared for civil war.  Then, about 2 am, this horde of policemen moved in, and over the next two hours they deployed rubber bullets, stun grenades, and flash-bang devices to forcibly remove the protestors, place them under arrest, and dismantle the encampment. Rubber bullets, in case you are not aware, have been used in intense political disturbances such as “The Troubles” in Ireland.  Apart from a miniscule number of minor skirmishes, all the protestors nonviolently submitted to arrest. It is necessary for me to add that, in describing them as nonviolent protestors, I am speaking as a scholar of the history of nonviolence who has been writing and teaching on these matters for close to four decades. I am aware that, weighed against the most stringent and rigorous conception of nonviolent resistance, the protestors may not always have passed the test, but all scholars and students of nonviolence are equally mindful of the fact that we cannot apply a wholly purist conception of nonviolence to every situation. There is not an iota of doubt in my mind that the protestors displayed an extraordinary and disciplined adherence, all the more remarkable for their youth, to the principles of nonviolence.

The events at UCLA have shocked not merely the campus community and the city of Los Angeles but many others around the world who are aware of the reputation of the university and have been following the student protests.  There are many reasons for the outbreak of violence and the events the last 60 hours, and there is certainly much blame to go around, but there is one person, and one person alone, who is principally responsible for this tragic turn of events—and that one person is you, Chancellor Gene Block. You cannot run away from this fact, however much you have tried to do so and will doubtless continue to do so, but it is important that everyone understand your culpability. Your naked partisanship towards Israel and Zionism, and your scarcely disguised indifference to, if not contempt for, Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims has been transparent since you arrived on this campus ten years ago, and has become painfully visible to everyone in the aftermath of the horrific attack launched by Hamas against Israel on October 7.

I shall turn, very briefly, to some considerations to make known to the world the way you abandoned UCLA’s students to the wolves.  You’ve spoken often in your usual anodyne language of “shared values”, the “Bruin community”, the “Bruin family”, and so on, but let us consider whether such language has ever been anything more than sheer humbug and chicanery.  Consider, for instance, your statement to the “Bruin Community” of October 13.  The subject heading was, “Reflections at the Close of a Difficult Week.”  The first sentence begins with an expression of your desire to share some “reflections” on a “challenging week”.  You then mention that “six days ago” a “heinous assault was perpetrated upon Israeli civilians by the terror organization Hamas, a despicable attack that included the killing of children and the elderly as well as the taking of innocent hostages.” I concur with you entirely, but you then point out this what happened on October 7 was “the largest one-day killing of Jews since the end of the Holocaust.”  This is not the time and place for a history lesson, but let me alert you to the fact that even many of the most reputable scholars of the Holocaust, and you are most emphatically not one, have pointed out how inadvisable it is to make such a comparison, and many have even argued that there is grave peril in exploiting the narrative of the Holocaust to confer perpetual immunity to the state of Israel for any and every kind of action it deems fit. But let us ignore all this: by October 13^th, Israel had already inflicted massive and illegal collective punishment on the Palestinians, destroyed large chunks of Gaza, and killed thousands of Palestinian civilians, most of them women and children.  Yes, I suppose all this made for a “difficult” and “challenging” week. Indeed, your very framing of the mass killings of Palestinians as producing a “challenging” time, while of course the attack perpetrated by Palestinians was “heinous” (which, let me reiterate, it indeed was), is an incitement to hatred for Palestinians.  As for the “hostages”, I will not refer to the tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of them but boys, who have been languishing in Israeli jails under the grossly inhumane practice of administrative detention, which allows Israel to hold them in confinement for indefinite periods of time without charging them.

Let me, however, turn to the chronology of the last 2-3 days alone. You declared the encampment “unlawful” and “unauthorized” on the afternoon of April 30, and less than twelve hours later the violent mob tore into the protestors at the encampment.  It is not at all difficult to imagine that they construed your declaration of the encampment as “unlawful” and the warning to the students to take it down as a green light to proceed to expedite the outcome that you desired. As I have suggested, you have persistently been throwing dog whistles at Islamophobes, racists, and Zionists, and it is also remarkable that repeated letters addressed to you by faculty concerned about this incitement to hatred against Palestinians and Muslims were never answered.  Perhaps you think that it is beneath you to reply to faculty, though you periodically mouth the customary platitudes about “shared governance”. Did you take the faculty into consideration before you declared the encampment “unlawful” and threatened that it would be taken down? I am not aware that you did. And, similarly, did you consult with the faculty before you summoned a massive police force—an ungainly sight if there ever was any, and one that should mortify anyone who thinks of the university as a home to the exchange of ideas and as “temple” of learning—to take down the encampment and arrest the students? But, to return to the chronology of events, the newspapers reported just a couple of days ago that you have been summoned to testify before the US Congress on May 23 on anti-Semitism at the UCLA campus.  You saw, as we all did, how a McCarthy-like inquisition was unleashed upon the presidents of three Ivy League institutions a few months ago, and the painful consequences two of them had to bear as a result of the congressional hearing.  You were determined to prove that you could stand up to the protestors.  And so, of course, this meant that you were determined to show to the students that you meant business.

