Puffery is an art form in America

 

Puffery is an art form in the United States. This is for two reasons in particular: (1) it is a civilization of immigrants and their descendants who like to think they control not only their own destiny but their own identity, and (2) Americans are hypermobile, continually reintroducing themselves to others, often succumbing to the temptation to re-create their past in the process. Opportunities to touch up a self-portrait arise every time Americans move, as one in five do every year, and half do every five years. “For much of his life,” memoirist Cyra McFadden wrote of her itinerant father, rodeo announcer Cy Taillon, “he was engaged in the game of inventing himself—adding to what was true and what was desirable, stirring counter-clockwise and serving up the mix.”

Obviously, deception about the self (and lots of other things) is not limited to Americans, or to our era. The wish to seem better than real is eternal and universal. Jacob, after all, wanted to be more like Esau. Odysseus made up a new identity for himself whenever an opportunity arose. The context of American life makes it easier to engage in this type of flimflam, however. It could hardly be otherwise in a country populated primarily by immigrants and their descendants. Excepting those who were already here and the ones brought in chains, America was settled by those shaking off Old World restrictions. Along with their previous lives, they left behind anyone who had known them in that life. Those who arrived in this country were in a position to wipe the slate clean. They felt free—duty-bound even—to re-create themselves, shedding inconvenient facts along the way like a snake molting old skin. Here Albert Einstein, a cold husband and indifferent father in Europe, could reintroduce himself as a warm humanitarian after arriving alone in New York. Occidental Petroleum founder Armand Hammer made up a personal past doing relief work with starving peasants and initiating business projects in Russia. Meg Greenfield’s father successfully transformed himself from a first-generation son of Russian immigrants who grew up in a Philadelphia slum to something resembling a well-bred English gentleman. In her book Washington, Greenfield observed that “at least since Yankee Doodle tried his scam, Americans have been engaged in the business of personally reinventing themselves—enthusiastically, with varying degrees of fraudulence (or ingenuity, if you prefer), and often to perfectly good purpose.”

Their penchant for mythmaking, and receptivity to each other’s tall tales, doesn’t make Americans less moral than those they left behind, simply more opportunistic. If no one around you knows your actual history, why be candid about it? Who was going to blow your cover? From the moment when immigrants Americanized their names at a port of entry, or had this done for them, how could it not occur to them that this was a whole new ball game. Gorodetsky a little hard to pronounce? How about Gordon? Shakishavili a bit of a mouthful? Try Shaw. If names could be changed that easily, what else might be changed as well? Age? Occupation? Family origins? America was a land of unlimited possibilities, in many senses of the word.

October 12, 1492: Genocide not discovery

 

Roxanne Durban-Ortiz, Lithub

Mahmood Mamdani, in Neither Settler nor Native, locates the founding moment of the modern nation-state at 1492, noting it emerged out of two developments in Iberia. “One was ethnic cleansing, whereby the Castilian monarchy sought to create a homogeneous national homeland for Christian Spaniards by ejecting and converting those among them who were strangers to the nation—Moors and Jews. The other development was the taking of overseas colonies in the Americas by the same Castilian monarchy that spearheaded ethnic cleansing.” Mamdani emphasizes that modern colonialism didn’t suddenly start occurring in the 18th century but that European colonialism and the modern state were co-constituted.

*

A few months after Catholic entry into ethnically cleansed Granada, the Spanish monarchs contracted with a Genoese seaman who promised he could reach India by a shorter route by sailing west. Columbus landed not at already European “discovered” India but, rather, on an island of what is now called the Bahamas. The thriving Indigenous residents informed him that to the north and south and east and west stretched a huge landmass, two massive continents teeming with cities and tens of millions of acres of farmlands that would come to constitute the major portion of humanity’s food production. The rapacious crusade-hardened mercenaries representing Christendom were skeptical, until some voyages later they reached the continent at Central America, which they named Cabo Gracias a Díos (Thanks to God Cape). Two decades later a Spanish army would possess the heart of that landmass, destroying the most populated city in the world at the time, Tenochtitlán, in the valley of México.

October 12, 1492, is etched in the brains of many as the day of “discovery,” but the Indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere and of Africa and descendants of enslaved Africans regard the date as the symbol of infamy, domination, slavery, and genocide. Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes, “To call ‘discovery’ the first invasions of inhabited lands by Europeans is an exercise in Eurocentric power that already frames future narratives of the event so described Once discovered by Europeans, the Other finally enters the human world.”

Amerika'nın Avantajı

 

History of Racism

As a Puritan minister, Richard Mather had walked uprightly through fifteen years of British persecution before embarking on the perilous journey across the Atlantic to begin life anew in New England. There, he would be reunited with his illustrious ministerial friend John Cotton, who had faced British persecution for twenty years in Boston, England. In 1630, Cotton had given the farewell sermon to hundreds of Puritan founders of New England communities, blessing their fulfillment of God’s prophetic vision. As dissenters from the Church of England, Puritans believed themselves to be God’s chosen piece of humanity, a special, superior people, and New England, their Israel, was to be their exceptional land.

Within a week of the Great Hurricane, Richard Mather was installed as pastor of Dorchester’s North Church near the renowned North Church of the new Boston, which was pastored by John Cotton. Mather and Cotton then embarked on a sacred mission to create, articulate, and defend the New England Way. They used their pens as much as their pulpits, and they used their power as much as their pens and pulpits. They penned the colonies’ first adult and children’s books as part of this endeavor. Mather, in all likelihood, steered the selection of Henry Dunster to lead colonial America’s first college, Harvard’s forerunner, in 1640. And Cotton did not mind when Dunster fashioned Harvard’s curriculum after their alma mater, Cambridge, setting off an ideological trend. Like the founders of Cambridge and Harvard before them, the founders of William & Mary (1693), Yale (1701), the University of Pennsylvania (1740), Princeton (1746), Columbia (1754), Brown (1764), Rutgers (1766), and Dartmouth (1769)—the other eight colonial colleges—regarded ancient Greek and Latin literature as universal truths worthy of memorization and unworthy of critique. At the center of the Old and New England Greek library hailed the resurrected Aristotle, who had come under suspicion as a threat to doctrine among some factions in Christianity during the medieval period.

**

AFTER ARAB MUSLIMS conquered parts of North Africa, Portugal, and Spain during the seventh century, Christians and Muslims battled for centuries over the prize of Mediterranean supremacy. Meanwhile, below the Sahara Desert, the West African empires of Ghana (700–1200), Mali (1200–1500), and Songhay (1350–1600) were situated at the crossroads of the lucrative trade routes for gold and salt. A robust trans-Saharan trade emerged, allowing Europeans to obtain West African goods through Muslim intermediaries.

