Where We Are This Week
Oppenheimer, should we have nuked Japan?, and communists on campus.
This week I watched the movie of the summer. Well, last summer, that is. My wife and I finally found the three spare hours necessary to watch Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer.
Long have I been fascinated by the story of the American Prometheus, the man granted with the singular distinction of being the ‘father of the atomic bomb.’ In Greek mythology, Prometheus, a descendent of the Titans, stole fire from the Olympian gods and bestowed the technology on humans.
Prometheus was punished for his trouble by being chained to a rock and having an eagle swoop down daily to consume his liver. The ancient Greeks believed the liver to be the seat of all human emotion, and Prometheus was sentenced to have his in perpetual turmoil for giving humanity greater power.
This isn’t my allegory, of course, it’s from J. Robert Oppenheimer’s biography with the same title, the source material for Nolan’s 2023 film adaptation. What I expected was a depiction of the internal strife the American theoretical physicist surely must have undergone during the aftermath of WWII and the dropping of two atomic bombs on the Japanese people.
Instead, I saw an hour-and-a-half-long montage of Oppenheimer’s early life, brief encounters with intellectual greats such as Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein, and the assembling of the Manhattan Project followed by highly charged interviews and Senate hearings where he would meet his political and professional career would come careening to a halt at the behest of the unstoppable force of McCarthyism.
The plotline of the American government leveraging and championing genius until it was suited otherwise, then disposing of a national hero at its earliest convenience is indeed a compelling narrative. However shameful, it’s not exactly a surprise that the federal government lacks certain scruples. I mean, Oppenheimer lost his security clearance — after gifting the American people with the tool to end WWII — because of supposed communist connections.
Make no mistake, Oppenheimer did in fact run around in communist circles and may have entertained a handful of Marxist ideals — but in his defense, he was an intellectual. The insidious ideology practically reached ubiquity amongst the academic elite and entertainment class — save for Clint Eastwood and Ronald Reagan — in the middle part of the 20th century. The irony of the US government castigating a man who never actually belonged to the party whilst welcoming scores of ‘reformed’ Nazis into the Department of Defense and NASA is parodical but that point wasn’t touched on in the film.
I’m still in disbelief as to how such a film became the cultural phenomenon it did. I would venture many of the millions who saw it last summer had ever heard of Oppenheimer, or had even contemplated the moral quandary of using an atomic weapon. Nevertheless, the movie was a hit and likely planted the seeds for the types of discourse we saw this past week.
I’ve written about the increasingly isolationist right-wing, but let’s talk about the increasingly anti-American ‘America First’ political denizens.
In the film, physicist and member of the Manhattan Project, Edward Teller, was shown imploring Oppenheimer to be more forthright with his opinions on the possible development of the hydrogen bomb — then colloquially known as ‘the Super’. Somewhat paradoxically, Oppenheimer never expressed his regret for his role in developing the atomic weapon and its use at the end of World War II but was openly opposed to nuclear proliferation and building evermore powerful atomic weapons.
Nolan seemed to have left his own conclusions out of the film. Not much was made of whether or not the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified but of the political backstabbing Oppenheimer would ultimately receive from former colleagues, the FBI, and Lewis Strauss. Never comfortable in ambiguity, however, the talking heads of the new right have latched onto a revisionist history endemic of the radical left.
This week, both Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens satisfied their end of the political horseshoe by condemning the Allied Powers’ actions in WWII. It bears remembering that these conversations have mostly risen on the right due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing war in Gaza and the latest comments appear to be the most recent in a series of equivocating the United States with Putin’s Russia and disavowing American military history in order to better condemn Israel. Both Owens and Carlson accused the American forces of war crimes against both the Germans and the Japanese.
At a first glance, the condemnation of any civilian death in any conflict appears a virtuous and noble statement — if not an altogether lazy one — but to act as if they are easily avoided by any nation that has set its sights on victory is preposterous. Under modest scrutiny, their arguments fall apart when met with reality. At best, the Allied Powers’ actions were justified in totality, at worse, there’s a debate to be had as to whether or not the extremity of the attacks was necessary. Wielding moral clarity on these issues 80 years later is as obnoxious as it is disingenuous.
