On August 6, 1945, the first atomic bomb to be used in warfare was detonated over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Over 70,000 men and women were killed instantly, and countless others lived on as hibakusha, the Japanese term for long-term sufferers of cancer and radiation poisoning. After a second atomic bomb was detonated over Nagasaki, World War II- the most destructive and far reaching conflict in history- came to a close. Historians claim that at least fifty million people died during the six years of war, while others claim that at least 100 million deaths were caused by the conflict and its related economic, political, and environmental disruptions. Any morally mature person and anyone interested in maintaining peace must wonder why so many people chose to engage in armed conflict with one another, must wonder what could justify the immense cruelty humans had dispensed on one another. The answer, it seems, is ideology.

If one had to identify the mechanism for the political, social, and environmental trauma that was a fact of life in the 1930s and 40s, one would choose ideology. Ideology, a term coined by Destutt de Tracy to describe "the science of ideas," that dominates social and political discourse, became the most powerful force in the world following the First World War. Political "isms," including Populism, Fascism, Capitalism, and Communism, reached new prominence in the hearts and minds of 20th Century men and women, becoming all-encompassing meta-narratives that turned European against European and Asian against Asian. Surely Nazi death squads were not slaughtering innocent Ukrainians; no, they were rooting out evils of Bolshevism. British pilots were not bombing German civilians; they were defending England from the menace of Fascism. Ideology, it seems, has an enormous capacity to redefine violence. But this is an illusion. Rather than curbing Fascism, Communism, or any other "ism," warfare is, in simplest terms, the tragic destruction of human life, and ideology will never change that.

But World War II, like all wars, eventually came to a close. To finally end the brutal conflict that had been destroying Asia for 12 years, the US opted to utilize atomic weapons. J. Robert Oppenheimer, lead scientist on the Manhattan Project, while gazing upon the mushroom cloud that signaled the success of America's first nuclear test, said "I am become death, destroyer of worlds," a phrase borrowed from Indian descriptions of Shiva, the Hindu god of death. To Oppenheimer, atomic weapons were death incarnate, a monster he had unleashed upon the world. But the true monster of the 20th Century is not poison gas or atomic weapons. No, the monster of the 20th Century, the monster that justified World War II, Vietnam, and countless other conflicts, is ideology. When we allow ourselves to justify immense personal suffering for the sake of abstract "isms," when we discharge all moral responsibility for the sake of an ideology, we, not the weapons we deploy, become death, destroyer of worlds. Perhaps what is needed is an anti-ideology, a new "ism" that identifies the insanity of sacrificing countless men and women upon the altar of ideology, and declares that war, regardless of its intellectual trimmings, will always be the institutionalized death of one person at the hands of another. I leave you with a poem, entitled 1936, the year of the Spanish Civil War, when the prevalence of ideology was at its height.

1936
Capitalism
Fascism
Communism
Ism
Ism
Ism
I am Become Ideology, Destroyer of Peace