Art does not merely imitate life. It explains life. It questions life. It arrives at a conclusion, however hydra-headed, that reflects the complexities of truth, its historical context and lessons for the future. Picasso’s Guernica exposed Spanish dictator Franco’s savagery against his ideological enemies. George Orwell’s 1984 was a prophecy about state control of individual freedom through technology.
OV Vijayan’s post-Emergency novel, The Saga of Dharmapuri, was scatological surgery on the perversion of power. Amanda Gorman recited The Hill We Climb at the Biden-Harris inauguration ceremony as a healing ode to a country divided by hate, anger and lies. All these artists address a single issue, and perhaps the most important one: mankind’s survival in the age of war.
Two movies—the recently released Oppenheimer and Red Joan (2018)—explore the triumph of the human spirit and ethical dilemmas on saving the human future. Oppenheimer was the father of the atomic bomb, which ended World War II, but started America’s Cold War with the Soviet Union. Red Joan is the story of Melita Stedman Norwood, a British bureaucrat and KGB spy, who gave the Russians the nuclear formula because she believed a third world war could be averted because of a deterrent her treason created to balance the scales of power.
When Einstein learned from two fellow physicists and Hungarian refugees Leó Szilárd and Eugene Wigner that Germany was mining uranium in Congo to make a nuclear bomb, he wrote to President Roosevelt that a weapon of unprecedented force must be made immediately. Thus, three Jews ended a war that Hitler had unleashed to murder millions of Jews. Another Jew, J Robert Oppenheimer, headed the Manhattan Project and detonated the world’s first nuclear explosion on July 16, 1945. A student of Sanskrit, he said, “I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita,” he said.
“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that, one way or another. The bombing of Japan devastated him: he reportedly told President Truman that both of them had “blood on our hands”. Like Red Joan, Oppenheimer was a Communist and was even suspected to be a Soviet spy. But unlike Melita, Oppenheimer was a patriot. In 1954, the United States Atomic Energy Commission, which investigated him, found no evidence of disloyalty or giving the Soviets US atomic secrets. He eventually became a recluse in academia, away from the new reality of a different world he had helped create.
The two films apply the equality principle of justice to explain that patriotism and non-partisan commitment to humanity have their merits. Both Oppenheimer and Melita erroneously believed that the Soviet model was a haven for socialism and equality, unaware that in reality it was a totalitarian state that shot its citizens on whim or sent them to the Gulag. In the age of nationalism today, such ambiguities don’t exist. It is heresy to question the transforming power of nationalism and zombie democracy.
The nuclear bomb reoriented the world. It also changed the security objectives of governments, which will use any means possible to get an N-bomb. Unfortunately, for countries like North Korea, the bomb is not a deterrent but an active threat. Perhaps, nuclear war would be initiated not by the superpowers, but a religious autocracy like Iran, which wants to annihilate Israel. Rogue states like Pakistan driven by geopolitical Islam and black market uranium are dangers that neither of the two Communist humanists had anticipated. Karma is a bitch; in this case, what goes around may never come around—to reason.
Ravi Shankar
ravi@newindianexpress.com