Ghana, Mali, and Songhay developed empires that could rival in size, power, scholarship, and wealth any in the world. Intellectuals at universities in Timbuktu and Jenne pumped out scholarship and pumped in students from around West Africa. Songhay grew to be the largest. Mali may have been the most illustrious. The world’s greatest globe-trotter of the fourteenth century, who trotted from North Africa to Eastern Europe to Eastern Asia, decided to see Mali for himself in 1352. “There is complete security in their country,” Moroccan Ibn Battuta marveled in his travel notes. “Neither traveler nor inhabitant in it has anything to fear from robbers or men of violence.”

Ibn Battuta was an oddity—an abhorred oddity—among the Islamic intelligentsia in Fez, Morocco. Hardly any scholars had traveled far from home, and Battuta’s travel accounts threatened their own armchair credibility in depicting foreigners. None of Battuta’s antagonists was more influential than the intellectual tower of the Muslim world at that time, Tunisian Ibn Khaldun, who arrived in Fez just as Battuta returned from Mali. “People in the dynasty (in official positions) whispered to each other that he must be a liar,” Khaldun reported in 1377 in The Muqaddimah, the foremost Islamic history of the premodern world. Khaldun then painted a very different picture of sub-Sahara Africa in The Muqaddimah: “The Negro nations are, as a rule, submissive to slavery,” Khaldun surmised, “because (Negroes) have little that is (essentially) human and possess attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals.” And the “same applies to the Slavs,” argued this disciple of Aristotle. Following Greek and Roman justifiers, Khaldun used climate theory to justify Islamic enslavement of sub-Saharan Africans and Eastern European Slavs—groups sharing only one obvious characteristic: their remoteness. “All their conditions are remote from those of human beings and close to those of wild animals,” Khaldun suggested. Their inferior conditions were neither permanent nor hereditary, however. “Negroes” who migrated to the cooler north were “found to produce descendants whose colour gradually turns white,” Khaldun stressed. Dark-skinned people had the capacity for physical assimilation in a colder climate. Later, cultural assimilationists would imagine that culturally inferior African people, placed in the proper European cultural environment, could or should adopt European culture. But first physical assimilationists like Khaldun imagined that physically inferior African people, placed in the proper cold environment, could or should adopt European physicality: white skin and straight hair.

Ibn Khaldun did not intend merely to demean African people as inferior. He intended to belittle all the different-looking African and Slavic peoples whom the Muslims were trading as slaves. Even so, he reinforced the conceptual foundation for racist ideas. On the eve of the fifteenth century, Khaldun helped bolster the foundation for assimilationist ideas, for racist notions of the environment producing African inferiority. All an enslaver had to do was to stop justifying Slavic slavery and inferiority using climate theory, and focus the theory on African people, for the racist attitude toward dark-skinned people to be complete.

There was one enslavement theory focused on Black people already circulating, a theory somehow derived from Genesis 9:18–29, which said “that Negroes were the children of Ham, the son of Noah, and that they were singled out to be black as the result of Noah’s curse, which produced Ham’s colour and the slavery God inflicted upon his descendants,” as Khaldun explained. The lineage of this curse of Ham theory curves back through the great Persian scholar Tabari (838–923) all the way to Islamic and Hebrew sources. God had permanently cursed ugly Blackness and slavery into the very nature of African people, curse theorists maintained. As strictly a climate theorist, Khaldun discarded the “silly story” of the curse of Ham.

Although it clearly supposed Black inferiority, the curse theory was like an unelected politician during the medieval period. Muslim and Christian enslavers hardly gave credence to the curse theory: they enslaved too many non-Black descendants of Shem and Japheth, Ham’s supposed non-cursed brothers, for that. But the medieval curse theorists laid the foundation for segregationist ideas and for racist notions of Black genetic inferiority. The shift to solely enslaving Black people, and justifying it using the curse of Ham, was in the offing. Once that shift occurred, the disempowered curse theory became empowered, and racist ideas truly came into being.

**

The Portuguese made history as the first Europeans to sail along the Atlantic beyond the Western Sahara’s Cape Bojador in order to bring enslaved Africans back to Europe, as Zurara shared in his book. The six caravels, carrying 240 captives, arrived in Lagos, Portugal, on August 6, 1444. Prince Henry made the slave auction into a spectacle to show the Portuguese had joined the European league of serious slave-traders of African people. For some time, the Genoese of Italy, the Catalans of northern Spain, and the Valencians of eastern Spain had been raiding the Canary Islands or purchasing African slaves from Moroccan traders. Zurara distinguished the Portuguese by framing their African slave-trading ventures as missionary expeditions. Prince Henry’s competitors could not play that mind game as effectively as he did, in all likelihood because they still traded so many Eastern Europeans.

But the market was changing. Around the time the Portuguese opened their sea route to a new slave export area, the old slave export area started to close up. In Ibn Khaldun’s day, most of the captives sold in Western Europe were Eastern Europeans who had been seized by Turkish raiders from areas around the Black Sea. So many of the seized captives were “Slavs” that the ethnic term became the root word for “slave” in most Western European languages. By the mid-1400s, Slavic communities had built forts against slave raiders, causing the supply of Slavs in Western Europe’s slave market to plunge at around the same time that the supply of Africans was increasing. As a result, Western Europeans began to see the natural Slav(e) not as White, but Black.

Stamped From the Beginning

In order to fully explain the complex history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning must chronicle this racial progress and the simultaneous progression of racist policies. Hate and ignorance have not driven the history of racist ideas in America. Racist policies have driven the history of racist ideas in America. And this fact becomes apparent when we examine the causes behind, not the consumption of racist ideas, but the production of racist ideas. What caused US senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina in 1837 to produce the racist idea of slavery as a “positive good,” when he knew slavery’s torturous horrors? What caused Atlanta newspaper editor Henry W. Grady in 1885 to produce the racist idea of “separate but equal,” when he knew southern communities were hardly separate or equal? What caused think tankers after the presidential election of Barack Obama in 2008 to produce the racist idea of a postracial society, when they knew all those studies had documented discrimination? Time and again, racist ideas have not been cooked up from the boiling pot of ignorance and hate. Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era’s racial disparities away from those policies and onto Black people.

I was taught the popular folktale of racism: that ignorant and hateful people had produced racist ideas, and that these racist people had instituted racist policies. But when I learned the motives behind the production of many of America’s most influentially racist ideas, it became quite obvious that this folktale, though sensible, was not based on a firm footing of historical evidence. Ignorance/hateracist ideasdiscrimination: this causal relationship is largely ahistorical. It has actually been the inverse relationship—racial discrimination led to racist ideas which led to ignorance and hate. Racial discriminationracist ideasignorance/hate: this is the causal relationship driving America’s history of race relations.

