Context for Tucson

"Gabrielle Giffords was targeted by the Tea Party Right on the basis that she supported the Obama health care plan – a plan that Beck and others like him have regularly explained to millions of Americans as representing totalitarian communism. Indeed, Sarah Palin’s notorious gun site map was only part of the eliminationist rhetoric unleashed against Giffords. For instance, her local Republican opponents held a fundraising event for his campaign that included the following message: ‘Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly.’"

Follow the below links to two articles, one post-Tucson recent, and one from August 2009, by Jeff Sparrow, an Australian Left-wing writer:

Have We Got A Show For You!
The Social Significance of the Arizona massacre.

There's a lot to read.
If you believe gun culture is healthy and the Tea Party are just nice people... you will blow a gasket.

"The toxic milieu of the Patriots spawned Timothy McVeigh — and a wave of other domestic terrorists responsible for over 40 violent incidents between 1995 and 2000.
The militias faded after the Clinton years, partly because of the economic recovery, partly because the far right felt less visceral antipathy to George W Bush and partly, perhaps, because the "war on terror" provided an external focus for internal rage. Yet, all through the Bush administration, the conservative infrastructure pushed the same populist message: the president was a swaggering Texan man of the people; his enemies, effete and treacherous intellectuals.
That strategy reached its nadir at the last election with the McCain/Palin ticket. Sarah Palin campaigned on almost nothing other than her anti-elitism: for her supporters, Palin was an ordinary hockey mom coming to clean up Washington, her very inexperience proof of virtue. In that respect, Obama’s victory — the defeat of the oxymoronic "Team Maverick" by a black liberal — was seen as the end of the so-called "Southern strategy", with the Republicans’ preferred talking points decisively rejected by an increasingly young and increasingly multicultural electorate.
In the wake of the Obama landslide, many Republican strategists recognised a need to change course but the populist forces they unleashed now possess their own momentum..."

Krugman on toxicity

"Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. It’s hard to imagine a Democratic member of Congress urging constituents to be “armed and dangerous” without being ostracized; but Representative Michele Bachmann, who did just that, is a rising star in the G.O.P.
And there’s a huge contrast in the media. Listen to Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, and you’ll hear a lot of caustic remarks and mockery aimed at Republicans. But you won’t hear jokes about shooting government officials or beheading a journalist at The Washington Post. Listen to Glenn Beck or Bill O’Reilly, and you will."

A pig is a pig - but gun sights are butterflies

"Rebecca Mansour, an aide to Palin, said the images were never meant to evoke violence. Mansour, who has been tweeting in defence of her boss since Saturday's massacre, said the cross-hairs were never intended to be gun sights. "We never ever, ever intended it to be gun sights," she said. "It was simply cross-hairs like you'd see on maps". "

Oh... like cherubs blowing from the corners and little sea serpents swimming around in unknown oceans. Of course.
Funny thing is I've NEVER seen cross-hairs on maps.
Not on ones that aren't hare-brained anyway.

"She added that "it never occurred to us that anybody would consider it violent" "

No. You don't see guns as objects of violence...
That and you're fucking stupid, lying, or both.

"Following initial controversy over the target map last year, Palin - who is known for her use of violent language and hunting lexicon - responded with her rallying cry: "Don't retreat. RELOAD." "

Yeah he tried to.

Shades of grey, drab green, dull blue

Wouldn't be horrible if you walked down the street and one entire gender was forced to wear the same sort of clothing...
A cartoonist's view of the burqa ban ( related post ).

Perceptions of perceptions about America

Over the last couple of days there seems to be an emerging theme among blogs I am reading... a perception among Americans that the world looks not as highly upon America as it once did. Or at least those who matter to American self-esteem... meaning, mostly, Europe... don't think as highly of America as they once did.

I'd like to share a thought on that, as someone who admires America but is not American.

"Why'd we go save their asses from Hitler...??" ... I've read or heard, so many times.