Many canards and fabrications have been floated by you, your acolytes and the extreme Zionists on this campus.  One of those canards, which constitutes the principal justification you have advanced for your actions, is that many students were blocked from entering classrooms or were obstructed in their day-to-day business around campus.  No evidence has been furnished by you or anyone else: one student appears in nearly every media video showing that he was obstructed, and one might even allow for the possibility that a few were, but those of us who have been teaching on the campus and speaking with others have witnessed no such incidents nor have we heard of any. This is yet another instance of the cheap, instrumental, and deplorable use of the term “anti-Semitism”—which, let me be very clear, is a real problem in this country—to tarnish protestors.  The sad part of the story is that the protestors understand very well, as you apparently do not, the difference between anti-Semitism, which I agree should be condemned unequivocally at every turn, and anti-Zionism.  The fabrication about the threats being experienced by Jewish students became one of the principal justifications for deploying a massive police force on campus and terrorizing and intimidating students. No one can fail to notice that, when the police were needed on the night of April 30, they were nowhere to be found; when they were not required at all the following night, had the protest been allowed to continue, they were deployed with your authorization. As Nithya Raman, Los Angeles City Council member for the 4^th District has noted, “The police actions at USC and UCLA have implied that the response protestors get from law enforcement is dependent on their politics, not their actions.”  Senator Bernie Sanders has described what is happening in Gaza as “ethnic cleansing”. I will allow you to draw your own inferences on what I might possibly mean in invoking Senator Sanders in describing the turns of events on our campus.

You, doubtless, are aware of the clear-headed editorial of May 1 published in The Daily Bruin which describes the attack by the police on student journalists and the “complicity” of the UCLA administration.  Please do not rub salt into the wounds of the students by arguing, as you have been doing all along, that you are acting to protect the campus from anti-Semitism and to ensure the “safety” of the students.  “The whole world is watching”, says the editorial, and the whole world also knows the donors and politicians to whom you are beholden.  Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had the audacity, several days ago, to demand that the National Guard be called in to crush the protestors and you evidently appear to have been all too happy to take your marching orders from this much-reviled foreign leader.  You may wish to reflect on the indubitable fact that there has throughout been a significant presence of Jewish faculty, staff, and students in the encampment, and Jewish voices for peace have been important in ensuring that the world understands that the war in Gaza is a war against humanity.  Many of the Jewish protestors, it appears to me, are speaking from an awareness of the deeply rooted ethical traditions in their faith and an attack on them is, in fact, the real anti-Semitism in which you may be complicit.  Nothing gives the lie to the claim that the protests were marked by anti-Semitism as much as the solidarity of Muslim and Jewish protestors, though what is equally remarkable is the extraordinary commitment to the cause displayed by people from all walks of life, nationalities, religious backgrounds, and ethnicities who are not being driven by a narrow-minded conception of identity politics. If you have seen the videos of the encampments at UCLA and at other university campuses, and videos on the anti-war protests more broadly, you could not have failed to notice the very large, indeed I would say almost dominant, presence of women and female students of color from all backgrounds. They have been at the forefront of this movement which, quite rightly, speaks of an alternative and better future.  It is precisely this aspiration that the administration has sought to crush at UCLA.

Since, in the tradition of nonviolence, I do not like to use the language whereby one makes demands of others, and who am I in any case to make demands of a powerful person such as yourself, I would like to invite you to take the steps enumerated below if you have any sense of contrition.  Though I have no expectations in this regard, I invite you to (1) issue an unconditional apology to the entire UCLA community, and specifically to those in the Palestine Solidarity Encampment who have been harmed; (2) issue whatever rejoinders you can muster in the form of an open letter; (3) pay for the medical treatments borne by the students who were injured in the violence; and (4) tender your resignation, effective immediately.  I would be amiss if I did not suggest to you, considering that you end nearly every letter to the “Bruin community” with suggestions about counseling resources, that you undertake intensive sensitivity and anti-racist training.

Yours sincerely,

Vinay Lal
Professor of History and Asian American Studies

Israel, US, the same old

Note (28 April 2024): On March 28, I received an email from one of the opinion page editors at The Indian Express asking if I might write an essay on the US vote of abstention in the Security Council on a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and whether such a vote could be interpreted as a shift in the American position towards Israel. The resolution passed 14-0, with the United States, which is of course a permanent member of the Security Council, casting the only vote of abstention. But the US had, uncharacteristically, not vetoed the resolution, as it had done repeatedly in the past. I submitted my essay a week later but it was published, both in print and online, on April 14 on p. 11 (or see the online edition where it appeared under the title of “The US support for Israel, contrary to opinion, is as strong as ever”). As the online title suggests, I argued that the various opinions that had been voiced suggesting that the US support for Israel was diminishing or might no longer be taken for granted were entirely mistaken and overblown. Events since March 25 and indeed down to the present day have established, as I argued, that the US support for Israel remains, to use the words of Biden and countless number of officials of his administration, “iron-clad”. To think that it might be otherwise, if the US is provoked to breaking-point by Israeli intransigence or arrogance, is to show little understanding of the American establishment’s rigid attachment for Israel. To be sure, some–and some only, let it be clear–of these officials are, in private, anti-Semitic; but their Islamophobic sentiments run still deeper. Similarly, one can be certain that we will continue to hear American officials voice “uneasiness” with Israel’s policies, “discontent” and “dismay” at Israeli arrogance and the impunity with which Israel will continue to ignore the entire world and do what it pleases, and so on. All of American expressions of displeasure are hot air, and just that. A few will object to my remarks with the observation that it is only US restraint that stopped Israel from clobbering Iran. That observation may not be without merit, but to concede that much is not to admit that the US does in fact exercise real restraining power over Israel. One cannot ignore the much larger geopolitical implications of an outright war between Israel and Iran. In any case, the essay below is the slightly longer version of the piece that was published in the Indian Express: as noted above, it is dated only in the sense that other events since in the last few weeks amply demonstrate that the US remains unflinchingly supportive of Israel and therefore complicit in the genocide unfolding in Gaza.