Their own racist ideas usually did not dictate the decisions of the most powerful Americans when they instituted, defended, and tolerated discriminatory policies that affected millions of Black lives over the course of American history. Racially discriminatory policies have usually sprung from economic, political, and cultural self-interests, self-interests that are constantly changing. Politicians seeking higher office have primarily created and defended discriminatory policies out of political self-interest—not racist ideas. Capitalists seeking to increase profit margins have primarily created and defended discriminatory policies out of economic self-interest—not racist ideas. Cultural professionals, including theologians, artists, scholars, and journalists, were seeking to advance their careers or cultures and have primarily created and defended discriminatory policies out of professional self-interest—not racist ideas.

When we look back on our history, we often wonder why so many Americans did not resist slave trading, enslaving, segregating, or now, mass incarcerating. The reason is, again, racist ideas. The principal function of racist ideas in American history has been the suppression of resistance to racial discrimination and its resulting racial disparities. The beneficiaries of slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration have produced racist ideas of Black people being best suited for or deserving of the confines of slavery, segregation, or the jail cell. Consumers of these racist ideas have been led to believe there is something wrong with Black people, and not the policies that have enslaved, oppressed, and confined so many Black people.

**

Racist ideas are ideas. Anyone can produce them or consume them, as Stamped from the Beginning’s interracial cast of producers and consumers show. Anyone—Whites, Latina/os, Blacks, Asians, Native Americans—anyone can express the idea that Black people are inferior, that something is wrong with Black people. Anyone can believe both racist and antiracist ideas, that certain things are wrong with Black people and other things are equal. Fooled by racist ideas, I did not fully realize that the only thing wrong with Black people is that we think something is wrong with Black people. I did not fully realize that the only thing extraordinary about White people is that they think something is extraordinary about White people.

Japonlar Atom Bombalarından Sonra Bile Teslim Olmadılar

İnsanlık tarihi binlerce yıl boyunca pek çok acı ve felaket gördü. Bu yönüyle insanlık tarihi aynı zamanda savaşlar, zulümler ve trajediler tarihi olarak değerlendirilebilir. Ancak 2. Dünya Savaşı tarih boyunca hiç olmadık zulüm ve acıların dünyanın her yanında görüldüğü, insanların insanlıktan çıkıp şeytanları utandıracak hallere düştüğü bir dönem oldu. Ülkemizde 2. Dünya Savaşı denilince daha çok Hitler Almanya'sı ve Yahudi soykırımı akla gelse de, savaşın en kanlı trajedilerinden büyük bir kısmı da Pasifik Okyanusu ve Güneydoğu Asya'da gerçekleşti. Savaşın bu kısmı hakkında Hollywood yapımlarının da etkisiyle Pearl Harbor ve Iwo Jima gibi savaşlar hatırlanacaktır. Ve tabii olarak da Hiroşima ve Nagasaki'ye atılan atom bombaları.

**

Bu yazı hazırlanırken Wikipedia (ilgili makalenin tamamını okumam yaklaşık 1 saat alıyor), Newyorker, New York Times, Foreign Policy, The Japan Times, Business Insider ve Guardian gibi popüler gazete ve dergilerde son yıllarda çıkmış yazılar kaynak alındı. Wikipedia'daki ilgili maddenin olaylara çoğunlukla Amerikan merkezli baktığı sğylenebilir. Diğerleri ise çoğunlukla bombanın atılmasının arkasındaki başka sebepleri araştırıyor ya da direk olarak Amerikan politikalarını eleştiriyor. Bunun sebebi iki sene Obama'nın anma törenlerine katılması ve bir nevi özür dilemesi olsa gerek. Yazıların kalanı da halen sağ olan kurbanlarla yapılmış röportajlar veya olay günü hikayelerinden oluşuyor.

**

Hiroşima ve Nagasaki'ye atılan atom bombaları bir savaşta aktif olarak kullanılan ilk nükleer silahlar olarak tarihe geçtiler. Nazi Almanyası'ndan Amerika ve İngiltere'ye kaçan bilim adamlarının önderliğinde oluşturulan meşhur Manhattan projesi temel olarak Almanya'dan önce bu bombayı yapmak üzere oluşturulmuştu. Almanya'nın 1945 baharında teslim olması ve Hitler' in intiharıyla bombayı kullanmaya gerek kalmasa da savaşın Pasifik kısmı devam ediyordu. Bu kısımda savaş aslında daha çok Amerika ile Japonya arasında geçiyordu. Operation Downfall ismi verilen operasyonla Amerikalılar Japonları öncelikle işgal ettikleri Filipinler, Myanmar ve Büyük Okyanus adaları gibi yerlerden çıkarmaya, sonrasında da Japonya'yı işgal etmeye çalışıyorlardı.

Meiji Restorasyonu ile 1800lerin ikinci yarısında hızlı bir yükselişe geçen Japonya 1. Dünya Savaşı sonunda artık oldukça güçlü bir hale gelmişti. Almanlarınkine benzer bir hırsla değişik yerleri işgal etmeye başlayıp büyük bir imparatorluk kurmaya çalışıyorlardı. Sahalin, Mançurya, Kore, Çin'in önemli bir kısmı, Vietnam, Filipinler, Myanmar ve Malezya'nın bir kısmı ile okyanus adalarını ele geçirmişlerdi. Almanya ve İtalya'ya benzer şekilde faşist bir grubun yönetimine geçen Japonya'da imparator Hirohito ülkeyi küçük bir grupla yönetiyordu ve bu grubun arzu ve hırsları milyonların canına mal olacaktı. Nanjing'te olanlar, Koreli ve Çinli onbinlerce kadına yapılanlar, öldürülen milyonlar... Pearl Harbor'a yaptıkları saldırı olmasaydı da Amerika ile karşı karşıya gelmeleri çok muhtemeldi. 1945 yaz aylarına gelindiğinde Avrupa teslim olmuş ve Japon şehirleri Amerikan bombardımanları ile yerle yeksan olmuştu. İşgal edilen yerlerin büyük kısmı da elden çıkmaktaydı. Yine de Japonya direniyordu ve Amerika 6 Ağustos'ta Hiroşima'ya ve üç gün sonra da Nagasaki'ye atom bombası attı. Japonlar da kısa süre sonra yenilgiyi kabul ettiler.