First, the Germans.
Both Carlson, on Joe Rogan’s podcast, and Owens, on X, piggybacking on Carlson’s statement, renounced the bombings of Dresden, Germany in 1945. Neither of them even pretended to know that Dresden was an industrial base and rail hub that played an integral part in the Nazi regime. Worse, neither of them even mentioned the German Blitzkrieg of London in 1941.
Now, I know it’s tasteless to contrast civilian deaths but do stick with me here. The casualties (meaning both deaths and significant injuries) in Dresden are estimated to be less than 25,000 people, civilians and military personnel. During the Blitz in London, over 40,000 British civilians were killed while estimates nearing 100,000 others were injured. If we’re calling out the Allies, can we not at least highlight what the Axis powers were doing in contrast?
Carlson then cackled at the notion that the Americans were under an imperative to build a nuclear weapon before the Germans did. Yes, as if the death cult that was Nazi Germany would have satiated its appetite with the deaths of six million Jews and the conquering of only mainland Europe. What, pray tell, would have been the alternate outcome of the war if the Germans had harnessed the power of fission first, mein führer?
Second, the Japanese.
What the Japanese were up to in World War II is largely a mystery to Americans. Not because there’s a lack of documentation but because the Pacific theater hasn’t quite captured the imagination of Americans as the goose step has.
For years, the Japanese had been waging a genocidal campaign on the Chinese and had successfully conquered large swathes of the country along with Korea, Singapore, and several other territories. The Chinese were subjected to forced labor camps, countless massacres and atrocities, and systemic policies of torture and collective punishment. Soundly defeating the Japanese in WWII was critical in liberating the Chinese population, yet almost no one offers that as a legitimate reason to why extreme force was necessary.
Harry Truman, who had recently taken over the Presidency from FDR and who had, until he assumed the office, no idea that the Manhattan Project even existed, had the unfortunate position of deciding on whether or not, or how, to use the atomic bomb.
Again, Carlson and Owens (and left-wingers like Nikole Hannah-Jones and Bassem Youssef) are in lockstep on this position. Both considered it a moral blight on the United States’ history that it would have deigned to use such a weapon on the Japanese people — yet neither of them stopped to consider the reality of the situation.
The Germans had surrendered but the Japanese, though they had lost key islands of defense in the Pacific and a heavily diminished naval fleet, resisted capitulating to the Allied Forces. The Japanese, the poor citizens, actually were under the impression that they were winning the war — thanks to propaganda from their own government — and were in no position to accept the terms of surrender.
Estimates show that a land invasion — the alternative to dropping Fat Man and Little Boy — would have yielded a human cost considerably higher than the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To further illustrate the hardened nature of the Japanese people, the subsequent surrender was preceded by a lengthy debate; it was no foregone conclusion. In fact, at one point, the Japanese government and emperor had to thwart a planned coup by the army and citizenry who were intent on keeping the war going. Collective suicide via American and British forces was by no means an obscure idea in Imperial Japan during the last years of World War II.
Unable to entertain the vagaries of war, however, the binary of good and evil must be preserved. As with Oppenheimer’s time, academia has been captured by idiotic anti-American sentiments that are finding a foothold in popular sections of ‘conservative’ media. It doesn’t take too much scrolling on X or this platform to find the sentiment echoed in certain right-wing circles.
This past week, college campuses across the country have been shut down by ‘pro-Palestine’ protests and occupations. Chants of ‘death to America’ — alongside the requisite pro-Hamas cheers — have been heard on American soil in surprising numbers. Without saying it explicitly, the new right and their phony pacifism are advocating for the same outcome.
If the film demonstrated anything, it’s that J. Robert Oppenheimer answered the call that was asked of him, by his people, by the West, and by humanity writ large, and was left to deal with the consequences afterward in isolation. Famously, after the first nuclear test in Los Alamos, quoting the Bhagavad Gita, said, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
Intelligence and genius aside, few and far between are the men or women who could have shouldered the burden that Oppenheimer did when he was credited with the development of the atomic bomb. Maybe, after all, it’s not the achievement that for which he should be celebrated, but the sacrifice for which he should be remembered.
To a better next week,
Cheers,
~FDA