Hiroshima Day

70 Years And Counting (Towards What, I don't Know)

This time of year always gets a little hairy with Hiroshima Day and Nagasaki Day and VJ day all coming within days of another. It gives you a sense how hurried the end of WWII was, back in 1945. Still, I try to shut out the commentary on what it means today because frankly, it's been 70years. I don't know how to break it to people, but 70years is history. It should be awarded some more objectivity than rehashed propaganda, but of course that's not what we get.

I was driving over to my parents place and on Drive with Richard Glover was Geraldine Doogue and Lisa Wilkinson. Richard Glover - a witty bastard any day of the week, respect - asked with a serious tone, whether dropping the bomb was worth it. Geraldine Doogue's answer gave me the shits. Essentially, she quoted some historian who wanted to know why we talk about the dead of Hiroshima more than the 25million victims of the Japanese military aggression; and the fact the Japanese were willing to fight to the death justified dropping the bomb, so doing so saved lives; and this makes it justifiable. Lisa Wilkinson thought that the point of wars was being a bigger bastard than the other guy, and so America was willing to be the biggest baddest bastard and that explained the bomb.

Central to this construction is this ongoing myth that the two bombs brought about the Unconditional Surrender of Japan. I say myth because I've read a fair deal of the meetings held by the Five Ministers in front of the Emperor. The Imperial Conferences were an abbreviated briefing of the Emperor to short circuit the need to have cabinet meetings followed by reports to the Imperial Palace. Obviously it evolved out of the necessity because the war situation changed so quickly and so often it was easier to have the Emperor in the room to rubber stamp decisions. It also meant the Emperor had to sit and listen to the ministers ague.

The five Ministers at the Imperial Conferences were the Prime Minister, the Army Minister, the Navy Minister, the Finance Minister and the Foreign Minister. By early August 1945, these meetings were fairly desultory. Kantaro Suzuki was the Prime Minister, a retired Admiral, who was charged by the Emperor Hirohito to bring the war to an "honourable end". Those thing are pretty hard to get when you're getting spanked, but nonetheless, that was his job.

There are transcripts and reports of these meetings. The Navy Minister was Mitsumasa Yonai, an admiral who was later exonerated at the Tokyo Trials; and the Army minister was Korechika Anami, who argued the line that the people of Japan were willing to die to the man, and so the only honourable end to the war was where everybody died for the Emperor. You can imagine how the Emperor might have felt about that, waiting to rubber stamp that horrible decision.

On the morning of the 6th of August 1945, they were having yet another one of these meetings. There is an interruption where it is reported that a new bomb has been dropped on Hiroshima and devastated the city with one blast. And it barely registers with the Five Ministers. I've read that passage at least four or five times and it is indiscernible that this new - earth shattering even - information affected the discussion. The sticking point in all of these meetings in August was what "subject to" meant in the Potsdam Declaration that demanded the unconditional surrender.

If the Allies meant "subject to" in general, then sure, that is what a surrender is; but if they meant "subject to"  as in the Emperor was going to be turned into a personal slave of Douglas MacArthur, then every Japanese person ought to die fighting to prevent such an outcome. Yes, it's weird, but this is what happens when things get lost in translation. So these grown men argued in front of the Emperor interminably while the cities were burnt by carpet bombings. And they kept arguing right on for another 4days like this, past not only the Hiroshima bombing but the Nagasaki bombing as well.

They were holding out hope that either Sweden or the USSR would step in as neutrals to broker a peace. Unbelievable as it sounds, that was the project being pursued by the Foreign Ministry in the first part of 1945. This scenario fell apart when the USSR advanced troops into Manchuria, breaking its Non-Aggression Pact with Japan on the 10th August. This was the news that changed the meetings.

There's a lot that could be said about Stalin, the USSR and its role in World War II, but I'll leave that for the serious historians writing about it. If there is one thing that is irrevocably clear is that Stalin's betrayal closed the books on Japan's war. by the 11th, the Japanese leaders made the executive decision to surrender to the Americans in the hope that Japan won't be overrun by communism (this too is a very big topic which I won't go into). Hirohito rubber-stamped that one quickly according to the Kido Diaries.

The point of all this is that it most definitely wasn't the two Atomic blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki respectively that prompted the surrender of Japan. And without that bit of justification, it is impossible to argue that dropping the two atomic bombs "saved lives". Yet the myth lives on because it is harder to live with the awful likelihood that the two atomic bombs were dropped on civilian population centres for nothing but absolutely gratuitous effect. I'm sure this is why Geraldine Doogue wants to hold tightly to the myth that the two atomic bombs were meaningful in history, that they saved lives by stopping the war. Uh, sorry, but no. It just ain't true.