Bombalar patladığında, yarısından çoğu ilk gün olmak üzere iki şehirde toplam en az 214000 kişi öldü. Aylar ve yıllar boyu binlerce insan radyasyon kaynaklı hastalıklar, yanık ve yetersiz beslenmeden dolayı yaşamını yitirdi. Japonya buna rağmen teslim olmadı, ancak Sovyetler'in savaş ilan etmesiyle 15 Ağustos'ta teslim oldu.

Amerikalılar savaş sırasında 69 şehri bombardımana tutmuş ve yerle bir etmişlerdi. 100 binlerce ölüye rağmen Japonya teslim olmuyordu. Yapılan tahminlere göre yüzbinlerce Japon ve on binlerce Amerikan askerinin ölmeden de Japonya'yı işgalle ele geçirmek mümkün görünmüyordu. Savaşın ekonomik boyutu da ayrı bir yüktü muhtemelen. Amerika toplam zayiatının dörtte üçü olan 1 milyon asker kaybını Haziran 1944 ve Haziran 1945 arasında vermişti.

Vurulacak hedefler belirlenirken Amerikalılar şu şekilde plan yapmışlardı: Kokura, Yokohama, Kyoto, Nagazaki gibi askeri mühimmat ve birliklerin yoğun olduğu ya da liman, rafineri gibi stratejik ve teknik öneme sahip yerler öncelikli hedefti. Ayrıca bomba kararı alınmadan (ya da çok önceden beri) bazı bölgeler atom bombasının etkisini görme, ya da ağır darbe adına bombardımanlar sırasında göz ardı edilmiş ve fazla vurulmamıştı.

Tokyo'da imparatorun Sarayı'nın vurulmasındansa askeri ve stratejik öneme sahip yerler daha ön plana çıktı. Tarihi Kyoto şehri ise bir iddiaya göre kültürel mirasın öne çıkması sebebiyle listeden çıkarılmış ve yerine Nagazaki hedefe konulmuştu. Bununla birlikte vurulacak şehrin düz olması da önemliydi çünkü patlama sonrası alev fırtınasının olabildiğince etrafa yayılması gerekiyordu, ki böylelikle olabilecek en büyük yıkım ve maximum ölü sayısına ulaşılsın. Bunlar Amerikalılar niye büyük şehirler değil de Hiroşima ve Nagazaki gibi küçük yerleri vurmuş sorusuna cevap veren argümanlar.

Hiroşima'nın bomba atılmadan önceki nüfusu 350 bin civarındaymış ve buranın bombardımanlardan etkilenmemesi garip karşılanıyormuş. Japonlar arasındaki genel kanı işgal sonrası Amerikalıların burayı kendilerine merkez üs yapacaklarından dolayı bombalamadıkları yönündeymiş.

Atom bombasını bir bölgede patlatma ve bu şekilde Japonları korkutup savaştan çekilmelerini sağlama fikri ise Amerikalı komutanlar arasında revaç bulmamıştı. Japonlar teslim olmayabilir, esirleri bu bölgeye sevkedip radyasyona maruz kalmalarına sebep olabilir diye düşünülüyordu. Elde sadece iki tane olan ve yapımı çok pahalı olan bombalardan birinin böyle bir güç gösterisine harcanması da lüks bulunmuştu. Herşeyden önemlisi atom bombası ilk kez kullanılacaktı ve oluşturacağı şok etkisi bu şekilde hafifletilmemeliydi Amerikan savaş lordlarına göre.

Havada infilak eden bomba atıldığı hedefin 240 metre uzağına düştü. Amerikalıların hesapladığından daha düşük bir etki gösterse de patlamanın oluşturduğu alev fırtınası yaklaşık 75000 kişiyi anında öldürdü.

Hiroşima'daki tüm hastahaneler merkezde olduğu için sadece bir doktor sağ kurtulmuştu, binlerce hemşireden de sadece birkaç yüzü.

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Bomba patladığı anda olanları hayal etmek oldukça güç. Binlerce dereceye varan sıcaklıkla yakın yerdeki herkes yanmış olmalı, belki de şokla anında öldüler. Kırılan camlar kurşun gibi her tarafa fırlamış ve zaten yanıp kömürleşmiş cesetlere kurşun gibi yapışmıştı. İnsanların gözlerinin yuvalarından gerçek anlamında fırladığı, organlarının parçalanıp koptuğu yazılagelen gerçekler. Bomba patladığında zaten yoğun bir karanlık oluşmuş ve peşinden oluşan toz her yeri kaplamış olmalı. Yıkılmayan çok az yer vardı. Bir şekilde bombaya biraz uzak olanların da evleri yanmaya başlamıştı. Çıkan ses, çığlık atan insanlar, ağlayan ve kaybolan çocuklar, enkaz altında kalanlar... Sonraki günler etraf yanmış cesetlerle dolu olmalıydı.

2016'da Hiroşima'daki anma törenlerine katılan ilk Amerikan başkanı Obama'nın elini sıktığı 80 yaşındaki Shinegoki Mori okula giderken bombanın patladığını ve patlama şiddetiyle bulunduğu köprüden nehre düştüğünü anlatmış New York Times gazetesine. Günlerce yiyecek aradığını ve ararken karşılaştığı tek şeyin yanmaktan kömürleşip tanınmaz hale gelen cesetler olduğunu hatırlıyor. Düştüğü nehir onu bu akıbetten korumuş.

İkinci bomba için Kokura şehri hedeflense de hava koşulları sebebiyle alternatif hedef olan Nagazaki vuruldu. Hava koşulları denilen hadise ise şehrin üstünü kaplayan toz bulutlarıydı. Atom bombasının hedefi bir kilometre ıskalaması bile Amerikalılara göre bu pahalı silahın israf edilmesi anlamına geleceği için hedefin çıplak gözle görülmeden bombanın salıverilmemesi emri vardı. Bazı teorilere göre 3 gün önce ilk bombayı atan Enola Gay isimli ve bu görevde hava durumunu tetkik etmekle vazifeli uçak Japonlarca tespit edilmişti. Dolayısıyla yerel savunma birimleri bir şekilde buhar ve dumanla şehrin üstünü kapatmışlardı. Bu bir şehrin kaderini değiştiren ve halkını kurtaran çok stratejik bir karardı. Aynı zamanda diğer bir şehrin kaderini değiştirecekti çünkü bombacıların alternatif planları vardı.

Daha büyük bir bomba atılsa da şehrin coğrafi koşulları ölümlerin sayısını Hiroşima'ya oranla daha az olmasını sağladı. Ayrıca şehirde petrol olmaması da yangınların yayılmasını sınırladı. Yine de Japon sömürgelerinden gelen çok sayıda kayıt dışı işçi ve göçmen olması sebebiyle ölü sayısı 40 bin ila 80 bin arası olarak tahmin ediliyor.

