From Hiroshima to Selma: The Meaning of August 6th
Exactly twenty years to date after the bombings of Hiroshima, on August 6, and Nagasaki, on August 9, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This legislation was the outcome of a decade of organizing, direct action, and education spearheaded by civil rights activists across the nation. The Voting Rights Act led directly to the registration of a quarter of a million African-Americans in the South only months after its passage. In turn, these voters elected thousands of black and white progressive politicians at all levels of government. Through the end of the decade black voter turnout approached levels of political participation never seen in the United States in any time, place, or among any other ethnic group. The balance of power fundamentally shifted across municipalities and states. President Johnson is said to have remarked after his ratification of the Bill that the Democratic Party had lost the South for the “foreseeable future.” In fact, the Southern states have been mostly controlled by conservatives ever since. The South continues to constitute the base of a trenchant, conservative, militarist, predominantly white United States. But the positive impacts of the Voting Rights Act are indisputable. It was a hard fought victory on the legislative front made possible by decades of grassroots struggle.
It’s an irony that come August 6th many will be tempted to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, while at the same time there are growing mobilizations against the perpetuation of nuclear insanity represented most tragically in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki exactly 60 years ago. Both commemorations share a few things in common that may be worth thinking about as many of us observe a moment of silence, celebrate, or simply remember the windfalls of 40 and 60 years prior. The connection of both issues, when properly understood, drains any trace of irony from the date, and points instead to the necessary task of coalition building at hand for the anti-war, anti-racism, and social justice movements.
We should remember that both commemorations represent unfinished business. The bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the nuclear age. In the following decades the United States and Soviet Russia engaged in nuclear brinksmanship building tens of thousands of warheads so that by 1965 the architecture of nuclear war was firmly in place. The end of the Cold War changed very little of this. The United States and Russia maintain massive arsenals, and along with the other full-blown nuclear states, France, China, and the U.K. show no signs of political will to move toward disarmament. India and Pakistan have joined the nuclear club, Israel maintains a shadow arsenal of perhaps several hundred weapons, and North Korea, Iran, and possibly other states are going nuclear. In sum, the nuclear danger has never been greater. Now more than ever do we need to build a mass movement for the abolition of nuclear weapons.
Not only does August 6th, 1945 represent unfinished business, more and more it is coming to represent the triumphant comeback of nuclear militarism on a global scale. The terrible bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have always motivated the global movement to abolish nuclear weapons. This year the anniversary is being observed by thousands of Americans who will take action at one of the various nuclear weapons sites around the nation, and many more global citizens who will gather in France, Japan, Belgium, and elsewhere to protest the inhumanity of nuclear weapons. August 6th represents the use of nuclear weapons in war. This unthinkable has become a goal for the political leadership of the U.S. The talk of “earth penetrating weapons”, miniature nuclear weapons, or modifications of existing weapons and their delivery systems is all for the sake of making nuclear weapons more usable. And this is not just rhetoric: the nuclear weapons arsenals of the United States and other nuclear weapons states are undergoing the beginnings of a wholesale retooling. All of the substantive actions taken by the nuclear weapons powers show that none intend to engage in meaningful steps toward nuclear disarmament. As nuclear abolitionists, our business remains the work of peace and true security through disarmament, and insofar remains unfinished.
August 6th, 1965 was an important victory made possible by the grassroots work of countless people. The political freedoms that were codified on that day in the Voting Rights Act have forever made this a more democratic and just society. And yet we know that the freedoms secured through this legislation have not been vigilantly guaranteed in recent years. In the last two presidential elections African-Americans in Florida, Ohio, and elsewhere were purged from voter rolls, intimidated at the polls, and obstructed from exercising their civil rights. We are only left to imagine what might have been possible had the Republican right not seized power in 2000. Would the present state of Iraq or Afghanistan be so terrifying? Would there be such pain and suffering flourishing in Darfur, in Haiti, in the Middle East? Would the United States be waging a belligerent “war on terror,” or would it be cooperating with the global community to a greater extent? Would civil rights, education, health care, social security, and so many more domestic opportunities to better the lives of all Americans be sacrificed on this perverse altar of war as the current administration is now doing? And would the nuclear weapons complex be receiving $7 billion a year, some of this budget intended for new weapons designs and production? Had all the votes counted in 2000, had there not been denials of political freedom in 2004, this would be a different nation and world.
Many of the elected officials and politicians who would normally be entrusted with seeing to it that atrocious denials of rights are prevented or prosecuted have looked the other way to ensure their party’s gain. Some, like Katherine Harris, have even been promoted in the Republican Party for their faithful inaction in the face of civil injustice. The Voting Rights Act was a major legislative victory of a much larger social movement that permanently altered American society for the better. Now we see, however, that even the most concrete outcome of this social movement is being undermined and subverted by those who hold a stake in the denial of equality to all people. August 6th, 1965 is unfinished business that we need to attend to just as diligently as we work toward peace and nuclear disarmament.
