In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.
- George Orwell,
|
On May 27, 2016, US president Barack
Obama spoke in Hiroshima and declared, “…today the children of this city will
go through their day in peace.” This statement could be taken as a
reminder of a precious achievement, but it also implied that in spite of the
horror of the attack, it had been necessary. It seems as if the president
wanted to remind the world, in a lightly threatening manner, that America
brought peace to the conquered. However, this point and others made in the
speech were so vague that it could be used as a Rorschach test. It said nothing.
It was a canvas onto which listeners could paint whatever impression they
wished. If you think it was an apology, or not, and that makes you happy or
sad, then good for you.
 | |
| Barack Obama, George Orwell, Vladimir Putin |
Nonetheless, the careful word
choices within the speech achieve a certain purpose that is far removed from
being the apology that so much of the American public feared the president
would make.
It’s worth comparing Barack Obama’s
Hiroshima statement with a speech that was made on the same day by his defense
secretary, Ashton Carter. Carter spelled out the specifics of the Obama
Doctrine much more clearly than his boss did in Hiroshima. In that speech, the
world was indeed told we must be grateful for and accepting of the “security”
that America provides. You could almost say this is the real “Hiroshima
Statement” because it reveals why President Obama has done nothing to move the
world toward the abolition of nuclear weapons. Carter’s speech contained
plenty of talk about Chinese, Iranian, and Russian “aggression,” the
technological superiority of American military technology, the military empire
backing up free trade agreements, and the “security” the world receives from
America ensuring that the “bad guys” obey international law.
A careful analysis of these two speeches
illustrates how they reveal the radical changes that are needed to
achieve nuclear disarmament.
President
Obama’s Hiroshima Statement
Barack Obama’s preference for
abstract nouns, intransitive verbs, and passive voice constructions serves to
make this speech not only a non-apology but also a deflection of attention away
from the nation and the individuals who attacked Hiroshima and Nagasaki with
nuclear weapons.
The speech begins with these words:
Seventy-one years ago, on a bright cloudless morning, death fell from the sky and the world was changed. A flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself. Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima? We come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past. We come to mourn the dead, including over 100,000 Japanese men, women and children, thousands of Koreans, a dozen Americans held prisoner. Their souls speak to us. They ask us to look inward, to take stock of who we are and what we might become. [2]
A brief analysis of just a few
parts of this passage reveals much about what is achieved by syntactical choices:
1. “Death fell from the sky.”
1. “Death fell from the sky.”
Here Barack Obama uses an abstract
noun (death) to serve as the subject of an intransitive verb (fall).
The word choices and the syntactical choices serve to depersonalize what
occurred. An intransitive verb has no direct object, no target for its action.
The human agents causing death are left unmentioned. For a quite different
effect, one could describe the same event with a sentence that has the more
common Subject-Verb-Direct Object-Indirect Object construction:
Alternative:
S [A
US Air Force crew] V [attacked] DO [the civilian population of Hiroshima] IO [with an atomic bomb.]
2. “The
world was changed.”
Barack Obama uses the passive voice
here, which is another syntactical choice that serves to depersonalize events
and remove human agency from them. One could imagine a sentence in active
voice, with the same Subject-Verb-Direct Object-Indirect Object as above:
Alternative:
S [American
military and political leaders] V [changed] DO [the world]IO [with their decision to make atomic weapons and use them to
attack cities during WWII].
It is worth noting that the active
voice SVO word order is the standard default setting of sentences in the
English language. Children acquire this simple pattern first, and textbooks for
foreign language learners begin with it. When people are speaking in a way that
strenuously avoids the default setting, listeners can begin to suspect that the
speaker is actively concealing meaning and motive. The politician’s classic
admission that “mistakes were made” is a signal of an intention to bury the
truth and deflect attention from who was actually responsible for the mistakes.
3. “A
flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that
mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.”
Again, Barack Obama depersonalizes
the event and removes human agency from it. The agent of destruction, the
subject of the verb, was not human. It was a flash of light and a wall
of fire. After this, a human agent is mentioned for the first time, but it
is not specific individuals or governments. The human beings who bore
responsibility for this act are abstracted as now being all of mankind.
Alternative:
The scientists and the generals who
made the atomic bombs, as well as the president who authorized their use, knew
that the flash of light and wall of fire would demonstrate that America now
possessed the means to destroy mankind.