Japon hükümeti bir kaç gün sonra yenilgiyi kabul edince bir iki hafta sonraya planlanan diğer bombaların atımından vazgeçildi.

Tarihteki en büyük devlet terörü denebilecek bu hadiseyi savunanlar savaş devam etseydi çok daha fazla kişi ölecekti diyerek savunuyorlar. Başta da belirtildiği gibi bombardımanlar ve Pasifik Okyanusu'ndaki aktif savaş devam etseydi en az bir milyon Amerikan askeri ve onun çok daha fazlası Japon asker ve sivil ölecekti. Ancak savaşı bitirmek için başka metotlar da olabilirdi. Örneğin Sovyetler'in Mançurya'daki işgalinden sonra Japonya teslimiyeti kabul etti. Ayrıca şu haliyle ölenlerin çok büyük kısmı kadınlar, çocuklar ve yaşlılar başta olmak üzere sivillerden oluşuyordu.

Japon resmî tezine göre ABD atom bombalarını başlamakta olan Soğuk Savaşı göz önüne alarak kullanmıştı.

Benim de kanaatime göre Almanya'nın bile teslim olduğu bu savaş biraz daha sürer ama tarihin en büyük trajedilerinden biri olan bu insanlık dışı uygulamaya gerek kalmayabilirdi.

Hiroşima'da olayın ehemmiyetini saatler sonra anlayabilen Tokyo yönetimi, bir iddiaya göre, Japon bilim adamlarının atom bombası kullanıldığı yönündeki raporlarında ikinci bir bombanın inşa edilmiş olamayacağı düşüncelerine dayanarak direnişe devam kararı aldılar. Bunun üzerine Amerikalılar da ikinci bombayı atmaya karar verdiler. Bununla birlikte Japonya'da yüz binin üzerinde nüfusu olan yerlerden sadece dokuzu bombalanmamış, kalanı ise kimisi yüzde doksan beşlere varan oranlarda yıkılmıştı. Bombalanmayan yerlerin bir kısmı kuzeyde ve çok uzaktı bir kısmı da Kyoto gibi kültürel sebeple yıkımdan kurtulmuştu.

Daha gerçekçi ikinci iddiaya göre ise atom bombaları Japon devletinin savaştan çekilmesine sebep olmamıştı. Olaya Japon hükümeti açısından bakınca bu sadece yeni bir bombaydı. Hiroşima'nın etkisinden çok daha büyük bombardımanlar geçirmişti Japonya. Mesela aylar önce, 9 Mart'ı 10'una bağlayan gece Tokyo bombalanmış ve yüz yirmi bin kişi tek gecede ölmüştü. Savaş boyunca 68 ayrı şehir yerle yeksan olmuştu. O yüzden Hiroşima ve Nagasaki savaşı bitirmek için yeterli değildi.

Japonları pes ettiren Sovyetler'in Japonya'yı işgal planı oldu. ABD'ye aylardır direnebiliyorlardı ve bu gidişte de daha aylar sürecek bir savaş vardı. Savaşın kaybı barizdi ancak savaş suçları mahkemelerinde yargılanmamak ya da savaş sonunda itibarlarını koruyabilmek için Japon hükümeti ve imparator stratejik planlar üzerinde yoğunlaşmışlardı. Avrupa'da yenilen ülke yöneticileri yargılanmaktaydı o günlerde. Diplomasi ve Amerikalıları hoş tutarak bu akıbetten korunmayı umuyordular. Belki işgal ettikleri yerlerin de bir kısmını hala koruyabilirlerdi, o yüzden savaş sonrasını da düşünüp diplomasiyi amaçlıyorlardı. Evet şehirler yıkılmaya yüzbinler ölmeye devam ediyordu ve Amerika iki şehirde yeni büyük bombalar denemişti ama bu çok da yeni birşey değildi.

Stalin'in kuzeyden saldırısı ise çok daha tehlikeliydi, kuvvetlerin büyük kısmı güneyde savaşıyordu ve Sovyetler Kuzeydeki Hokkaido'yu çok rahat ele geçirebilir ve imparatorluğu utanç verici bir sona uğratabilirlerdi. Japon yöneticilerin savaş suçları mahkemesi korkusu kadar imparatorluğu kaybetme korkusu da anlaşılabilir, zira dünyanın en uzun süren hanedanlığıydı bahse konu olan. Zaten atom bombalarından çok önce olası bir Sovyet saldırısı ile teslim olunma kararı alınmıştı. Ve sonuçta da öyle oldu.

Başkan Truman'ın ikinci bombadan haberi olmadığı için oldukça kızdığı ve kendi emri olmadan yeni bir bomba atılmasını yasakladığı gibi ilginç bir bilgi de mevcut. Günlüğüne o çocuklar ölmemeliydi tarzında birşeyler bile yazmış. İlk bombadan sonra her ne kadar zafer çığlıkları atılsa da ölü ve yaralıların görüntüleri özenle saklanmış Amerikan halkından. Bomba atılan yere neredeyse 2 hafta sonra ulaşan bir gazeteci Japon propagandası yapmakla suçlanmış. Japonların olanları belgeleme amaçlı kayıt ve yayınlarına da Amerikalılar bir süre sonra el koymuşlar. Yine de pek çok video ve fotoğraf günümüze dek ulaşmış.

Özellikle de Nagazaki'de birçok savaş esirinin de öldüğü bir başka ilginç ayrıntı. Bombalar atılırken sivil ölümleri engelleme gibi bir çaba içinde olunmadığı açık. Askeri hedeflerden çok siviller ölmüş her iki seferde de. Bazı savaş esirlerinin isimleri çok geç belirlenebilmiş zira Amerikalılar kendi askerlerini de atom bombasıyla öldürdüklerini uzun süre açıklamamayı tercih etmiş.

Gar Alperowitz'e göre savaşı bitirmek üzere bomba atıldığı bir efsane sadece. Zira diğer şehirler bombardımana maruz kalıp yerle yeksan olmuştu. Oralarda çok daha fazla insan ölmüştü. Ancak Japonlar savaşı bırakmamıştı. Japonların teslim bayrağını çekmesini sağlayan asıl faktör Kızıl Ordu ile girilecek savaştı. Şehirlerin kaybı ya da yıkılmasından çok Japon ordusunun tamamen yok edilebileceğinden korktular ve Sovyetler'in savaş ilanı ile 2. Dünya Savaşı'ndan çekildiklerini ilan ettiler. Alperowitz yazısında pekçok Amerikalı komutan ve politikacının sonradan yazdıkları anıları ve o günlerde basına verdikleri demeçlerinden alıntı yaparak aslında Japonya'yı yenmek için atom bombasına gerçekten bir ihtiyaç olmadığını vurguluyor.

