Not everything that is faced can
be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
– James Baldwin
You cannot understand the
twentieth century without Hiroshima.
– Robert J. Lifton and Greg
Mitchell
Every day we scroll past
photographs of burned children, bombed-out neighborhoods, families clawing
through rubble with their bare hands, and parents carrying the bodies of sons
and daughters killed beneath collapsing concrete. Such images seldom unsettle
our conscience, provoke outrage, and awaken a demand for justice. Increasingly,
they do none of these things. They register briefly before dissolving into
another statistic, another headline, another passing image in the endless
digital stream. Violence has become familiar, suffering routine, and genocide
itself is in danger of becoming just another image consumed and forgotten... This is not merely a political
development; it is one of the great moral and cultural disasters of our age.
We
have not simply become accustomed to living amid unprecedented violence, we
have been educated to accommodate it. Cruelty no longer confronts us as an
ethical rupture demanding judgment and action. It has been absorbed into the
rhythms of everyday life, stripped of its capacity to shock, and transformed
into yet another spectacle competing for our distracted attention.
Under such conditions, the
dehumanization of others is inseparable from the transformation of the
machinery of death into a spectacle consumed with fascination rather than
horror. The deepest victory of authoritarian politics in the twenty-first
century lies not only in its capacity to produce immense suffering, pain, and
death, but in its ability to cultivate moral indifference while making violence
appear seductive, entertaining, or inevitable.
When people cease to feel the
pain of others, violence no longer requires widespread consent; it needs only
widespread indifference.
As the anniversaries of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki return once again, they do so largely eclipsed by the
Trump administration’s transformation of the nation’s two
hundred and fiftieth anniversary into a spectacle of militarized patriotism,
historical mythmaking, and American triumphalism. The pageantry celebrates
a narrative of national innocence while eclipsing one of the twentieth
century’s greatest atrocities committed in its name.
The more urgent question,
therefore, is not simply what happened in August 1945. It is what has become of
a society whose formative institutions increasingly educate people to
accommodate violence rather than resist it.
The answer lies in more than
what Gore
Vidal once described as America’s cultivated historical amnesia. Under
gangster capitalism, forgetting has become a governing principle of power. We
inhabit a regime of organized forgetting that
erases bodies from public consciousness even as it erases historical memory
itself. It teaches us to look without seeing, to witness without feeling, and
to consume the suffering of others as another spectacle in an endless cycle of
distraction, entertainment, and forgetting. Such regimes are not abstractions.
They become visible whenever policies capable of producing immense human
suffering disappear beneath the noise of political spectacle—as in the Trump
administration’s dismantling of the United States Agency for International
Development, a policy that recent analyses estimate has already contributed to
“an
estimated 700,000 deaths worldwide.”
How else are we to understand a
world in which more than sixty-four
thousand Palestinian children have been killed or injured in Gaza since October
2023 while their suffering disappears almost as quickly as the
headlines that briefly acknowledge it? How else do we explain the reported
deaths of more than one
hundred children in the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran, an event that
barely registered before it was displaced by the next manufactured spectacle?
These are not isolated tragedies. They reveal a broader cultural condition in
which atrocity is consumed, circulated, and forgotten with astonishing speed.
This is the deepest wound
inflicted by authoritarian culture. It does not merely normalize violence; it
reorganizes consciousness. It severs suffering from compassion, history from
responsibility, and death from mourning.
When the victims disappear from memory
almost as quickly as they disappear from life, power secures one of its
greatest triumphs: it destroys not only bodies but the public capacity to
recognize their loss. In that moment, forgetting becomes the final act of
violence, completing in consciousness what bombs, prisons, armies, and
occupations begin in history.
This cultural condition has been analyzed most
powerfully by Robert Jay Lifton.
Robert Jay Lifton
gave this condition a name: psychic numbing. He used the phrase
to describe the diminished capacity to feel in the face of overwhelming
violence. What begins as a psychological defense against unbearable suffering
can become a cultural and political condition. Entire societies learn to look
without seeing, to witness without feeling, and eventually to forget.
This
condition is not merely an individual affliction, or type of “impaired mourning”;
it is a form of public pedagogy. It is cultivated by schools emptied of
critical thought, historical consciousness, and civic purpose; it is
produced by media cultures organized around spectacle, digital
platforms that reward distraction, a culture of immediacy, and political
narratives that teach us to accommodate cruelty rather than confront it.
Against this pedagogy of forgetting stands the difficult and necessarily
troubling work of historical memory.
