Reframing What Is Forgotten

Gaurav Sharma

Professor Andrei Guruianu

Writing the Essay, Section 112 2 PM

3 October 2017

Reframing what is Forgotten

        In the mid-first century B.C., the politician and general Julius Caesar returned to Rome after his conquest of Gaul, or modern-day France. He came back a conquering hero, with the adoration of the people for his military success held in one hand and the aristocracy and Senate of Rome pinned under the other. He quelled the resistance with which his political opponents presented him. He ruled the city and the Republic with a firm hand. Then, something changed. People began to oppose him and conspire against his rule. Eventually, he was infamously assassinated by his fellow Senators in 44 B.C. Many historians say the origin of this shift in sentiment can be traced down to the Latin word “tyrannus,” meaning tyrant. Rome was a Republic perpetually in fear of an ambitious politician aiming to become a dictator, and Caesar’s political opponents labelled him with this term to arouse those suspicions. By calling him a tyrant, they changed the way people thought about him. They drew attention to the reality as it related to Caesar’s domination of Roman politics, that his ambition may have outweighed his pragmatism. The idealized image of him as a hero led people to forget or ignore principles they had earlier held dear. This was turned on its head through new language and it led to his downfall. Essentially, these opponents reframed the very nature of Julius Caesar.

Similarly, in his essay “Hiroshima”, John Berger reframes the way we think about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, especially the suffering of the victims. It all began when he received a book called Unforgettable Fire that included survivors’ sketches and firsthand accounts of the bombing. One painting, by Kazuhiro Ishizu, depicts a field strewn with dead bodies and a person burned to a crisp with skin falling off (Berger 288). “On the west embankment of a military training field,” reads a survivor account, “was a young boy four or five years old. He was burned black, lying on his back, with his arms pointing towards heaven” (Berger 295). These scenes are terrifying. They are things most people cannot relate to or truly fathom. “These were images of hell,” Berger concludes (288). He realizes, to his horror, that these images evoke Dante’s Inferno and medieval European paintings of hell. What does not sit right with John Berger, with him having seen these materials, is that we seem to have forgotten the true nature of the suffering of these victims and survivors. He points out, “What has been torn out of our history are the pages concerning the experience of the two atom bombs dropped on Japan” (Berger 291). We forgot, or chose to ignore, the reality of what happened.

Berger examines the nature of reality as it relates to the event. People now tend to see these bombings as tragedies in the past and forget about the actual horrors entailed by them. The immense, unjustifiable suffering is often forgotten and, in its stead, people think about other issues related to nuclear weapons. “What we are considering is how in this case,” Berger asserts, “in the West…political and military realities have eliminated another reality” (292). These so-called political and military realities include nuclear deterrence and relative strike parity. To not consider these in today’s world, seemingly, is politically unviable. Berger argues that these considerations characterize a “false interpretation” of both the event and the overall reality of our world, due to their ignorance of the “eliminated reality” (292). “The eliminated reality,” he explains in reference to the true memory of the bombs, “is both physical and moral” (Berger 292). Put simply, the physical reality that has been eliminated is the aforementioned depictions of hell. It is what the survivors saw, felt, and experienced in Hiroshima and Nagasaki the days the bombs fell. The eliminated moral reality tells something very revealing about or society. “It has been a systematic, slow and thorough process of suppression and elimination. This process has been hidden within the reality of politics,” explains Berger (291). As opposed to recalling the horror of the event, people tend to dismiss it and conveniently say it should never again occur. Those in the West, as residents of nations in the alliance that perpetrated the attacks, tend to be self-defensive and justify the attacks. This is the moral bankruptcy Berger refers to; we do not remember the hellishness of the event, only the political issues associated with it. The moral reality is, as Berger puts it, “that what happened was evil” (295).

        When we think of Hiroshima, we generally think of just another bombing campaign as part of a strategy in a war. We do not think evil. Yet Berger forces us to look at the event through this lens. “Every culture, except our own in recent times, has had [the concept of evil],” he contextualizes (Berger 294). What happened at Hiroshima was unjustifiable. It is unacceptable no matter the motives or circumstances. Instead, today, we look at the death toll and analyze the statistics, relativizing and justifying the event. What we ignore is the nature of the event and the fact that it is evil. We as a culture and a society have forgotten that evil is real and we have made it no longer taboo. Berger’s use of the word “evil” reframes this view and makes us consider the reality of what the Allies did. Furthermore, modern foreign policy harkens to the immorality of terrorism. However, Berger asserts that the bombings were acts of terrorism by its very definition and the reservations we harbor about it. He uses this language “to re-insert that act into living consciousness today. Yet the word changes nothing in itself” (Berger 294). In other words, he is using new language to reframe the conversation we have about Hiroshima. Making people think of “terrorism” is shocking and leads to new ways of thinking and seeing something most in the West take for granted as a thing in the past.

Another essayist interested in reframing issues is Rebecca Solnit. In her essay “Climate Change is Violence” she boldly asserts, “Climate change is global-scale violence against places and species, as well as against human beings. Once people call it by name, they can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values” (Solnit 759). Solnit takes a massive issue that people take for granted and ignore, climate change, and spins it in a way that gets us thinking about humanity’s impact. It is deeply reminiscent of Berger’s claim that the dropping of the bombs was terrorism. “The two bombs dropped on Japan were terrorist actions. The calculation was terrorist. The indiscriminacy was terrorist,” he declares in his own bold spinning of language (Berger 293). This shares a conceptual link with Solnit’s text. In “Climate Change is Violence,” man-made climate change is given an unexpected label: violence. What this does is changes the way we look at the whole event, the whole problem, and allows us to get to the core of it. Additionally, Solnit illustrates the effects of climate change thusly, “That’s a tired phrase, the destruction of the Earth, but translate it into the face of a starving child and a barren field—and then multiply that a few million times” (761). This is an attempt to show what Solnit thinks is the true reality of the problem, pain and suffering, rather than some vague platitudes. Solnit is taking a huge, global issue that is usually thought of in terms of science and statistics and putting a human face on the victims. She’s allowing us to relate to and understand the effects of climate change. This clarifies why Berger chooses to highlight so many of the pictures and firsthand accounts of the survivors. The “tired phrase” in Berger’s case is the “labyrinth of defence policies, military arguments and global strategies” (294). Essentially, it is the political and military realities that have overshadowed those survivor stories, the stories that show how these people were in fact the victims of a terrorist act. Solnit’s text, therefore, has clarified and highlighted Berger’s intent in making his own startling claim that the bombings should be seen as terrorism.