Both August 6th commemorations strike at the heart of our present political dilemma. The United States is fast becoming an openly imperialist nation. This global role for the U.S. is being pushed most vigorously by the far right leadership of the Republican Party. Their core agenda includes a massive rollback of social welfare programs for the poor; defanging the nation’s environmental protection laws; reasserting U.S. geopolitical dominance and gaining control of strategic regions through military occupation; freeing up transnational capital through “free trade” treaties; dismantling and disempowering workers and labor movements worldwide; and a massive transfer of wealth to the wealthy through tax cuts that have proven extremely damaging to the fiscal health of the federal and state governments.
Much of this agenda has been facilitated through or shielded by the supposed necessity of the war on terror. Among the more militaristic aspects of this total agenda is a buildup of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. New weapons and new policies such as first strike are being implemented in order to ensure that the U.S. military is unchecked by both the weak states of the global south, and the stronger states of Europe, Russia, China, and Japan. This nuclear comeback in the U.S. is also facilitated by the resurgent power of the military-industrial complex. The financial gains to be made by these few but influential corporations via militarization and nuclearism are massive.
The political base that has so far allowed this corporatist Republican leadership to pursue its agenda through the Congress and White House is a southern white electorate, dubbed the “red states.” The red state southern electorate has allied itself with the corporate, and militarist agendas. As long as the corporate-militarist agenda remains indifferent to, and thus willing to accommodate the conservative social and religious values of this red state electorate, a powerful political coalition will remain.
This coalition was formed in the immediate aftermath of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The racism and patriarchal conservatism that were the keystones of the Southern social order remain powerful forces in the red states. Although the Voting Rights Act was a victory against the legitimate exercise of racism, parity and justice in electoral politics remains a distant goal in the United States. For the poor, political participation is fleeting. For poor minorities this is especially true. The evidence of political fraud and intimidation, best summarized by U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. report (see, “Preserving Democracy: What Went Wrong in Ohio.” Status Report of the House Judiciary Committee Democratic Staff. January 5, 2005.) drives home the fact that a truly progressive democratic political coalition remains elusive in no small part because of the active obstruction and assaults against the civil rights of constituents of this coalition by the far right. In more structural terms, racism, and impoverishment, and the inequalities of the U.S. criminal justice system have resulted in a systematic exclusion of lower income people of color from the electoral system.
Since 1965 African Americans and other minorities have helped to elect some of the most inspiring proponents of true democracy - black, white, or whatever race - to federal and state offices. Most of these representatives have supported the movement to abolish nuclear weapons since day one. Indeed, a look at the Congressional Black Caucus of 2005 reveals a group of women and men whose stance on nuclear issues and wider issues of war and democracy could hardly be better. Their annual Alternative Budget emphasizes education, healthcare, economic development, reducing inequality, helping the poor and disadvantaged to achieve their goals, cutting taxes for small businesses and families, and re-imagines American foreign policy in ways that promote peace and cooperation, not further militarism and nuclear belligerence.
A perfect example of this leadership was exhibited on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Speaking before the House of Representatives on March 18, 2003, Rep. Barbara Lee dissented from the White House and Republican leadership on all fronts stating that: “money spent on war to destroy lives could instead be used to save lives by financing the alleviation of the impending famines in Southern Africa, or to provide clean drinking water to enhance the health of hundreds of thousands of poor, defenseless men, women and children throughout that continent… these resources could also be productively directed toward providing treatment and prevention services for those afflicted by the HIV/AIDS holocaust in Africa, the United States and other countries around the world, not to forget the blight and ravages of economic depression in Appalachia and the inner cities of America.”
The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the passage of the Voting Rights Act 20 years later are both watershed events in modern history. Both are also part of the present crisis of democracy and war. August 6th will be the anniversary of both events. They are linked by more than merely a date. They are twisted and tied together, they are pieces of unfinished business that must be pursued simultaneously if a political coalition offering an alternative vision to that of the far right is to emerge. The interests of those who have been denied their civil rights in America are the same as those of the fractured and isolated democratic majority. We want peace, justice, and prosperity. And yet we get terror, militarism, and social insecurity. Those who have been denied their civil right because of racism, or more structural inequalities, are part of the natural constituency of a democratic coalition that will be capable of defeating the agenda of the corporate-conservative right. A peaceful answer to the events of August 6th, 1945, entails a passionate will to pick up and carry on the work that led to the victory of August 6th, 1965.