On March 25, during a discussion in the UN Security Council, the United States did something highly unusual:  it abstained from a resolution that had been introduced calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The United States had vetoed similar resolutions in the past, arguing that it would not permit any step that might impede Israel’s right to self-defense.  When it last exercised its veto power on February 20, the US justified its action with the observation that any call for a ceasefire perforce had to be linked to the release of all Israeli hostages from Palestinian custody.

Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, immediately pronounced the US abstention a “retreat” from the unstinting support that Israel has received from the onset of the present iteration of a conflict that effectively goes back to the founding of Israel in 1948.  As a mark of his displeasure, indeed of his alleged surprise that the US should in any way be signifying a shift in its position of unfettered support towards Israel, Netanyahu cancelled a planned visit by an Israeli delegation to the US to discuss Israel’s imminent invasion of Rafah. Netanyahu and Israel’s military planners have argued that the assault on Rafah is required to eliminate Hamas’s remaining battalions; the United States, importantly, questions not Israel’s right to defend its integrity as a nation-state, but only whether Israel has put into place a comprehensive plan that would guarantee the safety of Palestinian civilians.

Many commentators point to the US vote of abstention, as well as other recent developments such as criticism of Netanyahu by US Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and his call for elections in Israel—angrily dismissed by Netanyahu in a sharply worded rejoinder, “We are not a banana republic—as significant milestones in what is alleged to be an evolving relationship between Israel and the United States.  The diplomatic editor of the highly regarded The Guardian, for instance, described the American decision to abstain as far more than a ruckus over “some words in the text of a UN resolution: it marks another moment in the painful, almost anguished US diplomatic distancing from its chief ally in the Middle East.”

The terrain appears to have shifted quickly and considerably in the last several weeks: having vetoed UN Security Council resolutions thrice, the US was doubtless finding that it, too, was repeatedly being pushed alongside Israel into being part of a miniscule minority.  Indeed, before it abstained from the resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire, the US had introduced its own resolution—only to see it being shot down by China and Russia, which pointed out that the American initiative was more of a condemnation of Hamas rather than a demand for a ceasefire. Tensions have been rising between Israel and the US over the pace and scope of humanitarian aid, especially in the face of the imminent starvation of Palestinians on a large scale. Most recently, the death of seven aid workers from World Central Kitchen in a targeted strike by the Israel Defense Force (IDF) has ratcheted up the American pressure against Israel. 

Might one conclude, then, that something significant has altered in the special relationship that Israel has enjoyed with the US since its founding?  Reportedly, even as these lines are being penned, and following on what has been described as a tense call between Biden and Netanyahu, Israel has finally succumbed to the US pressure to open up new aid routes to Gaza. There is ample reason to think that American frustration with Israeli intransigence has been growing and some suspect that Israel may no longer enjoy unconditional support in the United Nations and more broadly the court of world public opinion. Moreover, the brute fact is that, as an electoral democracy, political parties are subject to the vagaries of shifting political sentiments.  The more “progressive” sections within the Democratic party have been arguing that arms sales to Israel must be tied to the immediate cessation of hostilities and much higher standards of accountability on the part of Israel. University campuses have been rocked by unrest over the Biden administration’s policies; more importantly, both recent polls and Democratic primaries being held in the run-up to the presidential election in November suggest that Biden is in grave danger of losing the support of Arab-American constituencies.

I would argue, however, that analyses which portend a significant shift in the US support of Israel are not merely premature but have failed to capture the pulse that animates the US-Israel relationship. Israel has, previous to this war, been the recipient of over $150 billion in American largesse, or something like $3.8 billion annually; it also has access to advanced American war technologies and weapon systems. If the pro-Palestinian demonstrators have appeared to make a splash on university campuses, it is only because the forces that lobby for both Jewish and Israeli interests have so long dominated the American university system that one barely heard of support for Palestine.  The charge of anti-Semitism remains the most potent weapon that can be deployed on behalf of Israel. The indubitable fact is that Israel is held up, by Democrats and Republicans alike, not merely as the only real friend it has in the Middle East but as the only democracy in the region. It is immaterial to this argument whether Israel is, in fact, a “democracy”:  the fact that some of its citizens have enjoyed liberties ordinarily associated with democratic states cannot obscure the other reality, namely that Israel has been an occupying power for decades and that Palestinians exist in a state of manifest and dire subjugation.

