Some Pictures of Knowledge/Power

            When everything is possible, nothing can be done.
            No way out is sometimes the way out.
            History is a wound. The past cannot be healed except by those in the present.
            We are united in peace against those who would destroy us.
            I am haunted by histories and the meaning of pictures.

            There is a photograph of a Japanese woman just after Nagasaki, covered with radiation burns, breast feeding a baby, also burned, who, along with his mother, will perhaps soon die.  Yet she feeds him anyway, tragically hoping he will live.

            There is a picture from the films made of Hiroshima after the bombing, long covered up by the U.S. government, that shows a bus destroyed by the bomb surrounded by  human skulls and backbones.[1]

            There is a village in Vietnam,  'saved for freedom', but everyone in it is dead  or fled into the forest and it is burned and razed to the ground.

            There was a shop on Hispanola, where Native American body parts were for sale, to feed to the well fed dogs of the Spaniards.

            There is the Wounded Knee graveyard, four lonely flags blowing in the wind  at the corners of the fence  that surrounds where the mass grave was dug. It is perhaps the most moving cemetery I have ever been in. Few people go there. They go down the road some miles, with thousands of other tourists, to visit the grave of Custer, a murderer who proclaimed it his manifest destiny to kill Native Americans.

            There are the disappeared, hundreds of thousands of them, dropped from airplanes in Argentina or killed by goon squads in Honduras and El Salvador.

            There is the image of Christ, in many Christian paintings of the apocalypse, smiling benignly as he orders most of the world's people to be tortured, burned or mutilated for eternity.  There are similar pictures in Buddhist and Hindu Iconography. The same pictures appear in written form in the Koran.    

            There are those who died for "history", because the vain Emperor thought he was the embodiment of the 'mandate of heaven': because of the thousand year Reich, because Muhammed or Christ or Marx thought they understood the final meaning of history. There are millions of corpses, all victims of histories, theories of history, or those who had the "real" story.

            There are dragons on many of the walls of the Forbidden City in Peking. It is a symbol of the Emperor and of the Tao; it represents the power that devours the many and the knowledge that benefits the very few.

            There is Orozco's painting of  skeleton-scholars in graduation robes watching a skeleton give birth to another Professor of imperial knowledge.

            There is the picture of William Laurence, who exulted as he watched the triumphant mushroom cloud rise over Nagasaki, because he believed he saw Lady Liberty in the cloud. 150,000  people were dying or dead under her skirts.

            The picture of the eyes of Gypsy and Jewish children injected with blue dyes by the Nazi doctors in an attempt to make them look like Aryans. The children went blind or died. These experiments were part of Himmler's program of racist extermination in the German Camps of World War II

            There is the picture of Issac Newton's tomb in Westminster Abbey.  A sculpture of Newton reclines on a cenotaph, his hand nonchalantly motioning to a picture of the heavens revolving in perfect spheres of gravitational order. Yet while Newton was imagining perfect harmonies in the heavens, and giving very important talks at the Royal Society of scientists, English ships were sailing across the Atlantic carrying slaves to the new world and those who died in passage were thrown overboard like garbage. Is there a relation between Newton's need of glory and the treating of humans like garbage. I think so. The cosmological pictures of Descartes, Newton and Darwin, with their machine, clock and competitive metaphors are justifications of industrialism and imperialism.

            There is the picture of Oppenheimer watching the first nuclear explosion and imaging himself as a god, with the power of death and life in his grasp. He spoke of the "technical sweetness" of making the bomb. This raises the question of what is the relation of the pursuit of scientific truth to the atrocities  of the imperial conquest from 1492 to Nagasaki.

            There is the picture of Von Neumann, whose insatiable greed for power led him to the intersection  where the highest levels of government, academic and corporate institutions all meet. There he promoted nuclear and computer technologies, which he felt were extensions of his own ego,  as if mathematical and technical apparatus could extend his influence, fame and need of immortal power.

            There is the picture of Cortez walking arrogantly down a street of Tenochtitlan, with the bodies so thick under his feet that he must walk on them. He and his men had killed more than 40,000  that day.

            There is the picture of 38 Dakota Indians killed in 1862, by settlers who stole their land. William Mayo, of the Mayo clinic dug them up, still warm, and used their bodies for science, America and the superior civilization.

            There is a picture taken at My Lai, of women and children about to be murdered by American soldiers. A woman cowers in fear, the children do not understand.

            And there are the words of President Johnson, justifying this atrocity--- words which today's preachers of multicultural manifest destiny might recognize as similar to their own-- "Americans and Asians are dying for a world where each may chose a path to change".[2]  The women and children were offered death as their path to  change and freedom, as Native Americans, African slaves, and people from the Philippines, Nagasaki, Korea, Panama and Iraq had been offered similar freedoms in death.  Over 4 million Vietnamese killed by the US; 55,000 children killed by the US in Iraq in four days.

             When these atrocities are listed in this way, the magnitude of the horror tends to be mind-numbing. The process of numbing is a major problem in discussing these atrocities. No one wants to look at them. No matter what harms are done to others, the ethic of self interest, and the refusal to consider information that is too painful, tends to take over. Actually the ethic of self-interest, and the Lockean and capitalist philosophies that justify self interest, as we shall see, is a major factor in some of the atrocities of the last 500 years.  An aspect of my thesis is to show that all these atrocities are interrelated. I list  some of them together at the outset to give an idea of the scope of the horror involved. Over the succeeding chapters I hope to lessen the numbing effect of the above list and to show something of the logic of death and the rationality of horror that is involved in these atrocities.  I wish to show the involvement of  theories of knowledge and some of mankind's highest aspirations in creating these atrocities. None of the above pictures are easily explained. But I will try, nevertheless, to explain what they mean to me, however others may interpret them differently. What follows is a  prefatory overview, which can be read as an introduction or a conclusion. I state my conclusions throughout the text as well and so have not felt the need to write a formal conclusion. Certainly, the subject would bear much more research, and this also is one of my conclusions.

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