Oppenheimer and Hiroshima – Reflections on the madness I see around me.
30 or so years ago I watched the children’s movie, “The Never-Ending Story”
To say I don’t like many movies, least of all modern kid’s movies, is a gross understatement.
But something about this movie clicked in a big way, and I still think of it as one of my favourite movies.
One of the most memorable scenes for me is the battle of the hero, Atreyu, to save his horse from sinking into the “NOTHING” – a swamp of nihilism which was slowly swallowing them both.
Is this the swamp that has given us the Oppenheimer movie?
We have never been closer to nuclear annihilation – maybe ever, but at least since the Cuban missile crisis of 1963. Yet there seems to be neither universal fear, nor mass resistance.
Instead, Hollywood gives us the Oppenheimer movie. Was it a coincidence it was released only weeks before Hiroshima Day, the 6th of August.. This year marks 78 years since the incineration of 200,000 souls in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I have only watched the trailer to Oppenheimer. But that was enough to fill me first with rage, and then with tears. Hollywood telling us this abomination was necessary to save lives. Included in the trailer is a scene of cheering young people.
I make no apologies for not seeing the whole movie. Any who have seen it have presented no redeeming features beyond mention of Oppenheimer’s angst at what they had done. A 1960’s interview with him had him still believing they had done the right thing.
War is peace. Love is hate. Mass murder is salvation. This appears to be the demonic message of the Oppenheimer movie. With apparently a little personal angst thrown in – to humanise inhuman barbarity.
Dorothy Day reflected soon after on that fateful event, as well she might reflect on the release of this movie.
Meanwhile home in Brisbane:
“What rough beast, it’s hour come round at last, slouches toward Brisbane to be born ……”
It was only a few years ago (2018), Australian Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, announced the goal of making our nation one of the world’s top ten weapons manufacturers. The only thing more shocking was that there was no large outrage at the time, only a few murmurs from the usual suspects of a remnant “peace movement”.
The ambitious goal is now well on the way to fruition. With massive subsidies from our own Labor government, arms dealers have opened up shop all over my own city of Brisbane
Our nonviolent resistance to the weapons company springing up here and elsewhere seem a mere pinprick on a leviathan.
A few weeks ago, a small group of us left Brisbane to go to Rockhampton to resist America’s largest war games in the Southern hemisphere, “Operation Talisman Sabre”. Ironically, we arrived back to find the US Secretary of State and Defence minister had been in Brisbane in our absence. Among other things they were here to encourage us in the noble goal of arms dealing. They discussed Australia making long range missiles, buying their nuclear submarines, and much more.
Did US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken. thank Anthony Albanese for allowing a new base for permanent B52’s bombers in the northern territory? Was there a smile and a wink about the possibility of them carrying nuclear weapons to start WW3.
“We will not ask”, Foreign Affairs minister Penny Wong has already happily declared.
For decades some of us have resisted the integral role of Pine Gap in any nuclear war. Now will our nation also drop the nuclear bombs with B52’s flown form our soil?
Talk of war with China, is discussed like talking about a possible recession, or interest rate rises.
Is this sane? Is there a possibility of war with nuclear powers without nuclear annihilation?
How have we come to this?
A few years ago, someone close to me surprisingly declared, “Life is meaningless. We just make up stories.” Is this the “Nothing” that explains the “Oppenheimer” movie, and the acceptance of nuclear annihilation. Have we replaced meaning with an anti-culture of identity politics and addictions to phones and devices. An anti-culture where annihilation may come as a blessing to end the meaninglessness of it all.
I don’t know. But the question keeps arising as I see us sinking into the nothing.
Am I just being ridiculously pessimistic? I hope so. I hope I am as delusional as someone with paranoid schizophrenia. What a blessing that would be.
But if not, is it time to rise up and resist?
Or is prayer the only answer to all this madness?
Jim Dowling
26 August 2023