The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to the Nihon Hidankyo, a fraternity of survivors of the twin atomic explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as the victims of nuclear weapons tests in the Pacific, cannot be accused of poor timing. This is because even though nuclear attacks have been averted in the post-War years — the last recorded nuclear test, conducted by North Korea, took place seven years ago — nuclear deterrence is being confronted by newer, emerging challenges in different corners of the world.
Vladimir Putin has been unambiguous in his threat to press the N button in the conflict with Ukraine; an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities looked like a distinct possibility at one point of time in a Middle East ravaged by crises; whispers of North Korea’s seventh nuclear test have had the United States of America and its Asian allies on edge for a while now; even the Japanese prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, who described the Nobel honour for the Nihon Hidankyo as “extremely significant”, has been known to be enthusiastic about a muscular military policy for Japan, which, despite being a nation with a pacifist Constitution, is now hearing rumblings, especially among the young, in favour of nuclear weapons for deterrence; there is no sign of the nine nations with nuclear weapons, including India, being eager to reduce the global nuclear stockpile of an estimated 13,000 weapons; most ominously, there are reports that the nuclear powers are now in a race to modernise their nuclear arsenal amidst signs of a scramble among new nations to join the N Club.
The Nihon Hidankyo’s arsenal against such formidable challenges has comprised the power of memory and storytelling. This collective, the Norwegian Nobel Committee stated, deserved the honour for “demonstrating through witness testimony” the evil, overwhelming power of the nuclear bomb. The testimonies of the survivors of the US’s pulverisation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — over 100,000 such people are alive — take, in other words, diverse forms of retellings of that catastrophe and are meant to induce guilt in the international community. This shared, global sense of guilt, a constant reminder of being complicit in the destruction of a people — remember Julius Robert Oppenheimer’s epiphanic transformation into ‘death, the destroyer of worlds’? — is meant to serve as a bulwark against future nuclear adventurism by rogue nation-states.
But global guilt need not succeed as a deterrent in all contexts. This is because guilt itself has been honed into a double-edged sword in numerous geopolitical contestations.
The roots of the decades old, unceasing conflict between Israel and Palestine, which continues to cripple Gaza and Lebanon at present, can be traced back to a problematic compensatory gesture that was the result of the burden of guilt borne by European powers, chiefly Britain, at their inability — timorousness — to stop Adolf Hitler’s purging of Jews in the Continent. Legitimising the rehabilitation of Jews on land that belonged to Palestinians, a criminal act, was the outcome of a supposedly righteous guilt.
Post-Holocaust Germany’s engagement with guilt — the Jungian concept of Kollektivschuld — has been equally chequered. This ingrained sense of guilt in German society and its highly ritualised commemoration in the form of pedagogy, architecture and historical record-keeping, especially within the arc of metropolitan Germany, may have led to a much-needed cathartic acknowledgement of German complicity in the horror that is the Holocaust. But the guilt has also stymied efforts to demand justice for the wrongs perpetrated by the Allied powers on ordinary Germans. A study published by the German government 50 years ago estimated the number of German civilian victims of crimes to be over 600,000 between 1945 and 1948, with about 400,000 deaths in the areas east of Oder and Neisse, 120,000 in acts of violence, mostly by Soviet troops but also by Poles, 60,000 in Polish and 40,000 in Soviet concentration camps on account of hunger and disease, and 200,000 deaths among civilian deportees to labour camps for Germans in the former Soviet Union. Unlike the anti-Jewish pogrom, the imprint of these transgressions in the global discourse is moderate. Is Germany’s burden of guilt to be blamed for the nation’s unwillingness to demand reparations for this other horror?
Similarly, guilt and shame, the supposed moral weapons in the hands of the hibakusha — the Japanese survivors of the atom bombs — had been instrumental in making them invisible to the world and to the nation in the decades after the War. Keiko Aguna, a hibakusha I had interviewed years ago in Hiroshima, had been emphatic about the crystallisation of the hibakusha’s identity as Japan’s ‘Other’ because the then Japan, vanquished in war and occupied by the victors, needed to vest its shame in a target. The hibakusha, having served as the Japanese State’s chosen target, were then effaced from the national imagination and conscience, their myriad tribulations — social ostracisation, bodily sufferings on account of the residual effects of the bomb and economic penury — eclipsed by the debris of shame for years. In a revealing anecdote, The New York Times had Sunao Tsuboi, a former chair of the Nihon Hidankyo, recount how he and his fiancée had been compelled to enter into a suicide pact after being informed by her parents that marriage with a hibakusha — Tsuboi was less than a mile away from the centre of the atomic explosion in Hiroshima — was inconceivable. Many other Japanese survivors, unlike Tsuboi and his fiancée, have taken their tales of oppression to the grave.
What needs to be noted is that this culture of shame was not always organic to these societies. Be it in Germany or in Japan, the Allied — occupying — powers put in place effective, curated public campaigns to slow-drip shame into the veins of the body politic of the vanquished nations. Some of the consequences of this project of national shaming have been far from desirable. For the ascendant far-Right in modern Germany, the burden of German war guilt has, over the years, been profitable political fodder. Japan’s new-found enthusiasm against the principle of pacifism can also be attributed to the tensions arising from the weight of remorse that Japan has been made to bear.
It is not enough to describe the honour bestowed upon the hibakusha by the Nobel Committee as a moment of the symbolic rupture of the silence — the ‘nuclear taboo’ — around the global nuclear arsenal. But the silence that has been broken does not only embody the one around nuclear weapons. What the Nobel Peace Prize for the Nihon Hidankyo has shattered, with equal force, is the complicity of nations, victor and vanquished, righteous and the reproachable, in invisibilising the injustices suffered by the community of hibakusha.
Guilt, Keiko Aguna had remarked in a frail voice all those years ago, need not always be morality’s gilded sceptre. On occasion, it can cut like a sword. After all these years, the Nobel honour, one hopes, would be a balm that would heal the scars of guilt borne by Keiko and her peers.
uddalak.mukherjee@abp.in