These questions matter because
remembrance is not the same as historical memory. Official rituals of
remembrance often console us by confining catastrophe safely to the past. As
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. notes in America, U.S.A., historical memory
performs a very different task. It returns us to unfinished histories whose
consequences continue to inhabit the present. It
unsettles rather than reassures. It refuses the comfort of distance
and insists that the past is never truly past when the conditions that produced
it survive in altered forms. Historical memory does not ask us simply to
remember what happened. It demands that we recognize how the logics that made
catastrophe possible continue to shape the present.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki belong to
precisely this kind of historical memory because they remind us that atrocities
begin long before the first bomb falls. They begin when language is removed
from moral responsibility, when history is erased or rewritten through the
vocabulary of conquest and colonization, and when entire populations are
rendered disposable before they are destroyed. Every genocide is first a crisis
of language, memory, and moral imagination.
By the time the machinery of death
is set in motion, the deeper work has already been done; compassion has been
weakened, historical consciousness has been dismantled, and violence has been
normalized as common sense.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki stand not only as symbols of
unprecedented destruction but also as warnings about the political culture that
makes such destruction imaginable. Few have expressed this truth more
forcefully than the late
Howard Zinn: What means could be more
horrible than the burning, mutilation, blinding, irradiation of hundreds of
thousands of Japanese men, women, children?
And yet it is absolutely essential
for our political leaders to defend the bombing because if Americans can be
induced to accept that, then they can accept any war, any means, so long as the
warmakers can supply a reason. And there are always plausible reasons delivered
from on high as from Moses on the Mount.
The
atomic bombings were not merely military events that concluded the Second World
War. They inaugurated a new historical formation in which scientific
achievement became inseparable from industrialized killing, technological
rationality overwhelmed ethical judgment, and civilian annihilation could be
justified through the sanitized language of military necessity, national
security, and historical inevitability. Long before the bombs incinerated
cities, another devastation had already taken place. Human beings had been
transformed into abstractions, dehumanized through racist slurs, strategic
calculations, and collateral damage.
The bomb exploded first in
consciousness. As
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o reminds us, “Language as culture is the collective memory
bank of a people’s experience in history.” When language is colonized,
memory itself becomes vulnerable to conquest—capturing consciousness long
before it captures territory.
Long before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were reduced
to ash, language had already been emptied of moral responsibility, memory had
been rewritten in the service of empire, and entire populations had been
rendered disposable.
That moral rupture did not
disappear with the mushroom clouds rising over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It
became embedded in institutions, policies, cultural narratives, and educational
practices that normalized militarism while celebrating technological mastery
divorced from ethical restraint. The bomb was transformed into a symbol of
national virtue rather than a warning about the abyss into which modern
civilization had descended.
As
Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell observed, American political culture
constructed an official narrative that sought not to confront the moral
catastrophe of Hiroshima but to redeem it, converting an act of unprecedented
destruction into a story of national innocence and salvation. That narrative
did more than justify the bomb. It reorganized moral consciousness.
Lifton argued that Hiroshima did
not wound only its victims; it also left a profound mark on the American
imagination, fostering a culture of denial, moral justification, and emotional
numbing. Yet he never regarded Hiroshima solely as a source of despair. He
insisted that confronting its moral legacy honestly could foster resilience,
renewal, and what he
called “survivor wisdom,” restoring the historical memory and moral
imagination necessary to resist future catastrophes. That insight is even more
urgent today because the habits of denial and indifference he identified have
escaped the nuclear age and become defining features of contemporary political
culture.
Among survivors of Hiroshima,
this diminished capacity to feel initially functioned as a tragic form of
psychological survival. Faced with scenes too horrific to absorb, many found
themselves emotionally paralyzed, temporarily incapable of responding to the
landscape of death surrounding them. But Lifton extended the concept much
further. He argued that the same condition also characterized those who
designed the bomb, authorized its use, justified its necessity, and later
defended its moral legitimacy. What began as an emergency psychological defense
gradually became a cultural condition. This insight reaches far beyond
Hiroshima. What begins as a defense against unbearable suffering can evolve
into a political culture organized around indifference.
A society that learns
not to feel one atrocity gradually acquires the capacity to ignore others.
Lifton warned that once Americans constructed what he called a “cordon
sanitaire” around Hiroshima—a barrier protecting them from confronting its
moral implications—that habit of avoidance spread to other forms of collective
suffering. The numbing did not stop with Hiroshima. It became a way of
inhabiting the world.
Nothing could better describe
our present historical moment. We inhabit societies saturated with images of
catastrophe. Yet rather than enlarging our ethical imagination, this relentless
exposure often produces exhaustion, indifference, and resignation.
