In the wake of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the spontaneous invocation and rapid popular acceptance of this freighted term mark a specific and potent return of repressed American history. While no critic or analyst has directly confronted this return, the genealogy of the term makes clear that the civilian victims and spectacular destruction of “9/11” triggered an unconscious discursive reenactment of the problem of U.S. guilt for the 300,000, mostly noncombatant victims of the first use of nuclear weapons against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.
Keywords
- Nuclear Weapon
- International Criminal Court
- Atomic Bomb
- Universal Jurisdiction
- Ground Zero
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