August 6 2023 The Wagnerian Ring of Fear, Power, and Force, and What Plato Got Wrong About Rule By Elites: the Case of Hiroshima

Today is the anniversary of possibly the most terrible war crime ever perpetrated in the history of man’s inhumanity to man and a bitter monument to the collapse of values under the pressure of fear; Hiroshima.

Though the litany of such atrocities would roll on endlessly like a song of despair and horror, there is nothing like America’s use of a weapon which cast men’s souls from their bodies and left their shadows etched upon the walls.

As with all Defining Moments of humankind which have become negotiated truths and a ground of struggle for ownership of the stories of ourselves, memory, history, and identity as a prochronism or history expressed in our form of how we have adapted to change over vast epochs of time, there are really two stories here, which swallow each other like the Ouroboros of Time; the story of events themselves as lived and the Rashomon Gate of stories about these Defining Moments as witnesses of history and what Foucault called truthtelling or the sacred calling to pursue the truth. Stories, and the stories about the stories; and which has ahold of us at any given moment we cannot know.

Hiroshima is such a Defining Moment and Rashomon Gate event, in which humankind is forever changed by our new capacity to annihilate ourselves. As Oppenheimer described it, quoting the Bhagavad-Gita; “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

How will we use such dread power, and how will the mere fact of its existence shape us and our future possibilities of becoming human?

Is this the greatest war crime in history, and the measure of America as the furthest depths of human evil? There are many candidates for that title, however, as humans are cruel and our governments are monuments of force and control. Historically I would say the Mongol origination of biowarfare in catapulting the bodies of plague victims over the walls of the cities they wanted to conquer was also very wicked, and resulted in the population of Europe losing one in every four persons, possibly one in three, during the three hundred year terror of the Black Death. But if Hiroshima is the most terrible of crimes against humanity, it is because it is ours.

The evils of which we are beneficiaries are always the most terrible, if only to us. Sadly, such evils are manifold and numberless; the Conquest and genocide of indigenous peoples of the Americas, slavery, Patriarchy, imperialism, and the culture of violence, militarism, toxic masculinity, and the fetishization of guns which sustains them.

And we have neither renounced nor abandoned the use of such weapons. Indeed, we are making more, and more terrible. In this the true meaning of America to the rest of the world is undeniable and clear; we are a nation whose objective is imperial conquest and whose mission is the annihilation of the human soul.

We can change this path we are on toward destruction and the subjugation of others simply and at any time; abandon the use of social force. A good beginning might be mothballing our nuclear arsenal and all weapons of mass destruction and terror, and disarming the police and other forces of tyranny, repression, and control.

Which brings us to my theme today; unequal power is also violence. For the key to our bewildering transformation from an egalitarian democracy wherein universal rights and the autonomy of individuals is paramount to an authoritarian tyranny of force and control is that militarism and the fetishization of instruments of violence is enormously profitable and necessary to imperialism and a global hegemony of power and privilege. This requires an elite, which both profits from and creates the conditions of inequality in a recursive process.

The fragmentation and class stratification of our free society of equals by hierarchies of exclusionary otherness into a vast precariat inclusive of prison labor as a national policy of the re-enslavement of Black people and theft of citizenship, and an elite hegemony of wealth, power, and privilege constructed on white supremacy and Gideonite patriarchy, is no flaw but a central and inherent design of our society, whereby authority centralizes power unto itself as a tyrannical subversion of Liberty.

The horrific spectacles of open violations of our values and ideals, the perversions and aberrant performances of atavistic barbarism, and the arrogance of impunity of power of the years of the Fourth Reich’s capture of America and the regime of Our Clown of Terror, Traitor Trump, are direct consequences of this process of undemocratization, which began with the demonstration of federal power in the suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, in the global interventions of Manifest Destiny and the paramount dominion of our empire won by our victories in the World Wars, the disastrous co-optation of the Nazi elite in service to the projects of anticommunist imperialism and their capture of the Republican Party in 1980 in alliance with Gideonite fundamentalists, white supremacists, and plutocrats, and the failed attempt to shake off the host political system of the January 6 Insurrection.

As proofs of this theory I offer here two examples; the emergence of a technocratic elite in the creation of a nuclear arsenal and of a medical elite whose purpose is to ensure the dominance of its own class and of social order, and which acts as an arbiter of what is real and what is mad, in the creation of a carceral regime of torture and thought control at Guantanamo and in secret prisons as a test laboratory for America and the world, in part a result of the inevitable imperial phase of America after 911 but which originates with the torturers whose escape from justice we abetted after the Second World War.

In one of the founding documents of our civilization, The Republic, Plato argues that the achievement of virtue is only possible when society is mediated by an elite, philosopher-kings who are beholden to no one and independent of financial interest or influence, experts who may govern by reason. It’s an attractive idea, and one with a long reach; America charged Aaron Burr with treason over corruption, nepotism and bribery, results of an idea of the role of gentlemen in government embedded in the traditions of the British aristocracy.

As Gramsci famously said, “Between force and consent lies corruption”. At the heart of this ancient debate about equality and the nature of the Good lies a simple and easily demonstrable truth; the rule of elites is always against the interests of its subjects, as it concentrates power rather than distributing agency among its citizens as co-owners of their government.

If you wish to see what lies on the opposite side of democracy, just look at Hiroshima and Guantanamo, Wounded Knee and the 1921 Tulsa Massacre, or beyond America’s sphere of dominion and responsibility at political atrocities like the Holocaust, the Siege of Mariupol, Srebrenica, Xinjiang, or at any of the authoritarian regimes throughout the world today which sadly control most of humankind and scheme endlessly to conquer and enslave the rest; Putin’s Russia, Xi Jinping’s China, Modi’s India, and far too many others.

Or to the collapse of the utopia Plato attempted to found by reimagination of the Empire of Syracuse, first by reconstructing the tyrant Dionysius the Second as a Philosopher-King and then by revolutionary seizure of power through his uncle Dion, both his students. This was the first Republic, whose failures and collapse Plato interrogates and fictionalizes in The Republic, the ur-source and founding document of democracy, wherein the sharing and use of social power is envisioned as a ground of struggle between liberty and tyranny.

Why is this important to us now, this origin story of our civilization as a free society of equals born in the Forum of Athens?

Because we today are witnesses to a parallel civilizational collapse from the mechanical failures of our systems’ internal contradictions and the legacies of our histories, caught in the gears of the great machine we serve like Charlie Chaplin in The Factory.

Ours is a machine which runs on the recursive processes of fear, power, and force, forever defined by Hiroshima as its terminal limit. The psychopathy of power and the nihilism of force may be shadows which devour our ideals of the good as freedom, equality, truth, and justice as their originals, our forms and realities from which they are cast, but they are also the products of political decisions and historical processes and not natural and inherent conditions of our humanity. Nor is civilizational collapse an inevitable consequence of democracy.

There are two obvious escapes from this dilemma; the redemptive power of love triumphs over fear and hate as motive forces and systemic harms, and seizures of unequal power restore balance in reply to structural harms. Plato tried them both, and both times failed; but he never tried both together as interdependent and parallel processes of change, as I propose herein.

In the end all that matters is what we do with our fear, and how we use our power.

Hiroshima: Out of the Ashes full film