Week Eight- The Nuclear Pacific

Housekeeping

-              CE Movie night- HL348, Thursday 14, 2024,

-              Final exam- Friday 13th December

-              Learn/draw from both big ideas, and specific examples- move back and forth between them

-              Italics are for books and film titles; quotations marks for articles/chapters

-              Pacific and all proper noun (names) get a capital letter

-              In-text citations ( Hau’ofa 1994, 45)

-              Breakup body paragraphs by sub-topic/theme,

-              Board statement- how do I know that? Colonailism is bad- Why? What examples is it discussing? Neo/post colonial.

Thematic Overview/review/making connections

Militarism and Militarization

Militarism:  Ideology, that a nation should maintain and be ready to use its strong military capabilities, to advance its national interest.

Militarization: “Step-by step process by which something becomes controlled by, dependent on, or derives its value from the military as an institution or milliatrstic criteria.

Atoll- Most at risk from Climate change.

The republic of the Marshall Islands

-              Inhabitited since 2000 BCE

-              Early european contacts- Spain, Britain, and Germany

-              1964- the us begins Neculai testing program on Bikini atoll

-              1947- the Marshall Islands. Becomes part of the trust territory fo the pacific islands created by the UN and administered by the US.

-              1983- Marshall Islands archives full soverigenty, and enters into Compact of Free Associarions

Place, personhood, culture, in Marshall Islands.

-              "The Marshallese envision the domains  of sky, land, and sea, including areas  below the sea, as intertwined; they recognize that their lives on the surface of the islands are possible because of the skeletons of marine invertebrates growing on top of submerged volcanoes

-              Highlights the discussion around the sea of islands, vs a sea full of islands

-              Marshallese views the environment with not just the land, but all aspects of it.

Nuclear testing in the pacific

§  1946- US begins a nuclear weapons testing programme, called operation crossroads on Bikini Atoll. Chief Juda of Bikini agrees to educate the 167. Islanders to Rongerik atolll.

§  1948- islanders are forced to evacuate enewetak Atoll, as us expands nuclear weapons testing programme.

§  Between 1946-1958. 67 Nuclear tests were conducted on Bikini and Enewetak atolls

§  1954- Castle bravo, the most power hydrogen boom ever tested by the US, is detonated on Bikini Atoll.

§  1954-  Rongelap Atoll is showered by fallout after winds change at the last minute

§  1970s islanders are told that’s its safe to return to Bikini but are subsequently found to have dangerous levels of radiation in their bodies and are edvacuated once again. Following exposure, islanders developed severe health problems, especially cancer, thyroid diseases, and birth defects.

§  1980- After the US removed much of the Topsoil on Enewetak Atoll, the islanders are premittted to return

§  Ongoing: Compenstation still being (underpaid), long-term effects; out-migration; international trauma; climate critics; Enewetak dome in danger of indication and breach ‘

Militarism and operation crossroads/ Wastlanding and Externalizations of harms

-             Movies used to have news before watching the whole film.

-             Trying to deminimize how lealthal atomic bombs were

-             “There are only 90,000 people out there; who gives a damn?”

-              Wastelanding: The process by which certain locations are marked, physically and ideologically, for exploitation, resource extractions and national sacrifice and untlimate rendered  pollulatable

-              Canadian examples, fighter plane, interrupts caribou migration, seem as not bad.

-              Externalization of harms nuclear superiority, military advancement, etc., the

-              Marshallese lost as much and more: health, land, culture,

-             economy, e

-             Not seeing the FULL cost of something, understand the context of everything.

Symbolic violence

-             IS an unconscious mode of domination subtly embedded in everyday thought, action, and objects, that maintains its power precisely because people fail to recognize it as violence.

-             Louis Rearsd beamed the two piece swimsuit in 1946 asa celeebration of the tests and as a reference to the devasting effect the swimsuit would have on society.

SpongeBob SquarePants

-             An explosion 1000 times more power than Hiroshima- becomes a punchline

-             Mutations become silly ‘

-             Bikini islands understanding of their home as an interconnected real of sea, land, and sky is replaced with a focus on bikini botttom

-             Bikin becomes famous  and yet is also forgotten

-             Bikini islanders are invisible and silenced.