4.
“Why do we come to this place, to Hiroshima?”
Personal pronouns, such as “we” and
“us” are usually used to refer to persons previously mentioned or known
implicitly in the context of the words spoken. In this speech, the listener is
never told who “we” are. Does the first person plural pronoun refer to the
people gathered in the park that day? Is Barack Obama speaking for all
Americans? He seems to be implying that “we” refers to all of humanity, but he
leaves this matter unspecified. This reference to an unspecified “we” is also a
common rhetorical device in Christian sermons, so it is interesting to note its
use here in another genre—a speech by a head of state. This mixing of genres is
a curious thing about political discourse in modern times. The president is a
comedian on late-night talk shows or when he addresses the annual White House
Correspondents Dinner (cracking jokes at the 2010 event about drone warfare), [3]
and he speaks like a preacher in Hiroshima. In Secretary Carter’s speech,
discussed below, he talks like a salesman.
Alternative:
Why did I come to this place? That’s
a good question.
5. “We
come to ponder a terrible force unleashed in a not-so-distant past.”
In this sentence Barack Obama uses
the passive voice (“force [which was] unleashed”) to depersonalize the event,
to avoid mentioning who unleashed the “terrible force.” This term “terrible
force” is also a vague way to avoid describing what actually occurred.
Alternative:
American forces attacked Hiroshima
with a new weapon of mass destruction which struck the civilian population with
unprecedented blast forces, the heat of the sun, blinding light, and deadly
radiation.
The rest of the speech goes on in
the same manner. As a result, the speech was not only the expected avoidance of
apology, Barack Obama’s words actually served to exculpate the people who
carried out the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The speech shifts
responsibility for the attacks onto all of humanity. The perpetrators of the
attacks are identified now as “mankind” and “humanity,” and likewise it is
mankind and humanity who are supposed to somehow, with no specific initiative
by political leaders, find a way to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
This shifting of responsibility begs
the question of why President Obama himself could not have taken this moment to
announce a specific proposal for new disarmament talks with Russian president
Vladimir Putin. There is no other place to start in nuclear disarmament except
with the two nuclear powers who possess about 93% of the weapons. However, in
all the media coverage given to President Obama’s Hiroshima statement evincing
wistful hopes for a nuclear-free world, there were few explanations of the
stalled progress in negotiations between the two nuclear superpowers.
A general opinion seems to have
formed that this lack of progress is due to a vague and lamentable tendency of
nations to mistrust one another and cling to the status quo. It’s all just some
darned “problem of humanity” floating far above our heads. Gosh, what can be
done about this? Somebody must do something.
The public is never told exactly
what concessions might be necessary to make Russia and the United States
capable of negotiating the reduction of their nuclear arsenals. A fact that is
unmentioned by many observers is that Russia’s preconditions for disarmament
talks would have little to do with nuclear weapons themselves. The first step
would require the United States to radically shrink its global empire and abandon
its role as the leader of a unipolar world order. It would also have
to undo the damage caused by the eastward expansion of NATO since the collapse
of the USSR. That is the starting point for Russia, but the United States
government cannot allow such issues to be even contemplated, so the American
side blames the lack of progress on Russia’s refusal to accept American
dominance, which is not expressed as such but rather, euphemistically, as a
need to commit to, in Ashton Carter’s words, “an inclusive, principled future.”
[4]
Nuclear disarmament is frozen in its
tracks because America is blinded by its inability to understand other world
views and to empathize with the concerns of other nations. It cannot
contemplate the reality that much of the global population has a negative view
of the past century of American hegemony. America looks out on the world and
sees only three challenges: (1) terrorists and members of an evil axis of
long-term enemies, (2) cooperative allies who must be grateful for the security
given to them, and (3) difficult frenemies who are pursuing paths of ultimate
“isolation” from the benevolence of the unipolar world order. America cannot
acknowledge the perspectives of other nations that would prefer to negotiate an
alternative path. In addition, America cannot see the ambivalence and
resentment of even its cooperative allies, such as South Korea and Japan.
Viewing the world from the other’s perspective would lead to thinking
unthinkable thoughts in the halls of power in Washington.
