Martydom 5: Vukovar, Guernica, and Hiroshima

Posted on March 5, 2004 in Martyrdom Series Morals & Ethics Myths & Mysticism War

Vukovar. When Croatians heard the news of the attack on the World Trade Center, they shouted “Vukovar, Vukovar”. The subtext was “When we needed arms in 1991 to defend ourselves, you emplaced an arms embargo on us. And Vukovar is what happened.”

“Nine-One-One punished the United States for Vukovar” was the whisper in the word.

During the 1991 Slavonian War, the Yugoslav National Army besieged Vukovar for many weeks, lobbing shell upon shell at the city center until nothing stood. In August 1992, I went to Vukovar, shortly after the town had been decimated by “the incessant, anonymous pounding by the most lethal weapons now in regular use in this world.” It wasn’t the cleaned up tourist trap that it has become today where the message of the government obfuscates the reality of war. Shattered pieces of brick, irregular window glass stars, silting plaster, and ragged, rusted shrapnel fragments left over from the precipitation of artillery littered the streets. There were places we could not go because they had not cleared the bombs, where we had to watch our steps as we searched for relics to show people that even in the corpses of shells, there could still be terror.

It tires me to remember what I saw that day. Buildings that looked like pet store cages. Statues whose heart had been ripped out by a mortar round. Historic monuments such as palaces or the building where the Yugoslav Communist Party first met pocked and gutted, the memory of what they had represented erased by metal heated in the barrel of guns or by blasts of powder. For three hours, I walked the streets, observing how buildings had been marked by the Serbian occupation inspectors. Of this, I wrote:

Green stripes show that the building has sustained no structural damage. The roof may be gone, the windows shot out, or, in the case of a church, the steeple may have disappeared, but the building inspector is confident that it can be reclaimed….Yellow denotes that there is structural damage which can be fixed. A wall may be missing. And red marks a total loss. The inspector must bend over low, in some cases, to mark these. About forty percent of the houses I saw were marked with green, about twenty percent with yellow, and about forty percent with red.

When I was through looking at the drifts of brick and plaster, the strange twisted metal structures that stood out of the ruins, and the shocked faces of the few Serbs who had patched up what they could and huddled in houses without electricity, plumbing, or running water, I went back to Zagreb. I pointed at my eye and said “I have seen. I have seen Vukovar.”

Armed with slides and a notebook which disappeared after a lecture in Rochester, New York, I spoke of Vukovar, of the terrible destruction that I had witnessed. I recalled how both Croats and Serbs expressed to me their anger about what Beograd and Zagreb had done to Vukovar. In East Slavonia, the people spat at the mention of the names of Milosevic and Tudjman. The one man, a squinting nationalist, sent the tanks. The other, also a nationalist, invited hatred with his works of Holocaust revisionism which attempted to reduce the numbers killed in the Holocaust, to suggest that Serbs and Jews exagerrated the figures just so they could oppress Croats, whose leadership during the Second World War had shamelessly allied with the Nazis.

After Vukovar, I could no longer take the side of nations and their leaders. Milosevic had sent the tanks, after all, and, in the name of “national unity” had blasted this mixed ethic town to granules not much larger than the ground clay and limestone particles from which the walls had been built. Tudjman, though less-armed, had brought about this destruction with his taunts against the Serbs. The two men had collaborated to destroy Yugoslavia, the land of the southern Slavs where the ideal had been a land where ethnicities could mix and not hate, not fight each other.

I refused to take the side of any government, any army in a war. Those who made the arms which made Vukovar uninhabitable — a ruin so strange and so modern that one wondered if this was a megalithic relic of the ancient Celts who’d occupied the land long ago — no longer could win me over with their “but we make jobs for people who wouldn’t have them” line. Their products brought death. I castigated the middle class peace movement for worrying only about the nuclear arms race, the war liberals as well as conservatives for spreading the unspoken falsehood that conventional weapons and conventional wars were moral and just. I showed slides that proved them wrong. Often, when I got to the slide showing the bomb crater in the street, the live shell in the center of the ragged supernova, a housewife would gasp “Wow! Look at those shoes! Aren’t they pretty?”

