SAJD 2015 FINAL.Indd

ISSN 2229 - 3361 South Asian Journal of Diplomacy 2015 K.P.S.MENON CHAIR FOR DIPLOMATIC STUDIES South Asian Journal of Diplomacy 2015 ISSN 2229-3361 Vice Chancellor Babu Sebastian Editor K.M. Seethi Board of Associate Editors Raju K. Thadikkaran A.M. Thomas R. Girish Kumar C. Vinodan M.V. Bijulal Lirar P. Board of International Advisory Editors James Petras (Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology At Binghamton University, New York) Mark Phythian (Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Leicester, UK) Kanti Bajpai (National University of Singapore) Achin Vanaik (Department of Political Science, Delhi University, India) V. Suryanarayan (Centre for Asian Studies, Chennai, India) Zheng Yongnian (East Asian Institute, National University of Singapore) Itty Abraham (National University of Singapore) Moonis Ahmar (Department of International Relations, University of Karachi, Pakistan) Ambassador Geetha De Silva (Regional Centre for Strategic Studies, Colombo, Sri Lanka) Delwar Hossain (Department of International Relations, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh) Matthew Craven (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London) Editorial Office K.P.S. Menon Chair for Diplomatic Studies School of International Relations and Politics Mahatma Gandhi University Priyadarshini Hills P.O., Kottayam, Kerala India Pin- 686560 E-mail: [email protected] Printed in India at Print Solutions, Kottayam, Kerala, India. Phone: 91-9447051734 Contents The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Shadow of the Atomic Plague 05 Henry A. Giroux Whispers, Voices and Visuals: Democracy and Dissent in Saudi Arabia 19 Gulshan Dietl The Continuing Conspiracy against Syria 29 John Cherian The Ukraine Conflict, Fear of Russian Aggression and Security 39 K. B. Usha The Changing Geo-Political landscape and Security of the Indian Ocean Region 57 Vice Admiral P. J. Jacob South- South Cooperation and Spices Trade 71 Girish Kumar R. & Aswathy Rachel Varughese Role of the Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora in Conflict and Peace in Sri Lanka 85 Tulika Gaur India’s Strategy in Central Asia: Challenges Ahead 105 Vinay Kaura India’s Public Diplomacy towards South Asia 119 Gazala Fareedi Engaging Smaller States in South Asia: India’s Relations with Maldives 133 Jocelyn Jose About the Authors 149 The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Shadow of the Atomic Plague Henry A. Giroux Seventy years after the horror of Hiroshima, intellectuals negotiate a vastly changed cultural, political and moral geography. Pondering what Hiroshima means for American history and consciousness proves as fraught an intellectual exercise as taking up this critical issue in the years and the decades that followed this staggering inhumanity, albeit for vastly different reasons. Now that we are living in a 24/7 screen culture hawking incessant apocalypse, how we understand Foucault’s pregnant observation that history is always a history of the present takes on a greater significance, especially in light of the fact that historical memory is not simply being rewritten but is disappearing Foucault (1989 and 1996). Once an emancipatory pedagogical and political project predicated on the right to study, and engage the past critically, history has receded into a depoliticising culture of consumerism, a wholesale attack on science, the glorification of military ideals, an embrace of the punishing state, and a nostalgic invocation of the greatest generation. Inscribed in insipid patriotic platitudes and decontextualised isolated facts, history under the reign of neoliberalism has been either cleansed of its most critical impulses and dangerous memories, or it has been reduced to a contrived narrative that sustains the fictions and ideologies of the rich and powerful. History has not only become a site of collective amnesia but has also been appropriated so as to transform “the past into a container full of colorful or colorless, appetizing or insipid bits, all floating with the same specific gravity” (Bauman and Donskis 2013: 33). Consequently, what intellectuals now have to say about Hiroshima and history in general is not of the slightest interest to nine tenths of the American population. While writers of fiction might find such a generalized, public indifference to their craft, freeing, even “inebriating” as Philip Roth has recently written, for the chroniclers of history it is a cry in the wilderness (Roth 2014). At same time the legacy of Hiroshima is present but grasped, as the existential anxieties and dread of nuclear annihilation that racked the early 1950s 5 SAJD 2015 to a contemporary fundamentalist fatalism embodied in collective uncertainty, a predilection for apocalyptic violence, a political economy of disposability, and an expanding culture of cruelty that has fused with the entertainment