At the time of Barack Obama’s speech
in Hiroshima, one could not ignore the backdrop of the American presidential
election campaign that was unfolding at the time. The mainstream political
establishment of both the Republican and Democratic parties haughtily dismissed
Donald Trump as a dangerous narcissist who was utterly unfit to be president. [5]
However, a president with a bona fide narcissistic personality disorder is
exactly what one should expect to emerge on the American political scene as the
offspring of the Democrat-Republican duopoly. “The Donald” is their
problem child, the big man-baby that has been gestating in America’s belly over
the last century. Just imagine that a nation’s behavior and personality could
be viewed as those of an individual. According to the American Psychiatric
Association, a narcissistic personality disorder is “a pattern of grandiosity,
need for admiration, and lack of empathy.” The Association suggests that this
particular disorder is indicated by demonstrating five or more of the following
behaviors:
1.
Has a
grandiose sense of self-importance (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents,
expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).
2.
Is
preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or
ideal love.
3.
Believes
that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should
associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).
4.
Requires
excessive admiration.
5.
Has a
sense of entitlement (i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment
or automatic compliance with his or her expectations).
6.
Is
interpersonally exploitative (i.e., takes advantage of others to achieve his or
her own ends).
7.
Lacks
empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of
others.
8.
Is
often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.
9.
Shows
arrogant, haughty behaviors or attitudes. [6]
One can look back at the American
century and see all of these traits in various American exploits around the
globe, and in the way American leaders still speak of their role in the world.
The
Secretary of Defense Articulates the Obama Doctrine
On the same day that the president gave
his speech in Hiroshima, his secretary of defense, Ashton Carter, was
delivering a commencement speech to the graduating officers at the Annapolis
Naval Academy. Barack Obama doesn’t like to explicitly describe the doctrine of
his administration. He gave the fuzzy, aspirational speech in Hiroshima while
he let Ashton Carter spell out what his doctrine is really all about.
Considering the coincidental timing of the two speeches, both of them should be
displayed side by side in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum for future
generations to ponder.
Carter’s speech was soaked in
examples of the above-described narcissism. He tells the graduating class, “…
the United States remains the security partner of choice in the Asia-Pacific
and around the world,” for a growing circle of allies and “partners.” Yes, he
said “security partner of choice,” as if he were a marketing man selling
weapons down at the mall to nations shopping for “all their security needs.” He
says this shortly after he has told the graduating officers that almost the
entire Asian continent is not buying the goods, as many nations on the
continent (Russia, Iran, North Korea and China) are behaving “aggressively” and
bringing a historic change that the new officers will have to “manage.” [7]
Shortly after the speech, Chinese
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying responded to Carter’s speech, saying
his remarks “laid bare the stereotypical US thinking and US hegemony,” and
that “China has no interest in any form of Cold War, nor are we interested in
playing a role in a Hollywood movie written and directed by certain US military
officials. However, China has no fear of and will counter any actions that
threaten and undermine China’s sovereignty and security.” [8]
Throughout Carter’s speech, one can
note the terminology that seems borrowed from a stockholders’ meeting, but then
this speech actually is part of a sales campaign for the military industry.
Journalist Patrick L. Smith observes that Carter was previously the Pentagon’s Undersecretary
of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics—in other words, in charge
of procurement—and he asks, “How wrong is it to give someone previously
assigned to shopping among the defense contractors the power to set policy?” He
adds:
Conflict of interest is woven into
everything Ash Carter does. In this respect, his appointment as Secretary of
Defense suggests something very disturbing about the true locus of power among
those now setting foreign policy in Washington… He is versed in method, not
purpose. Nobody with even a slight grasp of China and Asian history—or history
in general—could possibly stand on an aircraft carrier in the middle of a
locally conflicted region [Southeast China coastal region] and say the things
Carter did last month. He evinces no sense of his own recklessness. [9]
Later in the speech, Carter puts a
soothing gloss on all that America has done over the last century. While
President Obama landed in Japan just in time to face the rage of Okinawans
dealing with another murder by an American soldier, Carter told the soldiers,
“… you’re respectful of other people, and they—militaries and citizens of
countries around the world with whom we partner and fight—appreciate how you
conduct yourselves. They’ve learned that you’re there not to intimidate,
coerce, or exclude, but instead that you inspire, cooperate, and include.”
