Several celebrities, including J Robert Oppenheimer’s grandson, have signed an open letter pleading for nuclear disarmament, days before Christopher Nolan’s epic 'Oppenheimer' is expected to sweep up at the Oscars.
Recension av "Oppenheimer" i Jacobin: [av Leigh Phillips is a science writer and EU affairs journalist. He is the author of Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-Porn Addicts.]
"But even if in the film it’s the radicals who appear to have the first misgivings, it would be a mistake to think that it was the political right that approved of the bombing and only the Left who opposed it. The newspaper of the CPUSA, the Daily Worker, declared after the bombing that the Allies were lucky to have found struck “before the enemy can devise countermeasures.” The paper went on: “So let us not greet our atomic device with a shudder, but with the elation and admiration which the genius of man deserves.” Perhaps, one might counter, such calculation is to be expected from Stalinists. Yet the non-Stalinist but still progressive magazines The Nation and the New Republic felt little differently. Nation editor Freda Kirchwey wrote at the time: “The suffering, the wholesale slaughter it entailed, have been outweighed by its spectacular success.”
Few escaped the twentieth century with their honor intact, although it’s noteworthy that it was the more religious side of the liberal-left who was the first to mark their disquiet at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As historian Paul Boller noted, it was in fact the social gospel–oriented Catholic weekly Commonweal and its protestant counterpart Christian Century that straight out of the gate argued that the bombings had destroyed the nation’s moral position in the world.
---
sista stycket: Det finns återigen en antydan i Nolans film. Det ursprungliga löftet om gränslös frigörelse från dominans - vare sig från andra människor eller från resten av naturen - som gavs när modernitetens tre världar förenades under 1900-talets första år, har inte svikits så mycket som det har lämnats ouppfyllt. Det som Oppie och Rabi och resten av efterkrigstidens progressiva motståndare till kärnvapenspridning strävade efter - en internationalistisk egalitarism utan CPUSA:s dogmer och falska vissheter, där hela världen drog nytta av kärnkraften men kärnvapen var förbjudna - förblir målet.
While it’s always refreshing to see the lives of working people centered in our media, the docuseries Working: What We Do All Day is hampered by the limitations of its host and narrator, former president Barack Obama.
