Earlier this month while at the University of Chicago taking
notes on the antics of the newly reformed Students for a Democratic Society, I stumbled upon a
plaque marking the spot on campus where the first self-sustaining
controlled nuclear chain reaction was prodded into being by
physicist Enrico Fermi and his team of scientists on December 2,
1942, a feat which went a long way to securing America’s victory in
the race for the atomic bomb.
So I was not surprised to see flyers appear a couple days into
my stay announcing the plaza housing the plaque and Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy statue would be
the site of a commemoration of the anniversary of Hiroshima Day
headlined by Matthew Rothschild, editor of the Progressive.
The flyer read “Hiroshima, 1945…Iran, 2006?” and so a few
perfunctory mentions of those terrible firestorms were set adrift
in a veritable ocean of about words about “neo-con” conspiracies,
admonishments for those gathered to let their representatives know
“peace is a non-negotiable issue” and solemn recitations of
Seymour Hersh’s anonymous sources’ contention that the
United States is planning to attack Iran with tactical nuclear
weapons.
Most of the gathered were those one might have expected to see
at a Rothschild event: prim and proper middle-class adults, many of
whom were likely anti-nuke activists from the movement’s 1970s
heyday, with a strong progressive leaning, but sans the
bombast and revolutionary rhetoric par for the course at the SDS
meeting. A man in a Buddhist Peace Fellowship T-shirt, in a typical
scene, nodded along as folk singer Dave Martin crooned, in between
speakers, “Gather friends around you/ Don’t let silence seize the
days/ There is wealth enough for all creation/If we speak truth to
power.”
There were a few exceptions to the Good Vibes crowd, of course.
A Communist Party volunteer handed me a newsletter with a copy of a
Hezbollah leader’s speech on prominent display and chatted amiably
enough about the imminent collapse of the capitalist world order
and, inevitably, American empire. Another less amiable fellow
shoved a handwritten flyer a few minutes later advising me to
“REFUSE TO PAY TAXES: DESTROY ISRAEL,” join a “militant union”
called the Industrial Workers of the World and avoid the Socialist
Party which has a “Jewish Bias.” By the way, did you know Bush
stole two elections with “the help of Mossad-empowered Jews in the
Democratic Party”? Well, now you do. The gates of the Elders of Zion open before you!
Rothschild, like his target audience, was much more
sophisticated than these aberrations. “There have been bleaker
times” in our nation’s history, he said, noting that while Bush
contends we can “no longer hope that oceans protect us from harm,”
those oceans didn’t help us against the British in 1812 or thwart
the Japanese at Pearl Harbor, nor in the five years since the Sept.
11 attacks have terrorists proven themselves the sort of
existential threat the Soviets once posed. I agree, apart from the
“obvious and significant exception of terrorists getting hold of a
nuclear weapons,” to use the caveat James Fallows employs in his
Atlantic Monthly piece on declaring victory in the War on
Terror. If there were terrorist cells on every corner in America,
they would have disrupted our lives somehow, someway these last
five years. Terrible as global terrorists are, we assign them
strength they do not posses.
At any rate, the crowd applauded mightily when Rothschild
derided Bush’s stoking of terrorism fears as a ploy designed to
make Americans so jittery “we’ll give our freedoms to him.”
Likewise, Rothschild wrote a column last year on the sixtieth anniversary of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki arguing that fear of mass casualties to be
sustained in an invasion of the Japanese home islands was used to
justify unjustifiable nuclear detonations over civilian
centers.
That fear is a political tactic and its magnification has clear
benefits for political power brokers is a sentiment I have no
quibbles with. Nevertheless, Rothschild has what some might deem an
exceedingly bleak view of the American political landscape. He
believes the Bush Administration is “more eager to drop a nuclear
weapon than any administration since the early days of Ronald
Reagan,” a desire he attributes to a “messianic” view of the world
which has created “meglo-Cheney-acs” — “It’s a clinical
condition,” Rothschild assured — who are following a “doctrine of
eternal empire” and Bush’s personal belief that he is “God’s UPS
man with a truck load of bombs.” The highest superlative today’s
activists could earn, Rothschild said as his speech wound down,
would be as the generation that “overcame madness.”
So much for letting go of fear. If Rothschild is right, the most
powerful country in the world is being run by messianic madmen
eager for nuclear holocaust. How could there ever been “bleaker
times”? With that sort of laundry list of doom, how could we not
rather be facing angry Redcoats instead of fascist mullahs?
Rothschild wasn’t alone in this. Another speaker noted his own
“fight for justice” against Wal-Mart before fretting about “state
and non-actors so afraid they are in George W. Bush’s crosshairs,”
that they are forced to “buy an insurance policy.” The insurance
policy they’ve got just happens to be kept in a room with whirring
centrifuges. Fear Wal-Mart, not Iran. Meanwhile, a former member of
Vietnam Veterans Against the War dismissed suicide charges by
Japanese soldiers during World War II as the actions of “selective
troops…in Guadalcanal or Peleliu” — something that boldly
contradicts, among other texts, William Manchester’s memoir of the
Pacific War Goodbye, Darkness, a wonderful, but
hardly pro-war, tome — in a clear attempt to debunk a fear that
led to a military action he disagreed with. Fear U.S. military
propaganda, not overblown reports of Banzai charges.
I wouldn’t label any of this as the sole province of any
political philosophy. Republicans have used post-9/11 fears to
justify legislative, judicial and fiscal policies that even the
most partisan GOP booster with one day have to grapple with the
constitutionality, or at the very least propriety, of. Still,
explicit attempts by Rothschild and the other speakers that day to
allay or diminish those fears that work against progressive or
pacifist goals while subtly enhancing and encouraging fears that
play against those of his philosophical foes is a telling
juxtaposition.
While I sympathize with Rothschild’s contention that fearful
citizens make poor choices — or, more precisely, allow poor
choices to be made for them — progressives by no means have any
special cachet with regard to overcoming madness or slaying fears.
One need only take a cursory gander at the overblown rhetoric of
environmentalists, class war enthusiasts, anti-globalization
xenophobes and race-baiting activists for proof of that.
The theme running like a string throughout is not — despite the
left’s proclivity for invoking the penultimate line of FDR’s
first inaugural, “the only thing we have to fear is
fear itself” — a cooing “Be not afraid” or even “Be reasonably
afraid,” but rather, “Choose the right fears, or face the
apocalypse.” Problem is, how many positions of true strength do you
know of that were born of abject terror?