There is another and yet still more vital consideration.  I have elsewhere argued that there is a certain synergy between Israel and the United States as settler-colonial states. A messianic spirit has long informed American self-perception and guided US foreign policy: as every post-World War II American president has declared at one time or the other, the belief that America is “the one indispensable nation” is intrinsic to American exceptionalism. Israel is far from having the gumption of saying the same explicitly about itself, but the state of Israel conducts itself with the supreme confidence that it exercises a moral purchase over the rest of humanity. It does so, of course, on the presumption that the murder of six million Jews gives the Jewish state of Israel a special place in history—and the unconstrained and unquestioned right to oppress others in the name of “self-defense”.  Given this synergy, it is doubtful in the extreme that anything substantive has at all changed in the US-Israel relationship or is even likely to change in the near future.

Israel and the United States: The Catastrophic Synergy of Two Settler Colonial States

Of all the remarkable and still unfolding geopolitical aspects of the present war in Palestine, what stands out most is the unstinting support given to Israel by the United States from the very moment that the barbaric attack carried out by Hamas in Israel came to the attention of the world.  The US was not alone in unequivocally condemning Hamas, but President Joe Biden, characterizing the terrorist attacks as “pure, unadulterated evil” in a speech delivered on October 10, made it known that the “United States has Israel’s back”:  “We’re with Israel.”  Days later, in an extraordinary demonstration of just how “rock solid” American support of Israel is, Biden took the risk of traveling to Israel. By this time, at least 2,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians, had also been killed in the relentless, indeed merciless, aerial bombing of Gaza. Biden met with Jewish survivors of Hamas’s attack, holding some of them to his chest in a warm and consoling embrace; but, not surprisingly, he made no pretense of any similar commiseration with Palestinians.  Throughout, the United States vetoed resolutions in the United Nations calling for a cease-fire.  Since Hamas carried out its attack nearly two months ago, some 16,000 Palestinians, the greater majority of them women and children, have perished in a devastating orgy of fire, wrath, and destruction.

Gaza, Bombed Out of Existence: “An Empty Land” in colonialist Thinking, Now a True Wasteland

It is not only with Britain, but with Israel as well, that the United States has long had a “special relationship”.  On 14 May 1948, less than an hour after Israel proclaimed its independence, the US became the first country in the world to recognize Israel as a sovereign state. Ever since, Israel has been backed by American arms, recently to the tune of $3 billion every year, and the two countries have celebrated their ties as an enduring partnership of two democracies allegedly inspired not merely by mutually shared interests but by the love of liberty.  Several commentators have pointed to the great many sources of this unusual relationship.  The US has the world’s second largest Jewish population after Israel, but there are several other, lesser explored, aspects of this relationship, not the least of them being the fact that the modern American university, and nearly every sphere of scientific and humanistic inquiry, has been disproportionately shaped by Jewish intellectuals.

However, in all the vast commentary on the unwavering support that Israel has received from the United States in the last 75 years, the most critical factor has been rarely discussed.  Both Israel and the United States are settler colonial states. Though the idea of “settler colonialism” is now a staple of scholarly discourse, it has made scarcely any inroads into the common understanding of colonialism.  School textbooks down in the United States down to the present day do not use the term “settler colonialism”, and here I will not take up the matter of whether the extermination of American Indians has received even remotely the kind of recognition that it needs.  (“Recognition” barely gets us to the question of “justice”, but that is still more remote a possibility.)  But it behooves us to have at least an elementary sense of how settler colonialism provides another lens on the more general phenomenon of colonialism. The British in India, to take a well-known example of colonialism, absorbed ever greater parts of the country into British India after their initial conquest of Bengal in 1757, and some British families put down roots in India extending over the course of several generations. Though the relationship was often exploitative in the extreme, the British did not seek to exterminate the population and generally did not treat the local population merely as slave labor.

Settler colonialism is an altogether different phenomenon.  It is, in the first instance, predicated on the legal fiction, one that the Europeans boldly even merrily advanced, of terra nullius—that is, the notion that the lands they had encountered were “empty”. These lands were construed as sparsely populated, and that too by those viewed as savages bereft of civilization, and otherwise as unproductive.  Europeans thought nothing of claiming these lands as their own: however, it is not merely when they encountered opposition that they killed the indigenous people, since extermination was but a blood sport. Indigenous populations were nearly wiped out, but many of the natives were also taken into slavery.  Settler colonialists could not countenance even remotely the idea of accommodation and, without exception, settler colonialism resulted in the replacement of Europeans for the indigenous populations.  The other word for this phenomenon is genocide—even if, in the aftermath of the Second World War and especially in the last few decades, the world has settled upon a more capacious understanding of what constitutes “genocide”.

