Carol Bergman

 

The mission of women is to be beautiful and to bring children into the world.

 

-Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Reich Minister of Propaganda, 1933-1945

 

 

I woke up this morning thinking about the Bret Baier interview with Kamala Harris. Not the obvious ploy of his aggressive interruptions, but the semiotics of the camera shots from behind Baier's muscular shoulders looking down on the Vice President and dominating her. Not only did he use his voice to try to diminish her, he used his stature, literally and figuratively. As I have worked in newsrooms and studios, I am sure, absolutely certain, that the camera person was instructed to shoot from behind Baier at regular intervals. The semiotics of the managed scene was reminiscent of Trump stalking Hillary during their debate.

 

Any woman who has struggled to make herself heard, to achieve status, earn a wage equal to her male peers or—on the more domestic level—get her male partner to pull his weight raising children and running a household will understand what happened, what viewers saw and understood: propaganda.

 

My early morning realization would not quit. I went online to read excerpts from Mein Kampf. There have been rumors that Trump read Hitler's 1924 manifesto and kept a copy by his bedside. I am sure he has it memorized by now. The parallels between the two men are stark. Hitler began writing while he was in prison following his conviction for high treason to overthrow the German Republic in what is known as the "Beer Hall Putsch." Trump has not yet been imprisoned, but he and his cohorts attempted a violent coup. They already have the Supreme Court in their pockets, and many federal judges.

 

In recent weeks we've heard the word "misogyny," to describe the reaction of some men—white and Black—to the possibility of a woman becoming their Commander in Chief. And we heard President Obama blasting Black men for such a reaction. He even invoked Michelle during the encounter, and laughed as he did so, as did his audience. But it is not a laughing matter for men to denigrate women and threaten them with incarceration in the domestic sphere. What JD Vance is saying about women and what Joseph Goebbels said are nearly identical; one a lawyer, the other with a PhD in philology. All the education in the world did not dampen their hatreds.  

 

 "Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it," Goebbels once said. Sound familiar?

 

On the eve of this election let us keep in mind that it doesn't take much for a democracy to fail, and for a frightened population to fall under the spell of despotic, manipulative killers. It's our mandate as free Americans to fight the fascists in our midst at the ballot box, to make this election a landslide, and to ask everyone we know to stand with us.

 

 

Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount."

                                                                        ― General Omar N. Bradley

 

 

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded  the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize to the Japanese organization Nihon Hidankyo, a grassroots movement of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one can know for certain the Committee's deliberations behind closed doors, but it seems obvious that the Doomsday Clock has inched further to midnight this year. The "taboo" against using nuclear weapons is "under pressure," the Committee wrote in their announcement, an understatement. And though conventional weapons can wreak destruction beyond all imagining—Vietnam, Israel, Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine and now Beirut—it is the specter of a nuclear explosion, and various disarmament treaties that for the last 80 years have acted as a deterrent to the annihilation of all humankind.

 

Survivors of Nagasaki and Hiroshima have become living witnesses to the nightmare scenario of nuclear holocaust. Having met a few of them, I was particularly gratified to read about the Nobel announcement as many are aging out of recognition for their efforts to work for a sustaining peace in our troubled world.

 

I first met then 83-year-old Sueichi Kido from Nagasaki in May of 2015. He was one of twenty survivors of the atomic blasts who traveled to New York for the opening of an exhibit in the UN lobby, and discussions about the world's nuclear arsenal. A small man with a cherubic face, badly burned, Mr. Kido, a retired history professor, has devoted his retirement years to telling his story. Miraculously, he is still alive, and still working for peace. "There aren't many of us left. We are getting old, we are sick," he says. Five-years-old at the time of the blast and living within the 2 km epicenter, his mother carried him away from the wind and flames in search of shelter. Flesh was melting off their bodies, they were thirsty. There was no water, no shelter, no medical facility. The city had been incinerated. Needless to say, there was no question of a normal childhood for Mr. Kido after this holocaust. He didn't stop trembling until he was ten-years-old, or laugh, or play. PTSD doesn't describe the implosion in his body and his soul.

   
The survivors of the bombings are called hibakusha, a Japanese word that literally translates to "explosion-affected people." Hibakusha and their children have been stigmatized in Japan and it is only recently that the government has recognized their medical complaints as a consequence of the blasts. My husband's uncle, Norman Cousins, the editor of The Saturday Review used the platform of the magazine for a post-blast adoption program. Subscribers sponsored orphans and later brought twelve disfigured  "Hiroshima Maidens" to the United States for reconstructive surgery.

 

You can read about the project here:

 

 https://hibakushastories.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Hiroshima-Maidens.pdf

 

There is a plaque set in a stone dedicated to Norman Cousins at the Peace Park in Hiroshima,  and members of our family still attend ceremonies there every year.  President Truman and his advisers censored the press after the blasts and suppressed the stories of the military witnesses and survivors. Even General MacArthur doubted the wisdom of dropping the bombs, and feared it. He argued that the saturation bombing of Tokyo—200, 000 killed—just  prior to the nuclear blasts, would end the war just as quickly. 

 

"We knew the world would not be the same," J. Robert Oppenheimer said after the first test blast on July 16, 1945. "A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita... "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

 

This post is dedicated to President Barack Obama, the first American president to pay his respects at the Peace Park in Hiroshima. 

 

 

 

 

 

My sense is that if I spend more time talking to you then I spend complaining about you, then something wonderful often happens and the enlightenment is mutual.    

         

Ta Ne-hisi Coates, The Message

 

 

The man in the straw hat sat next to us at the Mexican restaurant and stared at us as he ordered. He threw glances, smiled, guffawed. It was obvious he was keen on conversation and hoped we were willing. I wasn't pleased as I'd looked forward to a quiet evening with my husband parsing Jack Smith's new filing to the DC court. Before long the man in the straw hat commented on the fish design on my husband's shirt. I'd bought it for him years ago in Sag Harbor; my husband loves to fish. Now the man in the straw hat said, "Do you like to fish?" And, of course, that began a bonding conversation between the two men about fishing. Before long, the man in the straw hat revealed he was a pastor, an evangelical pastor, that he ran a rehab somewhere, that he'd been an addict, that he'd met his wife in grade school and really really loved her, that his five kids and five grandkids lived with them during Covid and that none of them were vaccinated and look at them all: they are all thriving now.

 

I kicked my husband under the table. It was obvious he hadn't heard the bit about the vaccines or he might have stopped talking to the guy. We all know that there is a strong correlation between anti-vaxxers and the traitor running for president who can't keep his mouth shut, whose mouth is spewing hateful, horrible lies all day long, who exacerbated the pandemic, amplified its toll, because of the anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers who still adore him.

 

I tried to start a conversation with the pastor's ever-so-retiring wife. I asked her name, but that's as far as I got. Then I called for the waiter and asked for the check. I couldn't wait to get out of there, away from the toxic pastor. Once we were in the car, I began to reflect on life in public places before Covid and before Trump. In those long ago days, my curiosity never quit, I'd talk to anyone. Now I sometimes feel that an invasive species has rooted itself into my once tranquil neighborhood. As much as I'd like to listen without judgment, which is my inclination as well as my occupation, I am finding it difficult, if not impossible, as our election looms.

 

Will we ever return to mutuality and civility as Ta Ne-hisi suggests we should and must?  It seems like a utopian ideal, one to continue to strive for nonetheless