Even more troubling, it feeds a
resurgent war culture that glorifies domination, celebrates militarized
masculinity, and equates physical strength with moral worth. As Susan Sontag
argued in her classic essay on fascist aesthetics, authoritarian culture does
more than justify violence; it aestheticizes it. Domination becomes seductive,
hierarchy beautiful, submission desirable, and the spectacle of power detached
from the suffering it produces.
Violence no longer appears as a moral
catastrophe but as an exhilarating display of strength, discipline, virility,
and national renewal. U.S.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s celebration of militarized masculinity is
not simply a political posture; it is the contemporary expression of this
fascist aesthetic.
It transforms domination into virtue, physical force into
moral authority, misogyny into masculine authenticity, and violence into the
highest expression of citizenship. In doing so, it redefines citizenship
itself, replacing democratic responsibility with militarized obedience, civic
courage with warrior masculinity, and public life with a theater of force.
In such a culture,
violence becomes another genre of entertainment, another spectacle in the
economy of distraction. The constant circulation of suffering no longer
enlarges compassion; it erodes it, teaching people not simply to witness
violence but increasingly to admire, consume, and normalize it.
Lifton anticipated this
transformation with extraordinary clarity. As this moral desensitization
spreads, he argued, people require ever greater spectacles of violence simply
to feel anything at all. Disaster becomes normalized, and ordinary suffering loses
its capacity to disturb us.
Here the legacy of Hiroshima
converges with the digital culture of the twenty-first century.
Algorithms reward outrage while
discouraging reflection. Social media platforms monetize fear, resentment, and
humiliation. Corporate news reduces war to spectacle, compressing unbearable
histories into disposable images. Artificial intelligence accelerates the
circulation of propaganda, conspiracy, and racial mythology while diminishing
the time necessary for thoughtful judgment. We increasingly encounter suffering
not as fellow human beings but as data, content, or scrolling images. Distance
becomes permanent. Responsibility evaporates.
This is not simply a
technological crisis. It is a pedagogical one.
Every culture teaches people how
to see, what to value, whose lives matter, and whose deaths may be ignored. The
most powerful educational institutions today are no longer schools alone. They
are digital platforms, corporate media, entertainment industries, and
algorithmic systems that organize attention itself. These institutions do more
than distribute information. They shape consciousness, organize attention, and
cultivate habits of feeling. They manufacture forms of identification while
teaching indifference toward others.
Under such conditions, fascism
no longer requires spectacular rallies or uniforms to reproduce itself. It
works more quietly and, for that reason, often more effectively. It reshapes
perception, colonizes language, erodes historical memory, and teaches people to
regard entire populations as invaders, parasites, criminals, terrorists, or
demographic threats rather than as fellow human beings. By the time the
machinery of violence is set in motion, its deepest victory has already been
won: the democratic imagination has been hollowed out, compassion has yielded
to fear, and disposability has become common sense.
Today this pedagogy of
dehumanization is once again becoming normalized. Calls for mass deportation,
fantasies of ethnic purification disguised as “remigration,” attacks on
immigrants, racial conspiracy theories, and genocidal rhetoric directed at
Palestinians all depend upon a prior educational achievement: teaching people
to regard certain lives as disposable.
That
is why figures such as Elon Musk matter. They matter not because they are
uniquely evil but because they occupy commanding positions within the cultural
apparatuses that now educate hundreds of millions of people. When racist
conspiracies, demographic panic, and authoritarian fantasies are amplified
through platforms reaching much of the globe, white supremacist propaganda is
transformed into common sense. Hatred becomes normalized precisely because it
is repeated, circulated, rewarded, and stripped of its historical genealogy.
As
Jamelle Bouie has argued, Musk’s rhetoric is no longer confined to coded
insinuations or internet provocation. It increasingly echoes themes drawn from
the contemporary white nationalist imagination: affirming slogans such as
“First the traitors, then the invaders”; declaring that “anyone who opposes
remigration is a traitor”; amplifying demographic panic over declining white
birthrates; and normalizing the language of racial replacement and ethnic
cleansing.
Bouie also notes the disturbing resonance between this rhetoric and the
political imaginary of The Turner Diaries, where “traitors” who
defend a multiracial democracy are marked for elimination before the campaign
against supposed “invaders” begins. This should not be dismissed merely as
inflammatory rhetoric. Language of this kind does not simply describe the
world; it prepares people to inhabit one in which exclusion, racial
purification, and political violence appear not only legitimate but necessary.
Yet we should resist the
temptation to describe figures such as Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Benjamin
Netanyahu, or Stephen Miller simply as monsters.