In a perfect world, I would want the two bombs to be meaningful in a positive way. That they are not meaningful in the way that people want it to assuage their moral egos, does not take anything away significance from the event in history.  What I will say is this; it's been 70years since. I'm willing to let it slide into history. I ask not for tears to be shed for the civilians who copped it sweet, nor for revenge or retaining the grievances. I just want us to move past the bullshit propaganda that seeks to cast the bombings in a positive light. If you really want to come to terms with the events, that's the price.

No Nuance, No Peace

All of which is to say it really got my goat. What was said by Geraldine Doogue, was deeply offensive. If you can justify civilian casualties to end the war because that saves lives, you may as well make no distinctions as to who gets killed in a war and why. It's so Orwellian it's not funny.

Let's say for the moment you can justify bombing civilians because it ends wars (Doogue's argument, not mine). That would mean we would be free to bomb as many people as long as what came after the bombing was peaceful. We wouldn't have a leg to stand on in arguing against the Hanoi bombings by Richard Nixon, which of course was as unjust as they come, but all Nixon wanted to do was end the war once and for all. The Nazis bombed London, and that would be justifiable because they too were trying to end the war (by winning the Battle of Britain). We wouldn't be able to complain about collateral damage and civilian deaths resulting from Drone strikes, or the carpet bombing of Iraq using B-52s during 'Shock & Awe'.

And if you're allowed to bomb civilians to death - because it would end the war sooner to do so - then surely killing them en masse on the ground should be fine as well. Things like the 1995 Srebrenica massacre would not be war crimes, they would just attempts to bring the end of the war closer.

It's war. There is no "alright" kind of position to take on the state-sponsored violence that is war. If Geraldine Doogue wants to justify the state-sponsored violence carried out in her favour, then she's going to have to deal with arguments that justify state-sponsored violence carried out against her side. That means she has to support the case that the Nazis were right in wiping out civilian populations the Eastern Front, or that Russian pogroms were good; or that the Killing Fields of Cambodia were somehow good because they brought about peace in Cambodia.
Clearly it's an unenlightened position to hold.

The joke of course is that Doogue probably believes some of these examples are War Crimes. In which case she's essentially arguing War Crimes are justifiable if they take place in her favour, but not at any other time. It's this kind of exceptionalism that makes me sick to the gut talking about Word War II.

Come And See

Been A Long Time

Back in the day, one of the most traumatic films you could watch about the experience of World War II was 'Come And See' directed by Elim Klimov. This wasn't just any movie about the war, this was a film so graphic in its portrayal of the Einsatzgruppen - the SS paramilitary death squads - and their hideous modus operandi during their campaign in Byelorussia.

The first time I even heard about this film was in the late 1980s when a friend of the family told me about with much excitement. He described to me the climactic montage, which hardly made any sense because I don't think he understood what he was trying to describe, but it sounded really good. Later on, when i finally saw it, I understood it as well as the shear intellectual excitement of the family friend who just had to tell me all about it.

The film has a way of staying with you forever and for a long time I've wanted to get hold of this film on DVD so I can just watch it again and digest it; see if it matches up to the way I remember it.

What's Good About It

My old film school Screen Analysis teacher used to like talking about misc en scene and sense of place. Well, this film is dripping with a sense of what Byelorussia is like and the sorts of life they had in the 1940s as the Germans came in. As a Soviet era film, the film works through some interesting technical moves as well as a dialectical montage towards the end.

There is plenty of good old social realism to go around as we survey the Byelorussian village and roll around in the mud and laves, dance in the rain, as well as wade through the bog with the main character. The film conveys a fantastic tactile quality with the images on the screen, which later on turn to freak you out. It's got good directing and cinematography and you're never at a loss to understand the situation.

In one sense, the film remains a high watermark of films made under the auspices of the old Soviet regime even while Klimov may have struggled greatly in convincing the Soviet powers-that-be to let him make the film. It's an immensely ideological work as well as a very prosaically - almost pedantic - film that sets out to show what the Einsatzgruppen operation would have looked like. Put it this way, it's nothing like an American movie. This thing was not made to entertain you. It was meant to seer into your very consciousness the frightening terror and horror of the war on the Eastern Front.