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That afternoon still haunts me.

Last year, when I visited Mexico City, I shuddered when I saw bits of brick turned up and piled along the sides during a major street renovation. When I surveyed the ruins in northern San Bernardino following last October’s fires, I remembered Vukovar.

“Voljeni Vukovar” is another slogan from Croatia. Remember Vukovar. Remember comes from memory, which is derived from the Latin memoria. Which is related to the Greek word martus meaning a “witness” and sounding too much like martial which is derived from Mars, the Roman God of War. A witness to war. Vukovar is a martyr.

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I am on the civilian side in all wars. That is the true division. Those who die versus those who order their killing.

Draftees and soldiers who entered service for an education count as civilians for me. I don’t want them martyred for the causes of plutocrats and oligarchs.

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Nine one one and Vukovar caused people of the respective countries to turn inwards, to go along with programs enacted in the name of “preserving freedom”, acted out as repressive measures against a hated minority and against the critics of those measures. “These times are different,” they say. “This was against us, we take this personally.” They fail to recognize that the problems go beyond the immediate conflict and they do nothing to clear the world’s military stockpiles of high explosives, spent uranium shells, biochemical agents, automatic weapons and landmines. In both former Yugoslavia and the United States; in Iraq, Israel, and Palestine; in every nation where war lords trade shots with one another and despots conduct ethnic cleansings, people miss the point. One human being can hold at his fingertips too much firepower. This is not the day when knights fought with swords and spears, that all you needed to do to escape the field of battle was to avoid being there. Now they come after you, you the civilian in your home.

In Osijek, Croatia, I met a Belgian Jesuit kneeling next to a new grave. He told me the story of the girl, a friend of his, who had after weeks of living in her basement to escape the shelling had decided that she was sick of her mole rat’s life. She was going to spend the night in her own bed. Arcing down from its apogee as if to fulfill a prophecy, a shell from the Serbs landed in her house that night. In that room. In the center of the bed where she slept.

We received warning of this world to come on April 26, 1937:

A church bell warned of approaching planes. There had been such warnings before, but Guernica had never been hit. One Heinkel 111, a new bomber just developed by the Germans for speed and payload, flew in low from the mountains. Since Guernica had no air defenses, low-altitude daylight bombing, the ideal situation for accuracy, posed no danger to attacking aircraft. The plane dropped its bombs and flew away and returned with three more of the new Heinkels. Then came a sort of deadly air show, displaying all that was new in German and Italian attack aircraft: twenty-three Junkers, Ju 52s, the old bombs that the Heinkels were to replace, appeared along with the Heinkel 111s, three Savoia-Marchetti S81s, one of the new, fast Dornier Do 17s, a bombr so sleek the Germans called it “the flying pencil,” twelve Fiat CR32s, and, according to some reports, the first Messerschmitt BF 109s ever used….

The Germans and Italians had unveiled their new modern air force with the market in Guernica as its only target. The bombers dropped an unusual payload, splinter and incendiary bombs, a cocktail of shrapnel and flame personally selected by Richthofen for maximum destruction to buildings. As people fled, the fighters came in low and chased them down with heavy-caliber machine guns.


At 7:45 the planes disappeared, leaving only the blackened forms of the few remaining walls silhouetted against the burning flames, which glowed into the night sky. (The Basque History of the World, pp. 199-200)

This is how the Falangists, the Nazis, and the Fascists painted Guernica for Picasso. I suspect that it looked much like Vukovar.

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The Falangist-sponsored death storm missed a vital target in Guernica, the oak tree where generations of Basques had taken the oath of service to their people as members of the Fueros.

Eight years and three months later, a cloud shaped like an oak tree grew over the city of Hiroshima. The single bomb ignited the entire city, razed structures to the ground, and spread a black rain that sickened people with a new disease called “radiation sickness”. The Japanese people had been defeated. They capitulated to the United States and went on to build a new nation founded not on power springing from steel and explosives, but from vigorous manufacturing of peace time goods and aggressive marketing of new technologies.