industry. We’ve not produced a generation of war protestors or government agitators to be sure, but rather a generation of youth who no longer believe they have a future that will be any different from the present (Graeber 2013; Giroux 2014). That such connections tying the past to the present are lost signal not merely the emergence of a disimagination machine that wages an assault on historical memory, civic literacy, and civic agency. It also points to a historical shift in which the perpetual disappearance of that atomic moment signals a further deepening in our own national psychosis. If, as Edward Glover once observed, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki had rendered actual the most extreme fantasies of world destruction encountered in the insane or in the nightmares of ordinary people,” the neoliberal disimagination machine has rendered such horrific reality a collective fantasy driven by the spectacle of violence, nourished by sensationalism, and reinforced by scourge of commodified and trivialized entertainment(Ibid). The disimagination machine threatens democratic public life by devaluing social agency, historical memory, and critical consciousness and in doing so it creates the conditions for people to be ethically compromised and politically infantilized. Returning to Hiroshima is not only necessary to break out of the moral cocoon that puts reason and memory to sleep but also to rediscover both our imaginative capacities for civic literacy on behalf of the public good, especially if such action demands that we remember as Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell remark “Every small act of violence, then, has some connection with, if not sanction from, the violence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” (Lifton and Mitchell 1996: 345). On Monday 6 August, 1945 the United States unleashed an atomic bomb on Hiroshima killing 70,000 people instantly and another 70,000 within five years—an opening volley in a nuclear campaign visited on Nagasaki in the days that followed. In the immediate aftermath, the incineration of mostly innocent civilians was buried in official government pronouncements about the victory of the bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atomic bomb was celebrated by those who argued that its use was responsible for concluding the war with Japan. Also applauded was the power of the bomb and the wonder of science in creating it, especially “the atmosphere of technological fanaticism” in which scientists worked to create the most powerful weapon of destruction then known to the world. Conventional justification for dropping the atomic bombs held that “it was the most expedient measure to securing Japan’s surrender [and] that the bomb was used to shorten the agony of war and to save American lives” (Jung 2002). Left out of that succinct legitimating narrative were the growing objections 6 The Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Shadow of the Atomic Plague to the use of atomic weaponry put forth by a number of top military leaders and politicians, including General Dwight Eisenhower, who was then the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, former President Herbert Hoover, and General Douglas MacArthur, all of whom argued it was not necessary to end the war (Takaki 2014). A position later proven to be correct. For a brief time, the Atom Bomb was celebrated as a kind of magic talisman entwining salvation and scientific inventiveness and in doing so functioned to “simultaneously domesticate the unimaginable while charging the mundane surroundings of our everyday lives with a weight and sense of importance unmatched in modern times” (Hales 2014). In spite of the initial celebration of the effects of the bomb and the orthodox defense that accompanied it, whatever positive value the bomb may have had among the American public, intellectuals, and popular media began to dissipate as more and more people became aware of the massive deaths along with suffering and misery it caused (Ham 2011). Kenzaburo Oe, the Nobel Prize winner for Literature, noted that in spite of attempts to justify the bombing “from the instant the atomic bomb exploded, it [soon] became the symbol of human evil, [embodying] the absolute evil of war” (Oe 1965:114). What particularly troubled Oe was the scientific and intellectual complicity in the creation of and in the lobbying for its use, with acute awareness that it would turn Hiroshima into a “vast ugly death chamber”(Ibid: 117). More pointedly, it revealed a new stage in the merging of military actions and scientific methods, indeed a new era in which the technology of destruction could destroy the earth in roughly the time it takes to boil an egg. The bombing of Hiroshima extended a new industrially enabled kind of violence and warfare in which the distinction

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