Sonuçta atom bombaları Japonların teslim olma sebebi ya da Amerika'nın kazanma sebebi olmasa da ilginç bir şekilde iki tarafa da savaş sonunda büyük getiri sağladı. Japonya'yı gereksiz yere savaşa sokan ve savaş sırasında değişik yerlerde bir çok işgal ve zülümler gerçekleştiren Japon yöneticileri yenilgiye bahane olarak düşmanın mucizevi silahını gösterecek, oluşan mağduriyetten de uzun yıllar nemalanacaklardı. Bu ortamda savaş suçları gibi şeyler de gündemden düşüyordu ya da aşağıda da değinileceği gibi bazı yönleriyle görmezden geliniyordu. Amerikalılar ise bu insanlık trajedisi ile Soğuk Savaş için psikolojik bir üstünlük sağlamışlar, Pasifik Okyanusu ve çevresinin günümüze dek gelen politik kontrolünü elde tutmayı başarmışlardı(!)

Savaş suçları mahkemesi hakimlerinden birinin oğlu olan Jerry Delaney'in Foreign Policy'de çıkan makalesinde bahsettiği üzere Amerikalılar Japonların bazı savaş suçlarını gündeme hiç getirmemeye baştan karar vermişlerdi. Bunların arasında savaş esirleri üzerinde yapılan biyolojik deneylerden, sivillerin bombalanması, sistematik tecavüz ve soykırıma varana kadar pek çok zulüm vardı. Ancak bunların mahkemeye gelmesi 69 şehrin bombalanması ve özellikle de Hiroşima ve Nagazaki'yi de resmî kayıtlara geçireceği için bunların mahkemede sorgulanmamalarına karar verildi. Halbuki tarihin en barbarca saldırılarından biri olan bu bombardımanlarla bir gecede Amerika'nın tüm savaş boyunca Pasifik'te kaybettiğinin üç katı insan ölmüş oluyordu, ki büyük çoğunluğu sivildi bu ölülerin. Böylelikle savaşın sonunda kurulan mahkemeyle galiplerin adaleti hükmetti ve mahkemelerin en önemli sonucu Amerika'nın tüm suçlarını örtmek oldu.

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Japonlar bombalardan sağ kurtulanlara hibakusha ismini vermişler. Günümüzde yaklaşık 164 bin hibakusha hala sağmış. Ortalama olarak 81 yaşındalar. İlginç bir şekilde bu insanlar yoğun bir ayrımcılığa maruz kalmışlar çünkü radyasyondan etkilendikleri ve hastalıklı oldukları düşünülüyormuş. Çocukları da bu önyargı ve dışlamadan muzdaripmiş günümüzde. Daha da kötüsü o dönemde zorunlu işçi olarak çalıştırılan on binlerce Koreli'den sağ kalanlar ve sonradan Japonya'ya yerleşenler uzun süre Japonlara tanınan sağlık hizmetlerinden faydalanamamışlar. Bu mesele ancak 2008'de adalete kavuşmuş.


1. https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/08/05/stalin_japan_hiroshima_occupation_hokkaido/
2. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima
3. http://www.greenwych.ca/hiro2bmb.htm
4. http://www.businessinsider.com/the-nuclear-bomb-didnt-beat-japan-stalin-did-2017-8
5. http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/nagasaki-the-last-bomb
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki

Human History is the History of Extinction

“The journey of the first humans to Australia is one of the most important events in history, at least as important as Columbus’ journey to America or the Apollo 11 expedition to the moon. It was the first time any human had managed to leave the Afro-Asian ecological system – indeed, the first time any large terrestrial mammal had managed to cross from Afro-Asia to Australia. Of even greater importance was what the human pioneers did in this new world. The moment the first hunter-gatherer set foot on an Australian beach was the moment that Homo sapiens climbed to the top rung in the food chain on a particular landmass and thereafter became the deadliest species in the annals of planet Earth.


Up until then humans had displayed some innovative adaptations and behaviours, but their effect on their environment had been negligible. They had demonstrated remarkable success in moving into and adjusting to various habitats, but they did so without drastically changing those habitats. The settlers of Australia, or more accurately, its conquerors, didn’t just adapt, they transformed the Australian ecosystem beyond recognition.


The first human footprint on a sandy Australian beach was immediately washed away by the waves. Yet when the invaders advanced inland, they left behind a different footprint, one that would never be expunged. As they pushed on, they encountered a strange universe of unknown creatures that included a 200-kilogram, two-metre kangaroo, and a marsupial lion, as massive as a modern tiger, that was the continent’s largest predator. Koalas far too big to be cuddly and cute rustled in the trees and flightless birds twice the size of ostriches sprinted on the plains. Dragon-like lizards and snakes five metres long slithered through the undergrowth. The giant diprotodon, a two-and-a-half-ton wombat, roamed the forests. Except for the birds and reptiles, all these animals were marsupials – like kangaroos, they gave birth to tiny, helpless, fetus-like young which they then nurtured with milk in abdominal pouches. Marsupial mammals were almost unknown in Africa and Asia, but in Australia they reigned supreme.

Within a few thousand years, virtually all of these giants vanished. Of the twenty-four Australian animal species weighing fifty kilograms or more, twenty-three became extinct.2 A large number of smaller species also disappeared. Food chains throughout the entire Australian ecosystem were broken and rearranged. It was the most important transformation of the Australian ecosystem for millions of years. 

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The settling of America was hardly bloodless. It left behind a long trail of victims. American fauna 14,000 years ago was far richer than it is today. When the first Americans marched south from Alaska into the plains of Canada and the western United States, they encountered mammoths and mastodons, rodents the size of bears, herds of horses and camels, oversized lions and dozens of large species the likes of which are completely unknown today, among them fearsome sabre-tooth cats and giant ground sloths that weighed up to eight tons and reached a height of six metres. South America hosted an even more exotic menagerie of large mammals, reptiles and birds. The Americas were a great laboratory of evolutionary experimentation, a place where animals and plants unknown in Africa and Asia had evolved and thrived.