All of this was uttered in total
obliviousness to the fact that billions of people throughout the world would be
appalled by these words. They have a very different view of American
interventions, and of how much America respects international law seeks win-win
solutions. No matter how many wonderful, well-intentioned people there are in
the US military, their presence in foreign lands will always be problematic.
Carter was also oblivious to the
problem created by America’s superior military capabilities, which no other
nation can approach. He boasted of this disparity, unaware, it seems, that it
fills other nations with dread and forces them to pursue nuclear deterrents and
asymmetric strategies. The imbalance actually makes the world less secure.
Carter’s speech required no evidence
and allowed no counter-arguments. It was less abstract than the president’s
speech, but he didn’t have to worry about the sensitivities of the place where
he was speaking. His speech was meant to indoctrinate an unquestioning class of
military graduates, to send them out into the world, obediently following
orders. The historian and West Point graduate, Andrew Bacevich, spoke of this
indoctrination process in a recent interview:
From my upbringing, and I think
notably from attendance at the Military Academy [West Point], I was shaped by
some powerful forces to accept a very particular worldview. I’ve come to
believe that the Military Academy doesn’t educate. It socializes. It forms
people. And maybe it should. Because it exists to prepare people to be servants
of the state, as military officers.
So I came out of there and spent
most of my time in the Army, and it took me a long time to recognize the extent
to which I’d been socialized, and to come to appreciate that there were
alternative perspectives. It really took getting out of the Army and distancing
myself from an institution that had been my life. I needed that distance to
begin to think critically about a wide variety of matters: America’s role in
the world, America’s sense of itself, the record of U.S. involvement in parts
of the world, particularly in the period that I, myself, had existed in during
the late Cold War and then into the post-Cold War period…
I’m appalled by my naïveté, my
inability to ask some pretty obvious questions that should have been obvious at
the time, my willingness to sort of go along. But again, we don’t want military
officers to think that they are policymakers. We want military officers to be
loyal servants of the state, and that’s what I was for a period of time. [10]
Many people who specialize in
nuclear disarmament have failed to address the fact that the American Empire is
the elephant in the room that is impeding all progress. Nuclear disarmament
begins on the path from Washington to Moscow, and nothing is going to happen
until the disparity in conventional military and economic power is addressed to
Moscow’s satisfaction. America has done numerous things to erode the trust of
Russia, and it will take a lot of work to win it back. First there was
America’s triumphalist attitude about having won the Cold War, followed by the
economic shock doctrine imposed in the 1990s, along with the expansion of NATO
up to Russia’s borders. Finally, America orchestrated a pro-Western coup in
Ukraine, slapped economic sanctions on Russia (breaking WTO agreements that
Russia had signed onto), then it demonized Russia for its predictable reaction.
Mikhail Gorbachev, a critic of many
aspects of Putin’s leadership, has left his strongest criticisms for the way
American foreign policy has betrayed the promises of Reagan-Gorbachev summits
that ended the Cold War. He declared in 2016, “All of the attempts to resolve
the numerous conflicts of the previous two decades militarily have solved no
real problems, and only led to the erosion of international law and the
glorification of force.” [11]
Around the same time, Germany has downgraded
Russia from “partner” to “security challenge” because Moscow was alleged to have
used hybrid instruments to blur the boundaries between war and peace and
undermine other states, and is influencing global public opinion through
traditional outlets and social media (as if no other government ever attempted
to manipulate the mass media). [12] I declare here that some of the sources
cited herein may be those media outlets that displease Germany, but again, this
is an example of a Western government’s blindness to its own actions. The
problem for the West seems to be not that Russia engages in public relations,
but that it has been successful in presenting the world with a convincing
alternative view of what lies behind the conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, as
well as other global tensions.
This horribly degraded relationship
between the USA and Russia must force nuclear disarmament activists to broaden
their scope of concerns. One can say that nuclear weapons are stupid, useless,
wasteful, too dangerous to possess, too dangerous to ever use, and so on, but
we have to ask what happens when they’re gone. In the absence of nuclear
deterrence, only America would be secure with its overwhelming advantage in
conventional military capacity. In a new period of insecurity, the nuclear arms
race would immediately be replaced with a conventional arms race and probably
much bolder adventurism on the part of America.