Allow me to be a little blunt about this... that conceit doesn't go over well.

America's home cities were never subjected to devastating air strikes. Its farmlands never churned up under the wheels of ravenous armies (since the Civil War...). Its minorities never taken away to death camps. Its civilians never raped on mass or subjected to reprisals.
Others got the broken end of that bottle. Britain and the rest of the Commonwealth were at war for over two years before Pearl Harbor. Furthermore it was not only America that swung the balance... it was also the Russians - who lost more people than anyone else, who were labouring under an oppressive regime of their own, and which front swallowed as much as three quarters of the German war machine. Enough with "we saved your asses".
America would NOT have liked the rest of the world sealed shut inside the Third Reich, Stalin's Soviet Union and the Japanese Empire. I would have been a new dark age for America as well.

But history rolls on and when you have half the world tied up in a nuclear stand-off with an adversarial economic system like Soviet-style communism, and you have near total economic hegemony, and things at home are pretty cool and carefree... you can assume the rest of world thinks you're as glamorous as you do.

When the Soviets are gone but you still have everything else, you look for farcical pseudo-threats like "trade wars".

But when there is no Cold War narrative left ongoing, the economy is shaky and you have an atrocity like 9/11 to contend with... "carefree" goes right out the window.

When the central narrative of American politics becomes "what is America becoming?", all those quaint foreigners who you helped in some war long ago suddenly have opinions that seem to matter, because where else are you going to look for comparisons?

When Obama was elected president the world didn't celebrate because he was a black guy. They celebrated because they believed he was better for America. That a McCain-Palin administration would have been a freak show and driven the US economy off a cliff. They still believe that. It's still true. It wasn't just the promise of what Obama might represent as the crawling dread of what the alternative would have meant.

Reactionary Americans, which takes in most of the Right-wing blogosphere, still don't give a damn what the anyone thinks. If the solutions don't fit some mythic idea of what America is, was, or is remembered (often wrongly) to be... then those solutions are of no use to them.

The rest of the world has not changed its opinion of America. It is still greatly admired for what it does well.
I'm starting to think though, that Americans have become more aware of what the rest of the world thinks.

Further perspectives on the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

I had thought to leave this topic as it stood in my earlier post, but the comments that it provoked prompted this one...

There is prevailing rationalisation for the use of the atomic bomb which asserts that it was less costly, to both sides, than a conventional invasion would have been. This position is so pervasive that I think most people who have ever given thought to this are swayed by it to some extent.

It is predicated, however, on largely unthinking assumptions which are in fact untrue, or at least questionable.

The first key assumption is that the dropping of the bomb and full scale invasion were mutually exclusive alternatives, and that one made the other unnecessary. Any reputable presentation of war plans shows that this was not the intention at the time. Both were actually part of the same planning from the time the bomb became available.

The second key assumption was the bomb demonstrated such awesome power that it, of itself, persuaded the Japanese government to surrender. That is not, strictly speaking, entirely true either. An associated assumption is that the US government actually expected that outcome. Again, not strictly true.

As the war came closer to the Japanese homeland, conceptual plans for invasion were drawn up. Early planning did not account for the atomic bomb, the project being top secret and known to a very few. As it became a reality, though, that changed...
General of the Army George Marshall considered using it.

To support the invasion - not instead of invasion.

At this time there was no single commander who held total military authority over the whole Pacific theatre. Command was shared among several men. There was a sharp divide between the opinions of the US Navy and the opinions of the US Army. Broadly speaking, MacArthur and the Army wanted invasion. Chester Nimitz and the Navy wanted a blockade. The Army said not invading would prolong the war indefinitely. The Navy said invasion would be too costly.
Political considerations gave the Army the edge, and planning moved to a thought process of how to defeat Japan quickly. The plan was called Operation Downfall, split into two sections, Operations Coronet and Olympic. Olympic would take Kyushu, the southern island. Coronet would take Honshu, the main island, via Tokyo Bay.