But no longer. Within 2,000 years of the Sapiens arrival, most of these unique species were gone. According to current estimates, within that short interval, North America lost thirty-four out of its forty-seven genera of large mammals. South America lost fifty out of sixty. The sabre-tooth cats, after flourishing for more than 30 million years, disappeared, and so did the giant ground sloths, the oversized lions, native American horses, native American camels, the giant rodents and the mammoths. Thousands of species of smaller mammals, reptiles, birds, and even insects and parasites also became extinct (when the mammoths died out, all species of mammoth ticks followed them to oblivion).

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If we combine the mass extinctions in Australia and America, and add the smaller-scale extinctions that took place as Homo sapiens spread over Afro-Asia – such as the extinction of all other human species – and the extinctions that occurred when ancient foragers settled remote islands such as Cuba, the inevitable conclusion is that the first wave of Sapiens colonisation was one of the biggest and swiftest ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom. Hardest hit were the large furry creatures. At the time of the Cognitive Revolution, the planet was home to about 200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over fifty kilograms. At the time of the Agricultural Revolution, only about a hundred remained. Homo sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet’s big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing, or iron tools.

This ecological tragedy was restaged in miniature countless times after the Agricultural Revolution. The archaeological record of island after island tells the same sad story. The tragedy opens with a scene showing a rich and varied population of large animals, without any trace of humans. In scene two, Sapiens appear, evidenced by a human bone, a spear point, or “perhaps a potsherd. Scene three quickly follows, in which men and women occupy centre stage and most large animals, along with many smaller ones, are gone.

The large island of Madagascar, about 400 kilometres east of the African mainland, offers a famous example. Through millions of years of isolation, a unique collection of animals evolved there. These included the elephant bird, a flightless creature three metres tall and weighing almost half a ton – the largest bird in the world – and the giant lemurs, the globe’s largest primates. The elephant birds and the giant lemurs, along with most of the other large animals of Madagascar, suddenly vanished about 1,500 years ago – precisely when the first humans set foot on the island.

In the Pacific Ocean, the main wave of extinction began in about 1500 BC, when Polynesian farmers settled the Solomon Islands, Fiji and New Caledonia. They killed off, directly or indirectly, hundreds of species of birds, insects, snails and other local inhabitants. From there, the wave of extinction moved gradually to the east, the south and the north, into the heart of the Pacific Ocean, obliterating on its way the unique fauna of Samoa and Tonga (1200 BC); the Marquis Islands (AD 1); Easter Island, the Cook Islands and Hawaii (AD 500); and finally New Zealand (AD 1200).

Similar ecological disasters occurred on almost every one of the thousands of islands that pepper the Atlantic Ocean, Indian Ocean, Arctic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea. 

Archaeologists have discovered on even the tiniest islands evidence of the existence of birds, insects and snails that lived there for countless generations, only to vanish when the first human farmers arrived. None but a few extremely remote islands escaped man’s notice until the modern age, and these islands kept their fauna intact. The Galapagos Islands, to give one famous example, remained uninhabited by humans until the nineteenth century, thus preserving their unique menagerie, including their giant tortoises, which, like the ancient diprotodons, show no fear of humans.

The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don’t believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.

Perhaps if more people were aware of the First Wave and Second Wave extinctions, they’d be less nonchalant about the Third Wave they are part of. If we knew how many species we’ve already eradicated, we might be more motivated to protect those that still survive. This is especially relevant to the large animals of the oceans. Unlike their terrestrial counterparts, the large sea animals suffered relatively little from the Cognitive and Agricultural Revolutions. But many of them are on the brink of extinction now as a result of industrial pollution and human overuse of oceanic resources. If things continue at the present pace, it is likely that whales, sharks, tuna and dolphins will follow the diprotodons, ground sloths and mammoths to oblivion. Among all the world’s large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that serve as galley slaves in Noah’s Ark. 

America - A Nation of Holers

http://murals.wbtla.org/uploads/2/4/7/9/24790045/photo-a.jpg

As tourist destinations go, the Republic of Moldova — tucked between Ukraine and Romania — probably isn’t on anyone’s bucket list. It’s the poorest country in Europe, with per capita G.D.P. barely exceeding Sudan’s. Sex trafficking and organized crime are rampant. My memories of the place, from a visit 17 years ago, include roads that vanished into deep snow, Transnistrian border guards in Soviet uniforms, and an impoverished Holocaust survivor’s tale of a bleak life under Romanian, German and Soviet tyrants.

Let’s not mince words: Moldova is a hole. Modify with any four letters you wish.

I mention Moldova because it’s where my paternal grandfather was born in 1901. An anti-Semitic rampage in his hometown, Kishinev, soon forced his family to leave for New York, where my great-grandfather labored as a carpenter in the Brooklyn Navy Yard for eight dollars a week. Low skills, low wages, minimal English, lots of children and probably not the best hygiene — that’s half of my pedigree. The other half consisted of refugees.

I’m not alone. America is a nation of holers. It is an improbable yet wildly successful experiment in the transformation — by means of hope, opportunity and ambition — of holers into doers, makers, thinkers and givers. Are you of Irish descent? Italian? Polish? Scottish? Chinese? Chances are, your ancestors did not get on a boat because life in the old country was placid and prosperous and grandpa owned a bank. With few exceptions, Americans are the dregs of the wine, the chaff of the wheat. If you don’t know this by now, it makes you the wax in the ear.

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What about the argument that people from poor countries bring their national baggage with them — the dysfunctions and prejudices that help account for their troubles back home?

But immigrants are more likely to be fleeing those dysfunctions and prejudices than they are to be bringing them — just ask Dorsa Derakhshani, the international chess master from Iran who came to the United States last year because, as she wrote in an op-ed for The Times, the mullahs “cared more about the scarf covering my hair than the brain under it.” Vietnamese boat people did not bring fratricidal hatreds with them to America. Soviet refuseniks did not bring a Soviet work ethic.



Bret Stephens, The New York Times

Why religion is not going away and science will not destroy it

Peter Harrison, Aeon

In 1966, just over 50 years ago, the distinguished Canadian-born anthropologist Anthony Wallace confidently predicted the global demise of religion at the hands of an advancing science: ‘belief in supernatural powers is doomed to die out, all over the world, as a result of the increasing adequacy and diffusion of scientific knowledge’. Wallace’s vision was not exceptional. On the contrary, the modern social sciences, which took shape in 19th-century western Europe, took their own recent historical experience of secularisation as a universal model. An assumption lay at the core of the social sciences, either presuming or sometimes predicting that all cultures would eventually converge on something roughly approximating secular, Western, liberal democracy. Then something closer to the opposite happened.

Not only has secularism failed to continue its steady global march but countries as varied as Iran, India, Israel, Algeria and Turkey have either had their secular governments replaced by religious ones, or have seen the rise of influential religious nationalist movements. Secularisation, as predicted by the social sciences, has failed.

