"Hiroshima Sublime": Trauma, Japan, and the US Asia/Pacific Imaginary

As an ethical and aesthetic mandate for the new millenium, the Cold War repression of Hiroshima within the American political imaginaryneeds to be symbolically confronted and undoneat national as well as global levels.As Americans and as Japanese citizens of the liberal global order, we must mutually move beyond the Cold War situation of historical repression that had obtained in 1965, when novelist Kenzaburo Ōelamented, “To put the matter plainly and bluntly, people everywhere on this earth are trying to forget Hiroshima and the unspeakable tragedy perpetrated there.” However traumatic, Americans and their allies must try to remember this Hiroshima sublimeas a trauma of geopolitical dominationand racialized hegemony across the Pacific Ocean. By thinking through and re-imagining the techno-euphoric grandeur of this Hiroshima sublime, as well as representing the ideological complicity of ordinary Americans in their own sublime (rapturedby these technological forces of sublimity as manifesting and globally installingPatriot missilesas signs of theirglobal supremacy) and ordinary Japanese (citizens of the Empire of the Sun fascinatedby self-sublation into zeros of solar force) in the production of this nuclear sublime, we can begin to mutually recognize that a ‘post-nuclear’era offers new possibilities and symbolic ties between America and Japan as Pacific powers. This post-nuclear era emerges out of World War II freighted with terror and wonder as a double possibility:at once urging the globe towards annihilation andyet also towards transactional and dialogical unityat the transnational border of national self-imagining. The phobic masochism of the sublime can no longer operate in a transnational world of global/local linkages, although the technological sublimity of the Persian Gulf War had suggested otherwise, withits “sublime Patriot”missiles and quasi-nuclear landscapes lingering in the world deserts from Iraq and Afganistan to Nevada and North Korea.

“Beyond Containment”

This chapter studies the Persian Gulf War. Prior to the Persian Gulf War, the United States was focused primarily on Europe, where rapid changes to the regional security order provided early signals of the nation’s dawning preeminence, but few indications of what a “new world order” would entail. Beyond the Soviet Union, there were no clear threats to U.S. global interests, and emergent American grand strategy envisioned a world where economic and diplomatic power would predominate, resulting in some measure of multipolarity. Yet the shock and awe of the war revealed that the United States stood alone as the world’s sole superpower, backed by international political support—including from a surprisingly deferential Russia—as well as unprecedented military preponderance. Washington therefore moved toward a more militarily assertive form of hegemony, characterized by the discretionary use of force to enforce the terms of the “new world order.” The war also inaugurated the preoccupation with Iraq and nonproliferation as central focuses of post–Cold War foreign policy.

The Discourse of Propaganda: Case Studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror by John Oddo (A Book Review)

Piotr Gumuła's review of John Oddo's The Discourse of Propaganda: Case Studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Pennsylvania State UP, 2018.

Genomics of Gulf War Illness in U.S. Veterans Who Served during the 1990–1991 Persian Gulf War: Methods and Rationale for Veterans Affairs Cooperative Study #2006

Background: Approximately 697,000 members of the U.S. Armed Forces were deployed to the Persian Gulf in support of the 1990–1991 Persian Gulf War (GW). Subsequently, many deployed and some non-deployed veterans developed a chronic multi-symptom illness, now named Gulf War Illness (GWI). This manuscript outlines the methods and rationale for studying the genomics of GWI within the Million Veteran Program (MVP), a VA-based national research program that has linked medical records, surveys, and genomic data, enabling genome-wide association studies (GWASs). Methods: MVP participants who served in the military during the GW era were contacted by mail and invited to participate in the GWI study. A structured health questionnaire, based on a previously tested instrument, was also included in the mailing. Data on deployment locations and exposures, symptoms associated with GWI, clinical diagnoses, personal habits, and health care utilization were collected. Self-reported data will be augmented with chart reviews and structured international classification of disease codes, to classify participants by GWI case status. We will develop a phenotyping algorithm, based on two commonly used case definitions, to determine GWI status, and then conduct a nested case-control GWAS. Genetic variants associated with GWI will be investigated, and gene–gene and gene–environment interactions studied. The genetic overlap of GWI with, and causative mechanisms linking this illness to, other health conditions and the effects of genomic regulatory mechanisms on GWI risk will also be explored. Conclusions: The proposed initial GWAS described in this report will investigate the genomic underpinnings of GWI with a large sample size and state-of-the-art genomic analyses and phenotyping. The data generated will provide a rich and expansive foundation on which to build additional analyses.

