Radical Alterity - War Games and the Destruction of the Earth

The very idea of alterity is essential in war because it separates and distances not horizontally but vertically the status and humanity of people, to make the war acceptable, justifiable, and necessary. Once this separation occurs the war is acceptable because those who are on the lower rung of the scale stand to loose less than those on the top. It is justifiable because the lower run poses a threat to the upper rung and the upper run must defend itself. The other, I do not believe, becomes an entity that is simply far away but rather way below. To squash an ant or worm becomes a kind of duty because it is other it is below and it is a nuisance. But it is interesting to me how that otherness played out in the film we watched about the Nazi enemy. It is as though the otherness of the Nazis causes us to use it as a function of our own response to it. By that I am talking about the way the cartoon preached against emotion and endorsed rationality and then in the end said rationality is what you should use to go to war and be patriotic, when really it was emotion we want all along. Like a bacterial splitting and then a tiny mutation causes them to be at odds. You then have bacterial colony warfare. The otherness does not simply distance us but in a way the distance becomes replication. It make some sense that if you focus on the otherness of someone and foster stronger and stronger feelings of dislike, you become no different than what you hate. How can you escape the influence of what you hate when it becomes such a large part of who you are on a day to day basis and consumes so much of your productive time?

By focusing on Japan and the bomb we get a picture of what alterity can do or mean for us in the context of punishing the other. We talked at some length about the idea that it was not possible to drop the bomb on Germany because they where white. I naturally disagree and state that it was a Geographical move that was more acceptable. You either drop the bomb on an island nation that is your enemy refuses to surrender and is not in any close proximity to friendly nations. Or you drop it on a hostile nation that is surrounded by friendly nations. Not a hard choice even though both are regrettable. Tony then raised the issue of the US first testing the bomb on ourselves, and the question was how do we reconcile that? How can we accept punishing the enemy by first testing the punishment on ourselves? Does that not make us the moral nation? Is it more acceptable to test on others first? Perhaps this gives us the moral high ground with which we can justify using the bomb on a hostile nation. Besides there was a sort of marriage that occurred with Japan when we destroyed their cities and brought the sun to their land. We now take upon ourselves the responsibility of rebuilding their country. If otherness is a problem then surely crafting a nation in our image is good for the human race. Indeed we can agree that this element of Japans misery may be worth it. The otherness turned itself into a friendly sibling rivalry where production not destruction was the measure of a successful nation. If only we could replicate this in the world today? Hmmmmm (IMF, World Bank??)

It also brings us the metaphor of bringing the sun to the earth. The destructive and creative powers we get are fantastic, and I think that when Baudrillard says that America has no origins and is a mythical society we can have a certain peace about its leaders having the destructive power of the earth. Do we want nationals who take pride in where they come from to have the power to destroy the other? Or would we rather have people who have no origin and no other options than tolerance to have the same power? The scary moments in history where when that power spread to people who have a collective national pride. They have no reason to create the other, the other exists and needs only challenge them, or rather respond to their already active challenge. There is no more common other than nationalism and to have a world where those nationals have the power to destroy creates an odd numbered tug of war where the object is to say up and should one person let go or slip their footing the entire world will fall. Perhaps we can take comfort knowing that at least the global movement powered by technology is changing the rules of that tug of war.