Hiroshima Aftermath
Brossard, Chandler
Hiroshima Aftermath Death in Life, by Robert Jay Lif-ton. Random House. 594 pp. $10. Reviewed by Chandler Brossard It is my conviction that nearly all education in the schools is a fraud and is...
...Lifton, is a viable approximation of the thing...
...Fraud in that the same hallucinated "history" and "viewpoints"—the wrong data and the wrong evaluations—are taught over and over again...
...I ask myself: How can I separate this intellectual Western tradition from the explosion of the bomb...
...Or to be more fantastically exact, nothingness...
...This is part of the nothingness I mentioned...
...I cannot imagine a more complete study...
...Of course...
...Lifton's Death in Life...
...Lifton is writing for, absorbs this book and puts it into that fathomless collection of similarly dedicated "studies" of human behavior...
...Reviewed by Chandler Brossard It is my conviction that nearly all education in the schools is a fraud and is also dangerous...
...For it is this loathing, and with it the dehumanizing contempt, that brought us to the brink of oceanic bloodshed...
...The symbols, thoughts, configurations, abstractions—the assumed rapport—of his study came out of the very society that dropped the bomb that took men to another world of being...
...Language and thought systems collapse, and what we get, both from them and from Dr...
...I can't...
...What happens to the reader as a result of reading Dr...
...And who can afford such study...
...Lifton's infinitely patient methodology and interpretation...
...Explicate this unbearably human and Bunyan-esque statement, and you have a 594-page, Western study of the Asian Hiroshima experience...
...Robert Jay Lifton's massive analytical documentation of Hiroshima's annihilation, Death in Life, forces one back to one's origins, though this is not its purpose...
...But this thought occurs to me: If the whites (children or adults) were to examine seriously the psycho-social dynamics of their black-yellow racism, the result might be the end of their own civilization's structure...
...My intellectual acculturation, the very sensibility Dr...
...or second, a transcendental state where a totally new language and environment of response are necessitated for dealing with the transcendental, which is exactly what the bombing was...
...One must admire his plan: the examination, no less, of human kind responding to the unthinkable—that is, the end of the world...
...A strange thing indeed: nothing...
...Lifton's work is summed up in this poetic statement from a Japanese: "I was forced to find my own path and to work very hard to do that...
...Absurdity...
...What our children should be studying (I'm not sure it would do the encased adults any good) is why the white man loathes and wants to exterminate the black man and the yellow man...
...In a real, and perhaps ultimately integrative, sense, all of Dr...
...His project was to re-record and then analyze—-within the Western disciplines of psychoanalytical character theory, linguistic and philosophical image making, and balanced moods of scientific stability and personal human feelings—the effect of the atom bomb on the people of Hiroshima...
...This situation can cause serious grief to a conscientious auditor...
...Trying to think about the unthinkable puts a person into one of two states: first, a strategically reductive emotional and mental condition where reality is measured in terms of stones and streets and "things...
...While anxious and vulnerable children are being drilled in "civics" and the agricultural products of, say, Brazil, their older male relatives are dropping bombs and napalm on the Vietnamese, subverting indigenous revolts in Africa, and conning the American Indian out of his natural anger...
...The sanity of his project appeals to the sanity of my training —rather depends upon it for viability —and as a logical result the insanity of the hell-happening remains forever lost (except, of course, to the victims...
...Insight cannot be gained in bad faith...
...Dangerous in that this "education" leads the masses of white people to commit the most unspeakable crimes against our weaker, differently colored, and antithetically oriented brothers...
...And the heartbreaking paradox is this: The victims' own structured rationality prevents them from dealing with, and communicating, the transcendental experience...
...Every inhuman aspect of that instant (but so thoroughly calculated and rationalized) hell is revealed and explored, both in first person accounts and in Dr...
Vol. 32 • July 1968 • No. 7