Marshall did not believe that dropping the bomb would make Japan surrender, and ordered work to begin on how they might be used tactically instead of strategically.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "strategic" hits. Using them tactically meant dropping them on the areas they intended to deploy troops.

With the benefit of what we know now about the effects of atomic weapons, this idea is utterly appalling. Allied troops could have been in the effected areas in as little as 48 hours, meaning that after a vicious ground war, surviving veterans would have been falling down dead years later from the effects of radiation. The operational plan probably would have come unstuck very fast as massive numbers of forces committed to the invasion fell sick immediately, in a land where nearly 30 million Japanese civilians had been indoctrinated to fight as irregular military. An irradiated nightmare of a battlezone.

MacArthur was confident and believed Japanese resistance would not be as strong as reports suggested. Nimitz on the other hand had grave doubts. Marshall looked to Truman and fretted that the latter would not greenlight the invasion. Projections of Allied casualties ran as high as 4 million, and Truman could not support that politically given the deleterious effect it would have on civilian morale.

The first two atomic bombs were dropped. Japan did not immediately surrender and invasion plans continued apace.

However on August 9th 1945, the emperor, Hirohito, was advised the Soviets had declared war on Japan. What ran through the mind of a man told from infancy that he was a living god and inseparable from the material and spiritual existence of his country is hard to say, but he authorised surrender to the Allies - with the one condition that the Soviets would absolutely not have agreed to: the continuance of the throne. Earlier it had even been hoped by Hirohito that the Soviets would mediate as neutrals.

Fact: If that condition was not met - or Hirohito had believed it would not be met - it was his stated intention to continue the war. He said so. Another dozen bombs could have been dropped and the war would possibly have continued still.

Had he been killed, there would have been no surrender, for it was the office of the emperor, and his voice heard for the first time on public radio, that was the transcendent authority in Japan, their one way out, their sole means of processing total national catastrophe, the only thing that would make them "endure the unendurable".

The question is not what 'made' Japan surrender. The question is how they came to choose to surrender.

A large part of the latter 20th century spun on the whim of this one man, and the catalyst for his choice was not some dreadful new weapon, it was the choice between the Soviets or the Allies. I know who I would have chosen.

A few other related considerations:

Australia wanted Hirohito hanged. Cooler heads in Washington resisted.
Retention of the emperor enabled what was probably the most benign occupation of a former enemy in the history of the world. With the only use of atomic weapons in anger still within living memory, Japanese today by and large nonetheless regard the United States as Japan's one true friend - an extraordinary reversal. This in a world where there are peoples nursing murderous grudges over things done to them by other peoples generations or centuries earlier.

Footage of the effects of the bomb were suppressed in both the United States and Japan for more than 20 years. In occupied Japan the reasons are obvious. In the US the reasons are less clear.

In a 1944 poll 13% of Americans wanted Japanese exterminated (the source cited for this is here). However, attitudes flipped dramatically in the years after the war. While enmity persisted, common images of Japan went from subhuman adversary to a land of paper houses and tinkling kimonos. By 1959 there was a Broadway play, "A Majority of One", adapted to a 1962 film, wherein the mother of a American killed in the war is romanced by a Japanese widower aboard a cruise ship, to the consternation of the woman's daughter.

Perception is endlessly mutable. Truth is not.
The atomic bomb did not force capitulation so much as the emperor's authority enabled it, inspired by self-preservation under the shadow of the Soviets.

It was not a case of "use the bomb OR invade". It was "use the bomb TO invade". Active assumptions in Washington were that the first two detonations would NOT result in capitulation.

Finally.. let's call a filthy cruel weapon a filthy cruel weapon - not a silver bullet for peace. We are still, all of us, living in danger of these things today. At any time a city in the US, Europe or elsewhere could be leveled by nuclear terrorism. These things are not a solution and never were.

By the way the segment below is a scene from The Bridges at Toko Ri. My intention here is not to be cute, but to contrast this with the above mentioned poll, taken just 10 years earlier....