To be sure, this failure is not unqualified. Many Western countries continue to witness decline in religious belief and practice. The most recent census data released in Australia, for example, shows that 30 per cent of the population identify as having ‘no religion’, and that this percentage is increasing. International surveys confirm comparatively low levels of religious commitment in western Europe and Australasia. Even the United States, a long-time source of embarrassment for the secularisation thesis, has seen a rise in unbelief. The percentage of atheists in the US now sits at an all-time high (if ‘high’ is the right word) of around 3 per cent. Yet, for all that, globally, the total number of people who consider themselves to be religious remains high, and demographic trends suggest that the overall pattern for the immediate future will be one of religious growth. But this isn’t the only failure of the secularisation thesis.

Scientists, intellectuals and social scientists expected that the spread of modern science would drive secularisation – that science would be a secularising force. But that simply hasn’t been the case. If we look at those societies where religion remains vibrant, their key common features are less to do with science, and more to do with feelings of existential security and protection from some of the basic uncertainties of life in the form of public goods. A social safety net might be correlated with scientific advances but only loosely, and again the case of the US is instructive. The US is arguably the most scientifically and technologically advanced society in the world, and yet at the same time the most religious of Western societies. As the British sociologist David Martin concluded in The Future of Christianity (2011): ‘There is no consistent relation between the degree of scientific advance and a reduced profile of religious influence, belief and practice.’

The story of science and secularisation becomes even more intriguing when we consider those societies that have witnessed significant reactions against secularist agendas. India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru championed secular and scientific ideals, and enlisted scientific education in the project of modernisation. Nehru was confident that Hindu visions of a Vedic past and Muslim dreams of an Islamic theocracy would both succumb to the inexorable historical march of secularisation. ‘There is only one-way traffic in Time,’ he declared. But as the subsequent rise of Hindu and Islamic fundamentalism adequately attests, Nehru was wrong. Moreover, the association of science with a secularising agenda has backfired, with science becoming a collateral casualty of resistance to secularism.

Turkey provides an even more revealing case. Like most pioneering nationalists, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the Turkish republic, was a committed secularist. Atatürk believed that science was destined to displace religion. In order to make sure that Turkey was on the right side of history, he gave science, in particular evolutionary biology, a central place in the state education system of the fledgling Turkish republic. As a result, evolution came to be associated with Atatürk’s entire political programme, including secularism. Islamist parties in Turkey, seeking to counter the secularist ideals of the nation’s founders, have also attacked the teaching of evolution. For them, evolution is associated with secular materialism. This sentiment culminated in the decision this June to remove the teaching of evolution from the high-school classroom. Again, science has become a victim of guilt by association.

The US represents a different cultural context, where it might seem that the key issue is a conflict between literal readings of Genesis and key features of evolutionary history. But in fact, much of the creationist discourse centres on moral values. In the US case too, we see anti-evolutionism motivated at least in part by the assumption that evolutionary theory is a stalking horse for secular materialism and its attendant moral commitments. As in India and Turkey, secularism is actually hurting science.

In brief, global secularisation is not inevitable and, when it does happen, it is not caused by science. Further, when the attempt is made to use science to advance secularism, the results can damage science. The thesis that ‘science causes secularisation’ simply fails the empirical test, and enlisting science as an instrument of secularisation turns out to be poor strategy. The science and secularism pairing is so awkward that it raises the question: why did anyone think otherwise?

Historically, two related sources advanced the idea that science would displace religion. First, 19th-century progressivist conceptions of history, particularly associated with the French philosopher Auguste Comte, held to a theory of history in which societies pass through three stages – religious, metaphysical and scientific (or ‘positive’). Comte coined the term ‘sociology’ and he wanted to diminish the social influence of religion and replace it with a new science of society. Comte’s influence extended to the ‘young Turks’ and Atatürk.

The 19th century also witnessed the inception of the ‘conflict model’ of science and religion. This was the view that history can be understood in terms of a ‘conflict between two epochs in the evolution of human thought – the theological and the scientific’. This description comes from Andrew Dickson White’s influential A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896), the title of which nicely encapsulates its author’s general theory. White’s work, as well as John William Draper’s earlier History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874), firmly established the conflict thesis as the default way of thinking about the historical relations between science and religion. Both works were translated into multiple languages. Draper’s History went through more than 50 printings in the US alone, was translated into 20 languages and, notably, became a bestseller in the late Ottoman empire, where it informed Atatürk’s understanding that progress meant science superseding religion.

Today, people are less confident that history moves through a series of set stages toward a single destination. Nor, despite its popular persistence, do most historians of science support the idea of an enduring conflict between science and religion. Renowned collisions, such as the Galileo affair, turned on politics and personalities, not just science and religion. Darwin had significant religious supporters and scientific detractors, as well as vice versa. Many other alleged instances of science-religion conflict have now been exposed as pure inventions. In fact, contrary to conflict, the historical norm has more often been one of mutual support between science and religion. In its formative years in the 17th century, modern science relied on religious legitimation. During the 18th and 19th centuries, natural theology helped to popularise science.

The conflict model of science and religion offered a mistaken view of the past and, when combined with expectations of secularisation, led to a flawed vision of the future. Secularisation theory failed at both description and prediction. The real question is why we continue to encounter proponents of science-religion conflict. Many are prominent scientists. It would be superfluous to rehearse Richard Dawkins’s musings on this topic, but he is by no means a solitary voice. Stephen Hawking thinks that ‘science will win because it works’; Sam Harris has declared that ‘science must destroy religion’; Stephen Weinberg thinks that science has weakened religious certitude; Colin Blakemore predicts that science will eventually make religion unnecessary. Historical evidence simply does not support such contentions. Indeed, it suggests that they are misguided.

So why do they persist? The answers are political. Leaving aside any lingering fondness for quaint 19th-century understandings of history, we must look to the fear of Islamic fundamentalism, exasperation with creationism, an aversion to alliances between the religious Right and climate-change denial, and worries about the erosion of scientific authority. While we might be sympathetic to these concerns, there is no disguising the fact that they arise out of an unhelpful intrusion of normative commitments into the discussion. Wishful thinking – hoping that science will vanquish religion – is no substitute for a sober assessment of present realities. Continuing with this advocacy is likely to have an effect opposite to that intended.

Religion is not going away any time soon, and science will not destroy it. If anything, it is science that is subject to increasing threats to its authority and social legitimacy. Given this, science needs all the friends it can get. Its advocates would be well advised to stop fabricating an enemy out of religion, or insisting that the only path to a secure future lies in a marriage of science and secularism.