The United States, much like Australia, has evolved from being a settler colonial state into becoming a fundamentally immigrant society, but the periodic recrudescence of virulent white nationalism in both countries suggests that they continue to be guided by the instincts of settler colonialists.  There is but no question that the origins of the modern nation-state of Israel lie precisely in a similar kind of settler colonialism.  The founding of Israel was only made possible by the mass expulsion of Palestinians who term their displacement, and the dispossession of their lands, as nakba. Even as astute, learned, and sensitive a philosopher as Martin Buber was susceptible to the idea that it was given to Jewish settlers alone to make the land productive: “This land recognizes us, for it is fruitful through us: and precisely because it bears fruit for us, it recognizes us.” The land had thus far been unproductive, merely waste land: as Buber opined in an open letter to Mahatma Gandhi on 24 February 1939, “The Jewish farmers have begun to teach their brothers, the Arab farmers, to cultivate the land more intensively.”  Buber had at least the decency, utterly wanting in the present generation of Israeli leaders and their unthinking supporters in the United States, to add that “we do not want to dominate them; we want to serve with them …”

Palestine does not exist: one American, and not merely Israeli, politician after another has pronounced this as an unimpeachable fact over the last several decades. At my own university, the Chancellor, in his first message to the university community days after October 7^th, while deploring the “heinous” attack by Hamas, found himself incapable of even mentioning Palestine. A week after his first message, and that at a time when a few thousand lives in Gaza had already been snuffed out, the Chancellor of UCLA could only muster up enough “courage”, if that is the word for so supine and cowardly a gesture, to say that what was happening in Gaza was “troubling”.  If Palestinians cannot even be named, they certainly do not exist.  The United States and Israel together have woven a dance of death which has been catastrophic for their own countries and will undoubtedly prove to be an unmitigated disaster for the entire world.

First published in the Indian Express (online), 27 November 2023, as “Israel and the United States: The synergy of two settler-colonial states, a disaster for the world“

Making Meaning of the Crime of Nagasaki: American Power and Dehumanization in the Nuclear Age

It is on this day, August 9, seventy-seven years ago, that the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan.  Several air-raid alarms had sounded early that morning, but such warnings had by now become routine.  The Americans had been firebombing Japanese cities for months, and there was little reason to suspect that this morning would be any different. Two B-29 Superfortresses, as the gigantic bombers were called, had left Tinian air base and arrived at Kokura, the intended target, at 9:50 AM, but the cloud cover was too thick to drop the bomb with any degree of accuracy and the planes departed for the secondary target, Nagasaki.  Here, once again, visibility was sharply reduced owing to thick clouds, but then, fortuitously for the animated plane crew, the veil was lifted momentarily—just enough to drop “Fat Boy”, as the bomb was nicknamed, at 11:02 AM.  Nagasaki had thus far not been laid to waste: a deliberate decision, since the effect of the bomb could not be judged if it were dropped on a city that had already been reduced to rubble.  The clouds had parted, and the virginal city was now open to being ravished by “Fat Boy”.

Nagasaki, the Morning After: 10 August 1945. Photograph: Yosuke Yamahata.

At the moment of detonation, less than a minute later, something like 40,000 people were killed instantly.  Over the next five to six months, another 30,000 died from their injuries; the casualties would continue to mount over the years, some succumbing to their injuries, others to the creeping radiation.  At least 100,000 people had died within a few years in consequence of the bombing.  Almost ninety percent of the buildings within a 2.5-kilometre radius of the hypocenter, or “ground zero”, were entirely destroyed.  The following day, August 10, following the expressed wishes of the Emperor, the Japanese government conveyed its surrender to the Allied forces, though the American insistence on an “unconditional surrender” continued to be a stumbling block for several days.  It was not until August 15 that Emperor Hirohito, taking to the airwaves to speak to his people directly for the first time, announced Japan’s surrender.  On September 2^nd, the Japanese foreign minister signed the instrument of surrender, and the hostilities of World War II were formally brought to a close.

Japanese Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu signs the Instrument of Surrender on behalf of the Japanese Government, on board USS Missouri (BB-63), 2 September 1945. Photograph from the Army Signal Corps Collection in the U.S. National Archives.

The atomic bombing of Nagasaki has been, comparatively speaking, little explored and it is similarly less recognized and commemorated than the bombing of Hiroshima three days earlier.  It is, of course, the singular misfortune of Hiroshima that it ushered humanity into the nuclear age and catapulted humanity to new and heightened levels of barbarism.  “Little Boy”, the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, killed 70,000 people instantly—at the moment of detonation.  The city was leveled, utterly ruined, and transformed into a mass graveyard.  The graphic photographs that survive tell the same story, but in different idioms.  There is the photograph of a young girl who survived initially but whose eyes were hollowed out; she was blinded by the bright light emitted by the explosion.  Thousands of people were literally rendered naked:  the intense heat and the fireballs stripped them of their clothes, and on one woman’s back the kimono’s pattern was seared into her flesh.  This is one kind of barbarism.

Blinded by the light and by “Little Boy”: Hiroshima, 6 August 1945. Photograph: Christer Stromholm.

It is another if related kind of barbarism to adopt the view, in the words of an American military officer at that time, that “the entire population of Japan is a proper military target.”  Fewer than 250 people who were killed in Hiroshima were soldiers; the targets, in other words, were the elderly, women, and children, Japanese men of fighting age already having left the city to serve in the armed forces or auxiliary services. The hyper-realists have always adhered to the position that, whatever restraints on warfare international law might impose, and whatever the ethical sentiments that soft-headed people may have, war is a brutal business and that at times nothing is forbidden in the pursuit of victory.  Historians generally encompass this view under the rubric of “total war”.