What's Bad About It

It's been a long time since I've seen this film and I've possibly had too much time to digest the film. Watching it on DVD for the second time in my life had nowhere near the impact as seeing it the first time. Oddly enough there were whole sequences in the film that I'd forgotten about towards the beginning that are really tedious scenes to set up the central action of a boy going to war.

I probably shouldn't say it's bad as such but in the this viewing, I felt tedium. This is bad. Or maybe I'm just craving for more action on screen, but at the core of it I think Klimov is disinterested in what interests the audience, but very interested in what interests him. This results in a film whose emotional arc is so jagged that the crucially traumatic scene seems to pass over the main character early on all the while leading on to the church burning. It's an odd choice as to what Klimov wants to show up close and what he chooses to only glance at.

It's also not clear what happens to Glisha, the girl. I wasn't sure that the victim of mass rape actually was Glisha or the young mother who escaped from the church, leaving behind her child and then carted off on a "pack rape truck". The screenwriter in me sort of went, "hang a minute, what is this denouement?" The director in me actually went, "hang a minute, this is worth establishing, if you're going to be so prosaic about he rest of the war crime activity?"

What's Interesting About It

Quite by coincidence I saw this article in the Economist. If you scroll to the bottom of the page you'll see a spirited exchange of opinions as to whether Russia could have beaten NAZI Germany on its own.

I have no doubt that what the Russians endured in fighting NAZI Germany was much worse than anything else her allies had to live through. That's just the fact of it. The Einsatzgruppen didn't exactly tour an occupied New York or Washington DC, hunting for Jews and Romani and commissars. The film paints a fairly stark portrait of that very struggle by partisans facing off against the might of the German war machine.

What's interesting about it today is that in light of all the things that happened in the Balkans with their death squads and death camps, the film has actually lost something of its power through the intervening years. The two Gulf Wars by the two Bush Presidents have also changed the nature of how wars are conducted to the point where it seems quaint that the Germans would bother to round people up and burn them in a church. The contemporary American simply sends out a tomahawk cruise missile or carpet bombs a whole city.

Film As Ideological Artefact

Elim Klimov struggled mightily to make this film. I can't understand why, but then Tarkovsky struggled mightily to make his films as well. The Soviet film production approvals committee were apparently against making obscure films or difficult films. They wanted that old social realism, which of course goes back to Stalin. Stalin probably wasn't interested in the entertainment value of film but he sure was interested in propaganda value, so he wanted Soviet cinema to be the perspicacious to the extreme.

Now, I can understand Tarkovsky running into some flack with films like 'The Mirror' but Elim Klimov is nowhere near an obscurantist director as Tarkovsky. Watching the film today, you can get a pungent dose of the Soviet Realist school of film making. You just can't miss it. 20 odd years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Perestroika, the ideological garb of the film stands out more today than perhaps it did in 1986. The film it reminded me of the most was in fact Leni Riefenstahl's 'Triumph of the Will'. Maybe these films are mirror images of one another - one film about the glory of NAZI Germany, Klimov's film about the absolute hell it created. In other words, as fine a film as it is, today we can see it for the propaganda film it was.

Which is all the more reason why I wonder why Klimov struggled so much. He was certainly pitching fastballs high and inside just as he was meant to.

The Mosfilm Legacy

We used to get a steady diet of Mosfilm stuff at AFTRS. Such heavily ideological works as 'The Cranes Are Flying' and 'Alexander Nevsky' would get a screening and the student body would all sagely nod and say how wonderfully moving these films were. They're great films and I'm glad they got made, but to get them made, these film makers had to twist themselves to the yoke of Soviet ideology. You'd think AFTRS thought Mosfilm productions were the way to go in cinema.

In a world of global commercial cinema with America at the epicentre, it's very quaint how AFTRS was feeding this stuff to its students who would have to write essays about a deeper cinema. I dare say it contributed greatly to unrealistic expectations about the craft as well as the business. I think this strand of thinking has influenced the funding bodies that took on these graduates as its assessors and film bureaucrats. It has collectively contributed to the decimation of the Australian Film industry in the 1990s as well as the 2000s. It is as if the film bureaucrats who came out of AFTRS essentially locked up the film makers of this country in a church and burned them all down.

I remember piping up at the time 'Terminator 2' came out and asking how these Mosfilm films stood in relation to a US$120million action spectacle. I got frowned at and ridiculed, but really, where is Mosfilm now? On the other hand, Arnie's the governor of California and James Cameron did 'Avatar'. Looking back on it now, it seems really quaint that so much value was put into studying Mosfilm movies.

I like 'Come And See', but it fills me with a weird kind of angst that has nothing to with its content.