Jéssica, 29.
Multifandom (I'm mainly into dramas and BLs, with the occasional movie/animation), with lots of random things in between. I don't tag anything anymore, so if this is a thing that bothers you, I strongly recommend that you DO NOT FOLLOW ME.
[Images description: a Twitter thread by Alisa Lynn Valdés, M.S., @ AlisaValdesRod1. It goes as follows:
“This quote, from the @ nytimes review of the Oppenheimer film: (quote) “He served as director of a clandestine weapons lab built in a near-desolate stretch of Los Alamos, in New Mexico” (end quote)… It was inhabited by Hispanos. They were given less than 24 hr to leave. Their farms bulldozed. 1.
Many of those families had been on the same land for centuries. The Oppenheimer’s crew literally shot all of their livestock through the head and bulldozed them. People fled on foot with nowhere to go. Land rich, money poor. Their land seized by the government. 2.
All of the Hispano NM men who were displaced by the labs later were hired to work with beryllium by Oppenheimer. The white men got protective gear. The Hispano men did not. 3.
The Hispano men all died of berylliosis. These were US citizens, folks. Their land taken, animals killed, farms bulldozed, forced to work for the people who took everything from them, and killed by those people. 4.
For 20 years I have been trying to sell a film based on the story of Loyda Martinez, a remarkable whistleblower whose family’s land was seized for the labs. Her dad was one of the men who died from beryllium exposure at the labs. She later went to work there too. 5.
She is a computer whiz who rose to the top of her department at Los Alamos. Then she started digging for info on the Hispano men the labs killed, like her father. She filed a class action lawsuit, and won. 6.
The first Hispano governor of NM, Bill Richardson, appointed Loyda to run the state’s human rights commission. She then filed a second class-action against Los Alamos, on behalf of women scientists not paid fairly. 7.
But, no. We want more films about the “complex and troubled” “heroic” white men, who conducted their GENIUS in a “virtually unpopulated” place. These are ALL lies. This is mythology in service to white supremacy and the military industrial complex, masquerading as “nuanced.” 8.
Because of what the labs did to the local Hispano people in northern NM, our communities now have the highest rates of heroin overdose deaths in the nation. The generational trauma and forced poverty is outrageous. We need the real stories of Oppenheimer to be told. End.”
These girls are getting me so emotional ahhshsshwhshsh I mean, I’m always like this with them but it’s like, the first time they get serious overall mass media attention, I can’t even see a tv add I tear up babsbsbsbsbshshs
[T]he American militarization of science would usher in a new era of ecological thought drawn from the notion of isolated landscapes permeated with nuclear radiation. […] Western colonizers had long configured tropical islands into the contained spaces of a laboratory, which is to say a suppression of island history and Indigenous presence. This generation of AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] ecologists embraced nuclear testing as creating a novel opportunity to study a complete ecosystem through the trace of radiation. […] [T]he Pacific Islands have long been fashioned as laboratories for western colonial interests, from the botanical collecting of James Cook’s voyages to […] structural anthropology. […]
The declassification of a 1957 memo from Brookhaven National Laboratory’s medical researcher Dr Robert Conrad, the doctor in charge of testing and caring for the hundreds of Marshallese exposed to radiation, has confirmed suspicious that it was the islanders as much as the environment that were subject to an AEC experiment. To his colleagues he wrote, ‘The habitation of these people on the island will afford most valuable ecological radiation data on human beings.’
Arguments like this appear elsewhere in AEC records. For instance, the director of the AEC Health and Safely Laboratory described neighboring Utirik Atoll in 1956 as ‘by far the most contaminated place in the world’ but that it will be ‘very interesting’ to get data from the environment and islanders when they are returned there. Referring to genetic tests about the impact of radiation on fruit flies and mice, he observed of the Marshall Islanders:
‘While it is true that these people do not live, I would say, the way Westerners do, civilized people, it is nevertheless also true that these people are more like us than mice.’ […]
—
In claiming Micronesia and expanding the American exclusive economic zone, Truman tripled the territorial size of the United States. Although the land-base of Micronesia is 846 square miles, the oceanic territory, vital to US naval and airforce transit, represents three million square miles. […]With the advent of the far more powerful hydrogen weapons, the AEC in 1954 cordoned off an enormous area of the Pacific, banning the passage of ships or planes for 400,000 square miles. […] Estimated at one thousand times the force of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki […] [in] addition to spreading lethal levels of radiation over 5000 miles of the Pacific, Bravo’s fallout was detected in the rain over Japan, in lubricating oil of Indian aircraft, in winds over Australia, and in the sky over the United States and Europe. It caused the radiogenic illness of the crew of a Japanese freighter 1200 miles away. […]
When Rongelapese women began giving birth to babies without skulls and without skeletons (‘jellyfish babies’ and ‘grape babies’), infants with severe brain damage and missing limbs, scientists informed them that these miscarriages and defects were ‘to be expected in a small island population.’
Although scientists from the AEC Division of Biology and Medicine had ample evidence of the extensive radiological contamination of Rongelap, they allowed the islanders to return in order to deflect criticism of the AEC’s atmospheric testing program, and thus exposed the islanders to another 22 nuclear tests on Enewetak […].
—
Text by: Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey. “The myth of isolates: ecosystem ecologies in the nuclear Pacific.” Cultural Geographies. 31 October 2012. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]
some ppl on here honestly need a refresher on the us govt’s current and historical imperialist bomb apologia. these positions have included, in various combinations and permutations:
-it was a tragedy, but a necessary and gravely chosen one
-it was a few scientists gone rogue, disobeying the noble orders of the us govt
-it was the us govt gone rogue, deviating from the noble aims of the good scientists
-it ended the war
-japan brought it upon their own civilians by being a belligerent and warlike nation
-the scientists felt really bad about it
-the scientists later got unfairly scapegoated for having been leftists (yes this is a real thing people still say about physicists who explicitly deliberately worked for the us govt)
-it was still a scientific achievement, though the knowledge gained was used immorally
-it was a horrible mistake and everyone learned an important lesson
-they underestimated how many japanese would be murdered, disabled, or injured, and wouldn’t have dropped bombs if they’d known
-it saved lives ‘in the long run’
if you are repeating any of these things in regards to a christopher nolan film based on a revisionist history explicitly aimed to 'redeem’ j robert oppenheimer’s legacy, then congrats! you are not immune to propaganda!
ALT
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