The problem remains essentially what
it was in 1955, when Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein wrote in their famous
manifesto, “Although an agreement to renounce nuclear weapons as part of a
general reduction of armaments would not afford an ultimate solution, it would
serve certain important purposes.” A footnote called for this to be a
“concomitant balanced reduction of all armaments.” The manifesto seemed to
assume that nuclear weapons were here to stay and would inevitably be used in war,
so the more urgent issue was for nations to accept “distasteful limitations of
national sovereignty” and “find peaceful means for the settlement of all
matters of dispute between them.” [13] They wrote the manifesto to launch the
Pugwash Conference, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995 in
recognition of its mission to “diminish the part played by nuclear arms in
international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms.” [14]
Thus one could conclude that nuclear
disarmament groups, usually focused on a single issue, are themselves part of
the problem they wish to eliminate. They need to expand their goals, and rename
and rebrand themselves. They need to engage with geopolitics, economics,
ideology, peace studies, history, international law, and environmental justice;
in short, every global problem needs to be addressed on the way to nuclear
disarmament. I have the impression that Henry Kissinger, a supporter of the
Global Zero campaign, wouldn’t agree that radical solutions challenging American
supremacy are necessary, but the example of his being a nuclear disarmament
activist makes my point. [15] It seems logical to get rid of the most
terrifying weapons first, but it may be wiser to start by working on radical reform
of international relations and to start questioning our basic assumptions about
how and by whom the world should be ruled.
Notes
[1] George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language,” first
published in the journal Horizon
(volume 13, issue 76, pages 252-265) and since widely reproduced.
[2] The full text of President Obama’s speech appeared on
page A8 of the May 28, 2016 edition of the New
York Times, headlined, “The Memory of the Morning of Aug. 6, 1945, Must
Never Fade.” The online version of the article, at nytimes.com, is dated May
27, 2016, and headlined, “Text of President Obama’s Speech in Hiroshima, Japan.”
[3] Max Fisher, “Obama Finds Predator Drones
Hilarious,” the Atlantic Wire
(online supplement of the Atlantic
magazine, now known as the Wire), May
5, 2010.
[4] Ashton Carter, “Full transcript: Secretary of Defense
Ash Carter’s Naval Academy commencement address,” Capital Gazette,
May 27, 2016.
[5] Richard North Patterson, “Too Sick To Lead: The Lethal Personality
Disorder Of Donald Trump,” Huffington Post, June 3, 2016.
[6] American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition
(DSM-5) (Washington: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013).
[7] Ashton Carter, Capital
Gazette.
[8] “‘Stuck in Cold War’: Beijing says won’t play role in
Hollywood-style movie directed by US military,” Russia Today, May
30, 2016.
[9] Patrick L. Smith, “The Defense Department is
ruining America: Big budgets, militarization and the real story behind our Asia
pivot,” Salon, May 29, 2016.
[10] Patrick L. Smith, “‘This will stop only when the
American people get fed up’: American exceptionalism, the New York Times, and
our foreign policy after Barack Obama,” Salon,
May 22, 2016.
[11] “Gorbachev warns world of ‘cult of force,’ says all
recent conflicts could have had peaceful solution,” Russia Today,
June 3, 2016.
[12] “From partner to rival: Germany to designate Russia ‘a
security challenge’ – report,” Russia Today, June 5, 2016.
[13] The Russell Einstein Manifesto, Pugwash
Conferences on Science and World Affairs, July 9, 1955. The same notion about
the necessary surrender of sovereignty appeared four years earlier in the
science fiction film The Day the Earth Stood Still, in the words of
the alien visitor Klaatu.
[14] “Oslo
Award of the Nobel Peace Prize,” Pugwash Conferences on Science and
World Affairs, December 10, 1995.
[15] “Realist ‘Four Horsemen’ Challenge Obama, Other ‘Global
Zero’ Advocates to Abandon US Denuclearization,” Center for Security Policy, April 1, 2013. The authors of this
press release agree with the point I make about the elder statesmen supporting
Global Zero, but draw different conclusions. They perceive that nuclear arsenal
reductions would threaten the American global security regime that provides
American security and a nuclear umbrella to allies, so they argue against a
“naïve” nuclear reduction plan, whether it involves unilateral or negotiated
reductions.
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