Gulf War veterans exhibit broadband sleep EEG power reductions in regions overlying the frontal lobe

Aims: Nearly a third of U.S. veterans who deployed in support of the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf War are affected by Gulf War illness (GWI). Here we aimed to characterize whether subjective sleep complaints in GWI veterans are associated with objective sleep EEG disturbances relative to healthy veterans and controls; and whether Gulf War veterans show alterations in neural activity during sleep that differentiate them from healthy subjects. Main methods: We used high-density EEG (HDEEG) to assess regional patterns of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and non-REM (NREM) sleep between three groups: Gulf War male veterans with fatigue and GWI, Gulf War male veterans without fatigue or GWI, and control males. The groups were matched relative to age, sex and obstructive sleep apnea. Topographic comparisons of nocturnal NREM and REM sleep were made between groups for all frequency bands. Key findings: Topographic analysis revealed a broadband reduction in EEG power in a circumscribed region overlying the frontal lobe in both groups of Gulf War veterans, regardless of GWI and fatigue. This frontal reduction in neural activity was present, to some extent, across all frequency bands in NREM and REM sleep. Significance: Given that our findings were observed in all Gulf War veterans, it appears unlikely that frontal sleep HDEEG power reductions prove wholly responsible for fatigue symptoms. These results provide avenues for research and underpin the importance of maintaining a high index of suspicion when providing clinical care to formerly deployed veterans of the Persian Gulf War.

Blurred Borders between Fact and Fantasy: A Critique of Hannah Arendt’s “Defactualization” in a Subtly Self-aggrandizing and Overtly Deceiving “Post-Truth Era”

The term “post –truth”, that is believed to have made its maiden appearance in a 1992 essay, pertaining to the Iran-Contra Scandal and Persian Gulf War, garnered widespread popularity, in the form of "post-truth politics" recently on account of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the U.K. Brexit referendum. In fact, it was a political culture in which public opinions and media narratives have become almost entirely disconnected from the substance and policy of legislation. Interestingly such a relatively recent concept that has been vaulted up in an age of Twitter threads and viral news has its roots in post-modernity, relativism, even in the philosophical notions of Nietzsche, Weber, Leo Strauss, Foucault and Derrida, who were inevitably sceptical of the division between facts and values.

Interaction between Pyridostigmine Bromide and Oxidative Stress

In this chapter the following topics will be addressed: (1) actions of the cholinergic system in the nervous system, commenting on acetylcholine metabolism and acetylcholinesterase metabolism; (2) acetylcholinesterase inhibitors as subtitle in this topic: pharmacological characterization of pyridostigmine bromide, mechanism of action, and therapeutic effect of the drug; (3) use of pyridostigmine bromide in Persian Gulf War; and (4) potential effect of pyridostigmine bromide in oxidative stress, addressing as subtitle the influence of pyridostigmine bromide on the superoxide-hydrogen peroxide imbalance model. Studies indicate that the interaction between pyridostigmine bromide and stressors could trigger genotoxicity, the mechanism associated with the induction of oxidative stress that leads to this side effect of this drug; however, this discussion needs to be better elucidated and may be more discussed as there is interaction between the pyridostigmine bromide and an endogenous oxidative imbalance caused by it or even by the possible interaction of this with genetic variations present in the antioxidant metabolism.

Crisis

This chapter examines how Eisenhower, H. W. Bush, and Obama reacted when their foreign policy strategies were tested by crises and unexpected events. This chapter revisits Eisenhower’s aid to besieged French forces at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in 1954. It also discusses his handling of two crises in October 1956 over Suez and the Soviet invasion in Hungary, just days before his reelection. It examines how Bush led the United States during the critical period of 1991—with the aftermath of the first Persian Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet Union after a failed coup in August 1991. Finally, the chapter also analyzes how Obama approached the Arab Spring, which started in 2011, specifically focusing on his response to conflicts in Libya and Syria.