Thanks for reading.

Friendship dolls

This is Shirley Temple in 1935, from a trip to Hawaii.

"In 1926, 12,739 dolls (composition dolls with wigs and sleep eyes and ma-ma voices)were collected from American children and sent to Japan as a token of international friendship. In return, Japanese children contributed their candy-money to have 58 dolls made to be sent to the U.S. These Torei Ningyo (ambassador dolls) were of the type called Ichimatsu (after an 18th-c. actor) and also Furisode ningyo (representing little girls in traditional festival costume); they were 32" tall and elaborately dressed, and often came with their own furniture, tea-sets, and so on. During the war, many of these ningyo were hidden away or destroyed in both countries..."

The rest of this interesting link here.

My own grandfather was career navy, a champion boxer, and later head of military police in Sydney.

In 1923 the Great Kanto Earthquake levelled Tokyo. He stayed a while, as a very young man, with a Japanese family while he and his crewmates helped relief efforts to rebuild the homes that allied planes would be dropping incendary bombs on 20 years later.

He survived the war. My wife's grandfather, in the Imperial Japanese navy, did not.

I've watched my mother-in-law pray in front of a photo of him and his young wife, who never remarried, with offerings of incence. I wonder what would the two men have made of me witnessing this, in the particular circumstance I have?

Somehow I don't think there would have been any problem.

I have a belief in a particular irony: If we were all warriors, there'd be no wars.

Not a cockfight

Some days ago philosophy teacher and author Damon Young wrote a lyrical defence of competitive Mixed Martial Arts - what John McCain called "human cockfighting".

The context is that cage fighting is illegal in the state of Victoria. Like me, Young is resident in Victoria. Not so in New South Wales and therefore can be seen in Sydney.

Young writes: "Anyone who perceptively follows this sport, or who participates, quickly realises this is not a free-for-all. It is not a brawl. It is two well-trained, disciplined athletes trying to win a match through skill, guile and endurance."

For myself I mostly agree with Young's position. Young is a bit more 'elevated' about it than I would be, but he correctly percieves the patience, commitment, respect and humility that a competitor who has not been "corrupted by pride, warped by money-lust, or simply crushed by the corporate and technical demands" must have in order to cultivate his skills and attitude.

Nonetheless there are a great many people who don't agree at all, and Young's article drew a lot of hostile comment, most of it equating MMA with mindless violence.
One guy - 'Mike'- wrote "You are no philosopher Damon - you are a barbarian. This sort of violent public spectacle is the antithesis of civilised sports. It is never beautiful to see people injuring each other and it should be entirely banned in Australia and elsewhere - as should boxing and kickboxing."

While 'Mike' obviously hates all combat sports, others might single out competitive MMA alone.
Some people who actually do MMA don't like UFC. The variance in opinion is endless.

Intent and perception...

I'd observe that gentle and doting parents take their kids to karate lessons, where they make new friends, get fit, have fun... etc etc and have nice photos taken of them wearing neatly pressed white uniforms. It's part of the after-school landscape - like soccer and piano lessons. Harmless joyful photo album stuff.

But within karate forms is everything you need to kill someone. There are in-close moves designed specifically to inflict total and fatal damage. Techniques that, if fully applied, leave no chance of the opponent surviving. It's lethal and it's all there... for those who have had that depth of instruction.
Kids just don't get taught those particular bits, is all.
They get the Ralph Macchio version.

Personally I take UFC or equivalent as being one facet of something much bigger. My main interest is in martial arts per se, not competitive fighting.

As another commenter wrote "MMA encourages violence about as much as Formula 1 encourages hooning your car".

What about all the screaming mobs watch and yelling for blood...? some might ask...
Well... like drunks at a football match, they have nothing to do with the merits or otherwise of the sport itself.
I'd also add that it's hard not to watch ANY sport you are excited by and not yell something.