EASTERN DRAFTS AND A NUCLEAR BOMB

From top to bottom:

Great Wall, Mutianyu section, Beijing area

Ruins of Sao Paulo church, Macau

Ngong Ping Buddhist temple, Hong Kong area

Ten Thousand Buddhas monastery, Hong Kong area

Changdeokgung Secret Garden, Seoul

Hyangwonjeong pavilion lake, Seoul

Street of memories, National Folk Museum, Seoul

The last drawing is the epitome of a moment. A vanishing of my soul in the ground, blasted by the experience that happened in Hiroshima.

There is no words to tell what happened there but it must be told. Doubting if these kind of events and memorials (the memorial of peace) create antiwar/peaceful movements or what? I guess everybody is against war, you see the horrible experience that happened here and nobody agrees to commit it again. Yet, we still have genocides going on, and human being treated like waste, being disposed in the trash bean of history and totally forgotten. I believe it is really dangerous to support peace in an abstract Kantian way, moving in politics only through affections of repulse against violence, rooted in the rejection of horror scripts and forgetting the relations of power, the social stratification, the interstices inside politics (and the structure). But at the same time, is dangerous to be against violence by creating more violence or thinking of the goals no matter the means. This disconnects politics from everyday life and detaches us from affections towards other people, creating “enemies”. At the same time, responding to violence only with peace is not effective, and the use of violence in a “strategic way” has the problem in the last problem I mentioned. Amidst these dilemmas, I don’t know what to think about. What is the answer? I am being teared apart inside due to this conundrum. I am too angry to be Kantian but too sensitive to be consequentialist.

But I know the circle is completed. 11 years ago I visited the first town bombed by modern aviation in history, Gernika, in the Basque Country. In that museum of peace, I studied that what started in Gernika ended with two atomic bombs in the other side of the planet years later. Now, years later in my personal history, being where all that ‘finished’ in Japan is…

Two cities so different and two different stories, but joined by the tragedy of the tragedies. As a researcher of contemporary history/politics, this is beyond retelling. I am being torn apart but we can reemerge.

..

For the good memories with C.