It is still another kind of barbarism, however, to continue to defend both the atomic bombings years and decades later, as many Americans especially do, on grounds that are at best specious.  As late as 2015, seventy years after the bombings and considerable scholarship calling into question the conventional view, a Pew Research Center survey indicated that 56 percent Americans supported the atomic bombings and another 10 percent declared themselves undecided.  Many arguments have been advanced in defense of the use of the bomb.  Some commentators resort to what I have already described as the argument that, in conditions of “total war”, nothing is impermissible.  Since such an argument often sounds crass and unforgiving, others prefer to speak of “military necessity”.  The defense of the bombings often hinges around Japan’s obdurate refusal to surrender on the terms that Americans had every right to impose.  

However, at rock bottom, there is but one fundamental claim on which the proponents of the bombings rest their case.  It is the argument that the atomic bombings saved lives.  We can all envision scenarios, so goes the argument, where one preserves lives by taking other lives.  Had the bombs not been dropped, the Americans would have had to undertake a land invasion, and the battle of Iowa Jima had shown the Americans that the Japanese would be prepared to defend their country to the last man—and perhaps woman and child.  Tens of thousands of American soldiers would have been killed.  The somewhat more sensitive adherents of this view, mindful of the fact that Americans are not the only people fully deserving to be viewed as “human”, insist on reminding everyone that hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians would also have been killed.  Thus, it is not only American, but also Japanese, lives that were saved when the United States decided to unleash destruction on a scale the like of which had never been seen in history. 

President Truman’s remarks on August 11 unequivocally suggest that saving Japanese lives was certainly not on his mind—and neither was it on the minds of the military planners or even the scientists charged with bringing to fruition the Manhattan Project:  “The only language they [the Japanese] seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them.  When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him like a beast.  It is most regrettable but nevertheless true.”  There is but no doubt that the Japanese had been entirely dehumanized.  In prosecuting the war against Germany, the United States always made it clear that the Nazis, not ordinary Germans, were the enemy; however, no such distinction was observed in prosecuting the war against Japan.  Military planners and most ordinary Americans alike saw themselves as being at war against the Japanese, not just against the Japanese leadership.  The savage lampooning of, and racism against, the Japanese is to be found in countless number of cartoons, writings, and official documents, as well as in the expressly pronounced views of people in the highest positions in the American government and society.  The Chairman of the US War Manpower Commission, Paul V. McNutt, said that he “favored the extermination of the Japanese in toto”, and President Franklin Roosevelt’s own son, Elliott, admitted to the Vice President that he supported continuation of the war against Japan “until we have destroyed about half of the civilian population.”

A case can be made that the United States, in undertaking the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, committed war crimes, even crimes against humanity, and engaged in state terrorism.  Quite reasonably, we may expect that such a view will be aggressively countered, though the argument that the dehumanization of the Japanese—even if precipitated to some extent by Japan’s own wartime atrocities, some on a monumental scale—played a role in the bombings seems to be unimpeachably true.  Those who seek to defend the bombings appear, moreover, to be unable to comprehend that the nuclear bombs were not simply bigger and far more lethal bombs, and that the bombings were not merely a more aggravated and ferocious form of the strategic bombing carried out first by the Luftwaffe and then the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the U.S. Air Force. The atomic bombings breached a frontier; they constituted a transgression on a cosmic scale, bringing forth in the most terrifying way before humankind the awareness that the will to destroy may yet triumph over the will to live.  The sheer indifference to the idea of life, any life, on the planet suggests the deep amorality that underlies the logic of the atomic bombings.  In this sense, we may say that the crime of Hiroshima is the primordial crime of our modern age.

Still, is it also possible to argue that the crime of Nagasaki was yet greater than the crime of Hiroshima?  Why did the Americans have to drop a second bomb?  Why could they not have waited a few more days for Japan to surrender?  The defenders of the Nagasaki bombing argue that, since the Japanese had not surrendered immediately after the Hiroshima bombing, it was quite apparent to the Americans that they were determined to keep fighting on.  The Japanese may have believed that the United States had only one bomb; some argue that surrender was not an option for the Japanese since the warrior culture was pervasive in their society and “Oriental culture” does not permit such an ignominious ending.  On the other side, it has been argued that American military planners had a toy, and what use is a toy if it is not going to be put into play.  

As I have argued, and many others have argued this long before me, the atomic bombings were never just intended to induce Japan to surrender. Before the war had even ended, the United States was already preparing for the next war, and that against a mortal enemy—the Soviet Union. Japan, at this time, was an entirely decimated power; it was, indeed, of comparatively little interest to the Americans.  If this sounds implausible to some, consider that Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves, the Director of the Manhattan Project, himself confessed that “there was never from about two weeks from the time that I took charge of this Project any illusion on my part but that Russia was our enemy, and the Project was conducted on that basis.” It was imperative to convey to Stalin that the United States would not be prepared to allow the Soviet Union to spread the poison of communism around the globe and seek world domination; as Secretary of State James Byrnes remarked, “The demonstration of the bomb might impress Russia with America’s military might.”

With Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States sought to deliver a one-two punch:  knock out Japan and put the Soviet Union on notice that the United States was prepared to exercise its Manifest Destiny as the one indispensable country in the world.  “Power corrupts,” John Dalberg-Acton [Lord Acton] famously pronounced; “absolute power corrupts absolutely”.

First published under the same title at abplive.in on 9 August 2022.

Available in a Marathi translation, here.

Available in a Tamil translation, here.

Available in a Telugu translation, here.

