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The powerful prefer to keep politically caused cruelty hidden from public view. When you’re told to stop discussing the hundreds of thousands of COVID-19 deaths even if it’s because of the Trump administration’s malfeasance, there are echoes of history. Don’t name the US soldiers killed during the Iraq War from 2003 to 2011 to promote Bush’s neoconservative platform of spreading democracy abroad. Don’t show on television body bags filled with young kids drafted to limit the spread of Soviet communism during the Vietnam War in the 1960s. Let’s be clear: censoring cruelty censors vibrant opposition. So, paint a picture of disaster in all its bloody detail. When you do this, you not only create a more accurate historical record, but you make it hard for others to look away. In the face of the truth, they can’t be deluded by the fantasy that everything is alright, that things aren’t that bad. Now they have to confront what disaster does to people. Because cruelty doesn’t impact everyone in the same way, we must take into account the perspective of those who live it.
The lesson of antinuclear activists in the 1940s is that they roused public sentiment by scandalizing their audience. They forced them, whether they liked it or not, to confront what was far away. No text was more successful in this endeavor than the 31,000-word article “Hiroshima” by the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist who moonlighted as a reporter, John Hersey. First published in the New Yorker on August 31, 1946, the book version, Hiroshima, appeared a year after the B-29 bomber Enola Gay, on the order of President Harry S. Truman during the Second World War, dropped a nuclear bomb and destroyed five square miles of the industrial city of Hiroshima, Japan. One-third of the city’s population, one hundred thousand, were murdered.
No publication in the twentieth-century United States, and certainly none since, had as much of an impact on national consciousness. The entire New Yorker print run of three hundred thousand—in which Hiroshima, contrary to the magazine’s usual format, represented the content of an entire issue—sold out immediately. ABC Radio read the essay live over four nights. After it was published as a book, by Knopf, it received countless positive reviews and book club selections.
What accounted for Hiroshima‘s unprecedented success? By meticulously detailing the lives of six survivors, and the wreckage of the bomb, Hersey undercut official US government narratives that had emphasized the strategic necessity of forcing imperial Japan’s surrender. Within days of the bombing, the US military began a concerted propaganda campaign, releasing information to willing reporters in magazines like Time and Life that described Hiroshima as a military target, emphasizing the damage done to buildings, and implying that, though the choice of weapon was new and unique, the bombing was part of ordinary protocols. This idea was perpetuated in the best-selling book Dawn Over Zero (1946), by New York Times science reporter William Laurence, who was the official reporter for the Manhattan Project and the only journalist who witnessed the Nagasaki bombing firsthand.
Hersey wouldn’t allow the disaster to be told from the perspective of the perpetrators, who gave us a plane’s-eye view, thousands of feet in the air. In Hersey’s telling, after an apocalyptic “tremendous flash of light,”1 Hiroshima is transformed from a paradise of commerce into a hellscape. The mushroom cloud of smoke is pierced by a “shower of tiles [that] pommeled” people, and the ground opens to become a crypt in which men, women, and children are buried alive without warning. Hersey forces readers to think about how what was once mundane has transformed into a waking nightmare: in a hospital, “heavy partitions and ceilings had fallen on patients, beds had overturned, windows had blown in and cut people, blood was spattered on the walls and floors, instruments were everywhere, many of the patients were running about screaming, many more lay dead.” You think about how the children, many of whom were barely able to talk or walk, were out in the street with “nothing on but underpants.” Imagine you were part of a procession of mourners, who were barely upright as they hobbled toward their own death, their bodies collapsing upon themselves and exploding in public, forming a grotesque mass. “Wounded people supported maimed people; disfigured families leaned together,” Hersey writes. “Many people were vomiting. A tremendous number of schoolgirls . . . crept into the hospital.”2
So after you’ve read Hiroshima, you don’t need Hersey to understand that those who survive only survive in the literal sense. Their lives are distant memories of what they once were. One survivor is disabled, the other is destitute, and still another is living in a hospital. One can’t work, another knows the hospital in which he worked won’t be rebuilt, and another won’t return to the smashed church where he worshiped for years. Before reading Hiroshima and being exposed to US propaganda, you may have thought Truman had no choice. But now you question this view: Was there really no other way? Was it justified? War is no longer an abstraction to be addressed through theories of rational choice, strategic alliances, and geopolitical maneuvers. War has a face. Ask yourself: Can you accept its costs?
Hersey’s example is as relevant now as ever. Urge journalists to detail the violence inflicted upon villagers in Afghanistan who are the collateral damage of US drone strikes. In 2019, photojournalist Stefanie Glinski visited the Achin district community, where a US strike—one of 4,251 in that year alone—intended to target ISIS fighters killed thirty pine nut farmers and injured forty more instead. Glinski supplements her photographs of homes in rubble with survivors’ testimony. Don’t allow anyone to say such attacks are, regretfully, the cost of pursuing the US war on terror. Against the words of a US colonel whose language cloaks the human damage of the violence—”We are aware of allegations of the death of non-combatants and are working with local officials to determine the facts”—Glinski uses the words of a thirty-five-year-old woman, whose husband was killed, recalling how the strike began as the farmers had “completed their first days of work. We’ve heard planes circle above the village and in the distance, we’ve been hearing explosions.”3
Don’t fall into the trap of debating a policy’s efficacy for national security. Consider the consequences on the people who will pay the price for your comfort. Don’t ask which immigration law best deters migrants from arriving on US shores but instead ask, What are the deleterious psychological effects upon young refugee children escaping gang warfare in El Salvador and Guatemala, who are forcibly separated from their parents by ICE agents in Texas at the US-Mexico border? Jessica Goodkind, a sociologist at the University of New Mexico, did that and was surprised to find that “family separation was on par with beating and torture in terms of its relationship to mental health. . . . It is one of the driving factors that creates psychological distress.”4 Atrocities hidden from view abet the perpetuation of future atrocities. The light of truth is the best disinfectant for the virus of moral apathy that renders citizens immobile in the face of injustice.