Nicolás Juárez
“I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”: Vietnam, the Non-Ethics of War and Modernity as God In the dark, early July morning of 1945, in an arid, barren desert in New Mexico, the first atomic bomb exploded. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the project, would recall that amongst the scatterings of laughter and tears, there was an overwhelming silence that haunted the crowd. He would, upon seeing this falling star crash into Earth, speak a line from the sacred Hindu text, the Bbagavad-Gita: I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. It is unlikely that the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade recalled that haunting line from the Sanskrit poem as they waded ashore at China Beach in that early March of 1965, just under twenty …show more content…
God maintains the power to dictate Truth, to rewrite experiences and history as fluid and in their place create an objective and unquestionable truth that is forced upon subjects. When generals dictate lies as Truth operating as agents of modernity, they necessarily create a dissonance between the subjective truth of the soldier (“these people are not combatants”) and the objective Truth of modernity (“these people need to be eliminated”). Vietnam resulted in some of the worst violations of human rights in history, and it occurred not because soldiers or generals necessarily saw the peoples they were invading as lacking value and thus able to be killed, but rather because for the temporal moment of the war Vietnamese peoples were no longer peoples but placed within the ontological condition of the damné. Maldonado-Torres explains that the gratuitous violence that takes place occurs because “‘[k]illability’ and ‘rapeability’ are inscribed into the images of the colonial bodies” and as such become everyday
“I Am Become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds”: Vietnam, the Non-Ethics of War and Modernity as God In the dark, early July morning of 1945, in an arid, barren desert in New Mexico, the first atomic bomb exploded. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the project, would recall that amongst the scatterings of laughter and tears, there was an overwhelming silence that haunted the crowd. He would, upon seeing this falling star crash into Earth, speak a line from the sacred Hindu text, the Bbagavad-Gita: I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. It is unlikely that the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade recalled that haunting line from the Sanskrit poem as they waded ashore at China Beach in that early March of 1965, just under twenty …show more content…
God maintains the power to dictate Truth, to rewrite experiences and history as fluid and in their place create an objective and unquestionable truth that is forced upon subjects. When generals dictate lies as Truth operating as agents of modernity, they necessarily create a dissonance between the subjective truth of the soldier (“these people are not combatants”) and the objective Truth of modernity (“these people need to be eliminated”). Vietnam resulted in some of the worst violations of human rights in history, and it occurred not because soldiers or generals necessarily saw the peoples they were invading as lacking value and thus able to be killed, but rather because for the temporal moment of the war Vietnamese peoples were no longer peoples but placed within the ontological condition of the damné. Maldonado-Torres explains that the gratuitous violence that takes place occurs because “‘[k]illability’ and ‘rapeability’ are inscribed into the images of the colonial bodies” and as such become everyday