An Ignominious End for a Superpower: Run, America, Run

First in a series of 2-4 articles on Afghanistan, the Taliban, and the United States

Afghanistan has fallen to the Taliban and the United States is scrambling to evacuate Americans.  So screamed a headline in the New York Times all of yesterday and so say the images being flashed on television and mobile phone screens.  How the Americans are running with their tails between their legs!  US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was on the air defending the Biden administration’s decision to undertake a rather abrupt withdrawal of American forces and the most striking pronouncement that came from his lips was surely this:  ‘This is manifestly not Saigon.’  The very fact that he attempted to disabuse people from recalling the humiliation that the United States suffered on 30 April 1975 as North Vietnamese troops occupied the city and the US sought to evacuate its personnel from its embassy in Saigon suggests the potency of the analogy.  Then, and now, the most iconic image from the end game is of American helicopters ferrying US personnel and ‘collaborators’, as the enemy dubs them, to safety—this time to a secure location at the airport the perimeter of which is ringed by American military forces.  Then it was the evil communists; now it is the dreaded Islamic terrorists.  But it is America, once again, which is fleeing from scenes of chaos—the very chaos that it engendered in the first place.

The United States, the preeminent military power of the post-World War II period, has suffered yet another crushing defeat.  Let us not minimize the enormity of this defeat.  Many commentators have sought to soften the blow:  some are calling it an ‘embarrassment’, others are speaking of the loss of American ‘prestige’, and yet others are speaking of how the US military has been caught flat-footed.  It is all this and far more than just the end of the US era in Afghanistan.  It cannot suffice to say that the Americans were committed to a withdrawal in any case and that Biden and his advisors only miscalculated if severely the extent to which Afghan security forces would be able to hold back the Taliban.  On this view, the present ‘humiliation’ can be put down to failures in strategic thinking and implementation of a policy laid down by Biden’s predecessor, though many American themselves will wonder why a ‘trillion dollars’ have gone down the drain.  This is the amount that is being mentioned as the cost of the 20-year war, allowing for expenses incurred in military engagements, maintaining a massive American presence, and nation-building in an attempt, as the Americans saw it, to secure the ‘free world’ from the scourge of terrorism and bring ‘civilization’ to tribal ‘savages’.  Such a view shows a complete unawareness of the culture of militarism, which is another form of savagery, which is as intrinsic to American foreign policy and even the American character as the purported love of liberty. 

Last Days in Vietnam: The Evacuation of American Personnel from the American Embassy, Saigon, 29-30 April 1975. Source: PBS.

Last Days in Afghanistan: Evacuation from the US Embassy in Kabul, 14 August 2021. Source: AP Photo, Ahmad Gul.

The brute fact of the matter is that, since the end of World War II with the decisive victory of the US and the Allies against the fascists in Germany, Italy, and Japan, the US has not won a war outright, if it has won a war at all.  The Korean War (June 1950 – July 1953) ended in a stalemate, marked by an armistice agreement, and its bitter legacy continues to the present day.  In Vietnam, the Americans assumed the responsibilities, as it saw them, that the French were no longer able to carry out of stemming the menacing advance of communism.  Then, two decades later, in what can be called another protracted entanglement, this time in Iraq, the Americans sought the submission of Saddam Hussein first by bombing Iraq back into the stone age and then, some years later, by cornering the Iraqi dictator and literally digging him out from a hole before he was sent to the gallows.  In the process, they not only left the country in shambles, but their ambition to introduce democratic reforms—when they had enough to do in their own country, as the rise of white supremacists and xenophobic militarists has established all too clearly—would have the effect of unraveling entire societies all over West Asia (or the Middle East as the Americans call it).  The debacles in Syria, where the atrocities committed by the Western-educated Bashar al-Assad make Iraq under Hussein look tame, as well as the civil war in Libya, precipitated by the US resolve to bring down the government of Muammar Gaddafi, bear the imprint of US foreign policy, even as one recognizes the role of other states such as Russia and Saudi Arabia in creating the unholy mess in which the Arab world is now enmeshed.  Now, to cap it all, is the story of twenty years of the presence of American troops dissolving into capitulation to armed tribesmen over a matter of a few days. Some might argue that the US did win the Cold War:  if it did so, which thirty years after the demise of the Soviet Union is far from being clear, it is worthwhile asking what the implications might be of winning only a ‘cold’ rather than ‘hot’ war.

What should be unambiguously clear now is that military power, indeed overwhelming military power, has limitations and indeed is even a liability. There is a lesson in this for other powers, especially China, though one should never underestimate the human tendency to forgo what historians fondly and sometimes wistfully call ‘the lessons of history’.  The US never fully acknowledged its military defeats and the generals only took back the lesson that they would not fight a war with one hand tied behind their back. American counter-insurgency operations would henceforth be focused on developing tools and the skills required to fight guerrillas and what are called non-state actors.  In the operations against the al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, and other jihadi outfits, the Americans thought that they had learnt something about how to engage non-state actors. However, none of this should be allowed to obscure the fact that overwhelming military power does not necessarily confer advantages as it once did, even when the asymmetry of firepower is astronomical.  What is seldom mentioned about the American triumph over Germany, in contrast to the wars that the US has fought in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, is the element of the shared culture between the US and Germany as one of the torch-bearers of ‘Western civilization’.  This had a great many implications:  the US forces were never viewed as alien in Germany, just as the Taliban, whatever one might hear in the Western press about the dislike for them among common Afghans, have capitalized on the shared culture between them—even allowing for differences between Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and the handful of other ethnic groups—and the myriad other insurgent groups and political parties. The newly appointed Taliban mayor of Kunduz, Gul Mohammed Elias, is reported to have said that ‘our jihad is not with the municipality, our jihad is against the occupiers and those who defend the occupiers’.  The return of the Taliban, to which I shall turn in a subsequent essay, owes much to this consideration, not merely to realist political assessments of foreign policy, geopolitics, military strategy, and the like. 

