After a while in The Skin, a mysterious plague settles over Naples, the source of which Malaparte locates, darkly, in wide American grins. “The source of the plague was in their compassion,” Malaparte writes, “in their frank, timid smiles, in their eyes so full of sympathy, in their affectionate caresses.” The Americans’ belief in their own mission on earth, in other words, kept them in Naples, obliviously occupying its people. In one of the last scenes of the book, Italians cheer on the sidewalks during an American victory parade, and amid the commotion, one of the U.S. tanks barrels into an Italian local, turning him into a “carpet of human skin,” and then dumbly ambles on. “It is a shameful thing to win a war,” Malaparte writes. But Americans rarely feel that way, certainly not about the war in Europe—not even about the fate of Japan.
In the period after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the terrified world wrestled with the meaning of those events. Writers did not doubt the shadow it would cast over future generations. Mary McCarthy called the nuclear bomb “a hole in human history”; William Faulkner, in his 1950 Nobel Prize speech, wondered: “When will I be blown up?”; Doris Lessing’s heroine in The Golden Notebook says to her psychoanalyst, “I don’t want to be told when I wake up, terrified by a dream of total annihilation, because of the H-bomb exploding, that people felt that way about the cross-bow. It isn’t true.” In 1946, The New Yorker magazine devoted an entire issue to the writer John Hersey’s reportage from Hiroshima. “The eyebrows of some were burned off and skin hung from their faces and hands,” Hersey writes. “Others, because of pain, held their arms up as if carrying something in both hands. Some were vomiting as they walked. Many were naked or in shreds of clothing. On some undressed bodies, the burns had made patterns, of undershirt straps and suspenders.”
Hersey’s Hiroshima is an astonishingly effective catalogue of horror. But one critic at the time believed it left something out. In his review of the book, Gore Vidal pointed to a moral failing: that because it recorded the effects of the bomb in standard, objective American journalistic style—for which American journalists are usually lavished with praise—it had, crucially, avoided the larger political questions surrounding the bomb’s discharge. Hiroshima did not, Vidal wrote, “even touch on the public debate as to whether or not there was any need to use such a weapon.” Hersey likely believed that his spare representation of the terrible facts was itself the answer to the question of the bomb’s “necessity,” but Vidal’s critique raises the question of whether the American style of journalism merely records history, rather than reckoning with it.
Vidal’s point was that many people at the time, including members of the Truman administration, sensed that the Japanese, already devastated by the Americans’ firebombing of Tokyo, which killed a hundred thousand people, were ready to surrender. Yet somehow, years after the publishing of Hiroshima, the conventional myth among Americans—including myself—became one in which, once again, the Americans had been driven by unfortunate events to do unfortunate things. Hiroshima, wrote Garry Wills, was “the moment when total war was turned into a way of waging peace.” But I wonder how many Americans become what Wills called “Hiroshima liberals” by choice, by passive education, or by omission of facts—the particular kind of ignorance that Baldwin had once observed.
In 1994, the Smithsonian Institution sought to ask hard questions about Hiroshima in its fiftieth-anniversary exhibit of the bombings. Were the nuclear bombs unnecessary at that stage of the war? Did American justifications hold up to scrutiny? In the year of the Rwandan genocide, and the Bosnian war, and three years after the fall of communism, the Americans were finally facing their own most consequential violent act. But the plans for the exhibit were met with an uproar. Congress held hearings. Smithsonian employees resigned. John Dower, an American historian of Japan who would later win the Pulitzer Prize, had two of his lectures canceled. “In retrospect,” he writes in an essay called “How a Genuine Democracy Should Celebrate Its Past,” “it was na?ve to imagine that serious treatment of the dropping of the first atomic bomb would be possible in a public space in the United States.”
Censorship in America comes in quieter forms. It doesn’t announce itself, as it seemed to in Turkey. In Istanbul, I had disparaged the mythmaking performed by museums and art spaces funded by a Turkish government more interested in preserving the nationalist ethos than in supporting the exploration of ideas. But in criticizing the Turks, I was comparing them to the United States, whose state institutions’ independence and amply funded research is hardly ever called into question. I had never thought that American institutions, as Dower writes, had a mission “to praise, exalt, beautify, and glorify all that America has been and has done.”
It is perhaps for this reason that Americans gradually became unemotional about mass death. Hillary Clinton once famously pledged on national television to “obliterate” Iran, Trump supporters speak casually of “annihilating” the Islamic State. The Americans ended World War II. They did what they had to do to save the world. Few Americans likely have any idea what happened after the bomb exploded, or the way straps of suspenders burned into the victims’ skin.
One even lesser-known consequence of World War II was that the countries of Europe, and the nation of Japan, were broken, easily taken over by full-scale occupations in which the Americans rebuilt the cities they had destroyed, developed their capitalist economies, reminded them, at every turn, of why America was the greatest country on earth, and instructed them on the finer points of how to be free. The helpless pliancy of the Europeans and Japanese made Americans assume that the rest of the world, including Asians and Arabs emerging from their own colonial nightmares, would tolerate a new bunch of white Westerners dropping their bombs and telling them what to do.
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