The Japanese, especially those in Hiroshima, did not forget the day when the clocks stopped seconds after 8:15 am. August 6 1945. August 5 1945 in the United States. A date which goes unmentioned except as a historic curiosity in the United States; a date which causes survivors of Hiroshima and their children to speak beyond their ethnicity, as citizens of the world, as human beings who have gone through an experience which they believe no one else should suffer.

I don’t pretend to know why the survivors of Hiroshima turned so decidedly pacifist where the victims of more conventional weapons of state terror, genocide, and mass destruction have screamed out Old Testament slogans, the words of revenge. I have heard “explanations” that suggest it is because that the Japanese are so “obedient”; paradigms that reduce the Japanese people to head-bobbing-go-alongs. This strikes me as ironic because no pacifist marches to the lemming band that leads to destruction. Pacifism implies opposition to the state’s flesh, steel, and phosphorus mixture instruments of destruction. None go along for the sake of nationalism or partisanship.

Pacifists bear the truest claim to martyrdom that any can claim. But when the bomb fell on Hiroshima, the country was at war. What happened to cause the belligerant Japanese of Hiroshima to turn so completely around? Their religion? They had two: Shinto which stressed glory and Buddhism, which in the Japanese context, stressed the discipline under which many samurai trained for war. Buddhism, however, contained an older message, that of peace. Perhaps that contained the seeds of the consciousness that led the Mayor of Hiroshima to write to pResident George W. Bush:

….the United States, while demanding that North Korea, Iran, Libya, and other countries cease nuclear development, reserves to itself the right to first use of nuclear weapons and has decided to resume research on “mini-nukes.” You have forced open a door to use nuclear weapons again, undermining the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the central international agreement guiding the elimination of such weapons, and thus inviting new nuclear proliferation. I greatly fear that the acts of your administration are sweeping the human race down the path to nuclear annihilation.

This much I know: where Jews look for Nazis among the Palestinians; where Palestinians speak of a global “Jewish conspiracy” to annihilate them and all of Islam; where Catholic Croats eye Orthodox Serbs suspiciously and receive the same stare in return; and where countless rebels press against the oppression of numerous governments who buy their arms from the United States and deploy them in a manner calculated not to contain, but to eradicate the opposition; the people of Hiroshima, Japan press for the abolition of nuclear weapons. They do not call upon the people of the world to send them arms to bring down the United States. They call on the conscience of our leaders and our electorate to realize that our fears of everyone else pose the greatest threat to world security that exists in the world today, that the Bomb can fall into the hands of terrorists, or be used by us in conventional wars as earth-poisoning, leukemia-rearing weapons that we diminuatively call “mini-nukes” — as if they were candies or small cupcakes in the store.

The sweetness of the Japanese response to nuclear proliferation — being as they are the only people upon whom nuclear fission has been wreaked as a weapon of war — may simply come from this: They say to themselves “This happened to us. We can do nothing to change the past, but we can remember it. Let us see that this mushroom-cloud monster does not eat other people as it ate us.”

Though citizens of Hiroshima participated in Japanese jingoism as much as anyone else, even though the minutes of hot wind, searing light, and black rain destroyed the ability of the dead to see and act against this strange new world of killing, they became, nevertheless, martyrs after the fact. They witnessed to a spark in the universe brighter than a thousand suns and their legacy became peace.

It’s not for Japan or the survivors that these dead are remembered, but for all of humanity.

I’m feeling what may be the first symptoms of the cold Lynn has. The next installment in this series, which may appear tomorrow or in the next few days: Martyrs who do not die.

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Buddhists believe in an afterlife called nirvana. It is often translated as annihilation, an odd word which comes from a compound meaning “the destruction of the thread”. One could argue that the survivors of Hiroshima wish to prevent us from pursuing a false Nirvana.