Lady Liberty in a Mushroom Cloud: Imaging Atrocities as Female

            A strange combination of the ideology of democracy that is, in fact, a pretense, a "necessary illusion" to use Chomsky's term, and the supremacy of scientific progress was illustrated in 1945, when the bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. A New York Times reporter, William Laurence, supposedly representing the 'free press', was asked by General Groves to observe the work being done on atomic weapons and eventually to accompany the flight over Nagasaki. The military hired Laurence to write propaganda, essentially, but Groves claimed it was to give the story "the objective touch". [1] Of course if objectivity means, as the inquiry of this book indicates, that a reporter reports what is in accord with the reigning knowledge system and its vision of power, then Laurence is 'objective'. Laurences reports had to receive the approval of the military. It was Laurence who coined the term the "Atomic Age".           

            With the explosion of the first atom bomb at Trinity, Oppenheimer thought he had become a Hindu god, as I have recounted. Laurence, who was also there,  saw the bomb "as the ultimate symbol of human freedom", Lifton observes. Describing the explosion, Laurence writes: 

The mountain [of fire] that grows above the clouds took the form for a fleeting instant of a gigantic Statue of Liberty, its arm upraised to the sky, symbolizing the birth of a new freedom for man[2]

            Like Columbus and Locke, who describe the lands of the American Continent in terms of the Biblical Genesis, Laurence describes that he felt, while the first bomb exploded, like he was "present at the moment of creation when God said, "let there be light" ". [3] He comes to completely identify himself, as Himmler, Oppenheimer and von Neumann had, with the transcendent feeling of total knowledge and power. He claims, like Truman would, that it may be "the greatest moment in history". Like Custer, Napoleon, Mao, Columbus or Hitler had claimed to be at the pinnacle or summit of history, Laurence thinks he has become godlike, transcendent and one with total power and knowledge.

            The image of the atomic cloud as the transcendent or transfigured Statue of Liberty would follow him to Nagasaki.  Looking at the bomb itself, he describes feeling that he "crossed the borderline between reality and non-reality and felt oneself in the presence of the supernatural".  Abstractions of a totalistic nature seem to generate this feeling of a borderline or shadow area between reality and non reality. One finds similar descriptions in the writings of mystics, psychopathic killers, and men with enormous power, like Alexander the Great for instance, who declared himself a god. Napoleon also saw himself as a kind of god. He writes that "conquest has made me what I am; only conquest can maintain me" and a few years later (1804) "my mistress is power, I have done too much to conquer her to let her be snatched away from me".[4] This tendency to image power or total knowledge as a female to be conquered is disturbing and persistent. Bacon likewise thought of nature as a female, who must be tortured on a rack to reveal her mysteries and thus grant

knowledge and power. Laurence sees power and knowledge as the Statue of Liberty: Japanese corpses under her feet, like the devil under the feet of the Virgin Mary in some Medieval  as well as recent Church sculptures. Similar conception of conquest as a woman to be conquered can be found in images of the European vision of America or Africa. There are sculptures of Africa, America, and Asia created during the era of the European Empires that reflect the same value of European men's need to dominate the world. Personifying the African or American continents as female enabled  European men to image or represent the desired object they wished to conquer.  America is usually pictured as nude in these images, and thus particularly open to male advantage, use and exploitation. [5] Picturing the will to power and the atrocities it produces as a female deity or a conquered woman no doubt gratifies some need in these men to excuse their participation in atrocity by feminizing it, as if the image of a woman somehow softens the horror. Actually it makes the horror and the deception of its righteousness even more appalling.

            In any case, as Laurence flies over Nagasaki, with the bomb near him, he describes the people of the city as all: 

having gone to bed, men women and children... they were like the fatted calf...saved for the slaughter... Here I am. I am destiny. I know. They do not know. But I know that this is their last night on earth...I was thinking: there's a feeling of a human being, a mere mortal, a newspaper man by profession, suddenly has this knowledge which has been given to him- a   sense- you might say- of divinity. [6]

Here most of the myths of knowledge/power are rolled into one. There is the pose of value neutrality- the reporter scientifically detached: the myth of scientific progress leading to the destruction of 'inferior' peoples for the purpose of revealing the truth: the myth of democracy in the image of the Statue of Liberty raising her transcendent arm to announce the birth of a new age of freedom while beneath her skirts over a hundred thousand people are dead and dying: the myth of destiny and history- the belief that knowledge and power deserves to conquer and history is the story of conquerors, the Christian myth of the fatted calf, who like Christ is brought to slaughter and eaten for the glory of god, America and science.

            This last myth is complemented by a painting, by Thomas Gast, called America, in which another maiden, again dressed, like the statue in New York harbor, in Greek or Roman clothes and representing Liberty, floats in the sky above the landscape of America, stretching east to west, from sea to shining sea.[7] Like Laurence's image of the Statue of Liberty, this woman is Manifest Destiny, but instead of benignly smiling down on the Nagasaki holocaust, she smiles down on the murder of Native American men, women and children, buffalo, and the conquest of the landscape itself. She wears the "star of empire" on her forehead, and beneath her, trains and stagecoaches, and pioneers with all the implements of science and civilization march toward the West, cutting down trees and killing Indians in the way. She carries a book in her hand, representing knowledge, and some wire cable, representing science,. The book, carried by the personification of empire is also supposed to represent "the emblem of education and the testimonial of our national enlightenment". [8] This is an  image of the relationship of atrocity to knowledge and power, science, empire and history.

             Here again the image of a goddess justifies the brutality and effort  towards extermination. like the cruel image of Justice as a blindfolded woman overseeing the injustice of many of  the decisions of American courts: or as Athena in Homer is the goddess that leads the way to brutal war and bloody revenge. The use of the female image to justify male domination and atrocities is an ancient strategy, going back well before the use of the Virgin Mary as the image of Crusade and plunder. [9] Imagining atrocity as female is a strategy that helps excuse its horror and cloak the greed of the will to power. It is a form of advertising: a means to sell a system of knowledge/power through exploitation of attractive images.

            In any case, the march of Empire and Manifest Destiny leaves corpses, and elaborate systems of knowledge and justification have been created to justify this fact.

Scientific neutrality is one such justification,  the impersonality or infallibility of god is another. In the American vision of 'excellence' or Manifest Destiny, the notion of progress, science and the march of history coalesce with a corporate vision of humanity as moving ever toward a Darwinian vision of success. The American Dream is a theology were the price of success for one group of people cruelly forces the end of possibilities for another group. Europeans succeed Native Americans, brutally, or Mexican Americans, in the case of the Mexican American War, or Africans, in the case of slavery or the later "new slavery" that followed upon  the so called 'emancipation' of 1865. The conquered people's are left the option of assimilation or resistance and death. This a Darwinian and a cruel choice, really not a choice at all. The victims of the Darwinian American dream have no recourse but to protest and describe their plight and their victimization, in the hopes that history itself will somehow change and the powerful face their own cruelty and greed. But this rarely happens. History in this context becomes a system of inclusion, but inclusion means assimilation to the American dream and the corporate values that dominate American economic and political life. Freedom in any real sense is denied and the cycle of opportunity and failure proceeds victimizing some while elevating others in a cycle of poverty, exploitation, inclusion and greed.

            Von Neumann and Laurence were 'successful men", winners of the American dream. There is a continuity of historical ideals from the founding of the Plymouth colony in 1620 to von Neumann's vision of his own ego exalted by the atom bomb and the computer or Laurence's vision of Lady Liberty in the Mushroom cloud. Science and commodities justified killing the Native Americans off, in some cases eliminating entire tribes from the face of the earth.

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