Musings on Politically and Ideologically Correct Substantive "Criticism"

Not only are there, as I noted in an earlier blog post, fundamental problems with substanceless contextless "criticism", but there are also problems with some varieties of substantive "criticism". Take Doctor L's (aka, Henry Lerner) "review" of the first edition of Andrew Hartman's A War for the Soul of America on the Amazon US website.

In his book Hartman explores the American culture wars of the post-World War II period and particularly the culture wars since the countercultural culture wars of 1965 through the early 1970s. There are a several things one could take Hartman to task for. For example, culture wars have been fought out in cold, cool, hottish, and hot variations even before there was a United States of America. I give you the numerous colonial and American culture wars over slavery, Americanness, America itself, religion, and immigration, for example. So why does Hartman focus his history of American culture wars on one particular period?

Doctor L, however, focuses his critical energies on Hartman's discussion of revisionist approaches to America's dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese in 1945. What fascinates me about Doctor L's review rhetoric is this: He condemns Hartman for his focus on revisionist approaches to the dropping of the bomb, particularly in the wake of the countercultural movement, apparently forgetting that "revisionist" approaches are themselves reactions to the dominant or hegemonic "mainstream" view, in this case the notion that the US had to drop the bomb on two Japanese cities full of civilians in order to end the war in the Pacific and, so they claimed, save American lives in the process. Such a view, however, is as selective and as politically and ideologically correct as the approach to the issue that Doctor L condemns.

How so? First, Doctor L buries the fact that not everyone before the US dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki found it necessary to save American lives and end World War II. Some, for instance, as declassified documents make clear, found the estimates of the numbers who would be killed in an attack on Japan exaggerated making "revisionism" present at the creation of the we needed to drop the bomb rhetoric. Second, as increasing documentary evidence makes clear, the war was over particularly after the Soviets attacked Japan. It seems likely, and yes, I realise that there are problems with alternative histories as there are with presentist approaches to history, that if the US had asked for conditional surrender rather than unconditional surrender and had negotiated with Japan over the position of the emperor, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have been avoided and the war would have come to a less bloody end.

Underlying, of course, the dominant and selective politically and ideologically correct perspective that the dropping of the bomb was necessary to end the war in the Pacific is the moral and ethical notion that the lives of American soldiers were and are worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians. I suppose if you are a nationalist and you transcendentalise the nation then such an argument makes sense. If you take a general human rights perspective such as many Quakers do, however, where each and every human life is inviolable and thus the taking of human life is morally and ethically problematic, it does not. Moreover, the argument that it is acceptable to kill civilians by dropping bombs on them, something US military policy opposed at least in theory if not in practise, at least in the early years of World War II when it made a distinction between civilians and soldiers, assumes that the lives of America's soldiers and warriors are worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians.

Doctor L deserves credit for criticising a book, in this case the Hartman book on American culture wars, on a substantive basis. Unfortunately, his selectivity, a substantive selectivity driven by political and ideologically correct considerations is, as I hope I have made clear, problematic. Substance is great and it is necessary particularly in a scholarly context. Substantive discussion, however, has to take into account all the evidence and all the theoretical and methodological issues related to the evidence in a fair, balanced, and equitable way. Doctor L, in my opinion, does not do this when he accepts a perspective without substantively critiquing it and asking the question of what type of assumptions drove many and drive many to accept speculative notions of American deaths and what type of assumptions made and make many willing to accept the killing of civilians during war time.