As Jorge Gonzalez
Arocha observes, the language of monstrosity may satisfy our moral outrage,
but it ultimately obscures the deeper workings of power. Monsters exist outside
history. They are imagined as aberrations, exceptions to ordinary life. Fascism
is neither. It is produced within history, cultivated through institutions,
sustained by bureaucracies, legitimized by law, amplified by media, and
normalized through the everyday pedagogies of schools, digital platforms,
entertainment industries, and political culture. When we imagine authoritarianism
as the work of monsters, we mistake symptoms for causes, overlooking the social
relations, institutional arrangements, and cultural forces that make such
politics possible.
The enduring lesson of Hiroshima
is not that monsters occasionally seize power. It is that educated people,
respected institutions, celebrated scientists, compliant journalists, and
ordinary citizens can become participants in systems that separate technical
intelligence from moral responsibility. The bureaucrats who planned Hiroshima
were not monsters. The scientists who perfected the bomb were not monsters. The
journalists who celebrated it were not monsters. They were products of
institutions that transformed mass death into administrative necessity and
moral obligation. The greatest crimes of modernity are rarely committed outside
civilization; they are committed in its name.
The political danger of the
language of monstrosity is that it individualizes what is fundamentally
systemic. It encourages us to search for evil personalities rather than
authoritarian cultures, for pathological leaders rather than the pedagogical
apparatuses that educate people into accepting cruelty, disposability, and
organized forgetting. Remove one authoritarian leader and another will take his
place so long as the institutions, economic interests, media ecosystems, and
educational forces that manufacture authoritarian consciousness remain intact.
That is the enduring lesson of Hiroshima, and it remains the central political
lesson of our own time.
History never repeats itself
mechanically. Gaza is not Hiroshima. Nagasaki is not Gaza. Their histories are
different, their contexts distinct. But they reveal a recurring political
logic: civilian populations rendered disposable, overwhelming violence
justified as necessity, bureaucratic language replacing ethical judgment, and
technological superiority mistaken for moral legitimacy. Whenever human beings
become abstractions rather than persons, the conditions for atrocity are
already present.
This is why remembering Nagasaki
matters. Historical comparison is valuable not because it erases difference but
because it reveals recurring political logics.
Historical memory breaks the
spell of moral indifference. It restores the connection between feeling and
judgment, conscience and politics. It reminds us that every genocide begins not
with the machinery of death but with the pedagogy of dehumanization. Long
before bodies are destroyed, language is corrupted, history is erased,
compassion is ridiculed, and entire populations are taught to disappear morally
before they disappear physically.
Lifton believed that confronting
Hiroshima could become a source of renewal because it enabled us to recover our
moral imagination, relearn how to feel, and reconnect ourselves to the broader
human project. That may be the most important lesson Nagasaki offers today.
The struggle against fascism
begins not only by resisting authoritarian institutions but by refusing the
moral indifference upon which they depend. Against organized forgetting and
manufacture illiteracy and amnesia, we must recover historical memory. Against
the politics of disposability, we must insist upon the irreducible dignity of
every human life. Against the seductive myths of technological omnipotence and
permanent war, we must reclaim a language capable of naming both truth and
justice.
The authoritarian abyss is no
longer a distant possibility. It has entered the present. It appears wherever
democracy yields to militarism, wherever cruelty is celebrated as strength,
wherever historical memory is erased, and wherever entire peoples are stripped
of their humanity in the name of security, racial purity, or national destiny.
The forces that produced Hiroshima and Nagasaki have not disappeared; they have
assumed new languages, new technologies, and new justifications.
The question is no longer
whether we remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The question is whether we can
recover the moral urgency necessary to prevent their logic from becoming the
defining political grammar of the twenty-first century.
Historical memory is no
longer simply an act of remembrance; it has become a condition of survival. To
remember is to resist. But memory cannot remain a sanctuary for conscience; it
must become a catalyst for collective struggle. Its highest purpose is not
simply to preserve the past but to interrupt/rupture/transform the present.
Only when remembrance gives rise to solidarity, organized resistance, and the
struggle to create a more just world does it honor those whose lives history
has tried to erase.
Henry A. Giroux currently
holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in
the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire
Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include: The
Terror of the Unforeseen (Los Angeles Review of books, 2019), On Critical
Pedagogy, 2nd edition (Bloomsbury, 2020); Race, Politics, and Pandemic
Pedagogy: Education in a Time of Crisis (Bloomsbury 2021); Pedagogy of
Resistance: Against Manufactured Ignorance (Bloomsbury 2022) and Insurrections:
Education in the Age of Counter-Revolutionary Politics (Bloomsbury, 2023), and
coauthored with Anthony DiMaggio, Fascism on Trial: Education and the
Possibility of Democracy (Bloomsbury, 2025). Giroux is also a member of
Truthout’s board of directors.