A Polish translation of this article by Marek Murawski is available here.

A translation into Georgian by Ana Mirilashvili is available here.

The Creative Scholar: A Tribute to James Carse, Philosopher of Religion

Finite players win titles; infinite players have nothing but their names. — James Carse

           

James Carse, a philosopher of religion ‘by profession’ and an extraordinarily creative thinker at large, died on September 25 last year.  He was 87 years old. 

The Impunity of White Terrorists

Vinay Lal

What transpired at the US Capitol on January 6, President-elect Joe Biden noted, amounted to “sedition”, an act not of “protest” but of “insurrection”.  He was joined in this characterization at that time by a few other Senators and since then many public commentators have endorsed this view.  Some are inclined to use somewhat softer language, deploring the shocking lawlessness and descent into anarchy.  Many other elected officials and public figures bemoan the desecration of the “temple of democracy” and still others wonder whether America can any longer boast of being “the shining city on the hill”.

The Year that America Unraveled

It scarcely seems possible that it was a mere thirty years ago, as the Berlin Wall came crashing down, the Soviet Union crumbled, and what Winston Churchill had famously called the ‘Iron Curtain’ was lifted from eastern Europe, that commentators in the West were jubilantly pronouncing (to use Francis Fukuyama’s phrase) “the end of history”.  The supposition was that the entire world seemed on course to accept the idea that the liberal democracies of the West, and more particularly the United States, represented the pinnacle of human achievement and that the aspirations of people everywhere could only be met through the free market. It mattered not a jot on their view that, precisely at this time, the US was cajoling nations into joining an international coalition designed to bring Saddam Hussein to heel and bomb Iraq, as American officials with pride and insouciance declared, “back into the stone age”.  Those who saw ominous signs of what unchecked American power might mean worldwide, and in the US itself, for the prospects of democracy and social justice were dismissed as some pathetic remnants of a warped communist vision that could not recognize the dawn of a new age of freedom.  “Muslim rage”, the phrase made popular by the likes of the Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, was a variant on the idea that those who failed to recognize the supremacy of the free market economy and the rights-bearing individual as the apotheosis of the idea of human liberty were religious fanatics, troglodytes, or just under-developed.

Coronavirus in Native American Communities: The Charade of “Thanksgiving”

General Jeffrey Amherst’s letter of 16 July 1763 advocating for the use of every method, including the “gift” of smallpox-infected blankets to American Indians, that might aid in extirpating “this execrable Race”.

Every nation has its, to use the word commonly invoked for such purposes, “myths”.  Just how myths, lies, and fictions differ from each other is an interesting question in itself, but in his classic essay of the late 19^th century, “What is a Nation?”, Ernest Renan put forward the arresting idea that a nation cannot be forged without some shared notion of “forgetfulness”.  Americans, especially white Americans, have for generations been brought up on the idea that the annual celebration known as Thanksgiving, held on the fourth Thursday of November for many decades, marks the occasion when the Pilgrims first sat together with Native Americans and they broke bread together in celebration of the first successful harvest.  This recounting of that idyllic past disguises the forgetfulness which would become critical to the making of America.  The other name for that forgetfulness is “genocide”.  It is for this reason that, in common with many other Native Americans, the United American Indians of New England mark Thanksgiving Day as the “National Day of Mourning”.  As this collective of Native American organizations states, “Since 1970, Native Americans and our supporters have gathered at noon on Cole’s Hill in Plymouth to commemorate a National Day of Mourning on the US thanksgiving holiday. Many Native Americans do not celebrate the arrival of the Pilgrims and other European settlers. Thanksgiving day is a reminder of the genocide of millions of Native people, the theft of Native lands, and the relentless assault on Native culture.”

Conspiratorial America: QAnon and the Great Awakening

Third in a series on the 2020 US Election

America is right now in a strange place, many would say.  Though the Presidential election was “called”—as one Indian commentator in the state of Bihar, where an equally interesting election has just drawn to a close, stated, he now perforce has to add this new term to the electoral vocabulary common to India—some days ago, the sitting President of the US refuses to acknowledge the election results. Trump’s supporters plan a massive rally in the nation’s capital on Saturday in a show of force intended to convey to the man who now believes that he practically owns the White House that they will form his stormtroopers.  There are rumors that, come January 20, Trump may be running a parallel administration.  Perhaps, much like Venezuela, the United States will have two presidents and the world will be divided between those conferring recognition to either of the two claimants to the throne.  There is some talk of militias taking to the streets and even of “civil war”.  Uneasiness hangs in the air.