The Stories We Tell To Live
On Godzilla Minus One, and the warmongers' fatalistic story of war
This past week, while recovering from a flu, I had a lot of long, near-sleepless nights hacking up my lungs, which gave my mind more time than it ever really needs to dwell on the latest round of grinding horror in the news.
Canada is preparing for the possibility of evacuating 45,000 citizens from Lebanon, which is entirely fair because everything out of Israel for the last few months bodes poorly for containment of the Hezbollah-Israel conflict that many have been eager to see break out into a greater war. Since neither Canada nor the US has the greatest diplomatic sway with Iran (the proxy state behind many of Hezbollah’s activities), the US has instead been trying to keep Netanyahu from baiting Iran into all-out open engagement for months. Biden even dangled laxer rules of engagement around displaced-civilian-packed Rafah, as the world’s most depraved “carrot”, when Netanyahu was eager to escalate the conflict in a retaliatory game of chicken in April.
But Netanyahu’s Knesset coalition hangs on the appeasement of the religious extremist elements that first allowed him to hold on to power in December 2022, with the most far-right government in Israeli history—and extremists love this stuff. They can’t wait for the whole region to descend into an even “greater” conflict through which the spiritually prophesied return to a larger empire of a state will be assured.
(Even today, far right finance minister Ben-Gvir is at it again, vowing to seize the West Bank, known as Judea and Samaria among many in Israel, by force and then by legislation, to thwart the creation of a Palestinian state. Last month, he was promoting the “voluntary emigration” of Palestinians from Gaza for Israeli resettlement at an “ultra-nationalist” rally. He’s also responsible for disturbing changes to Israeli police processes and attitudes, to both crack down harder on internal dissent and deny protection to humanitarian aid from right-wing blockades.)
The fact that the US already signalled full support of Israel if it engages in all-out war with Hezbollah is catnip to such warmongers—carte blanche to make all other diplomatic options untenable, if they know they can drag bigger guns into the fray—and also why you’re now seeing more reports warning about vulnerabilities to Israel’s Iron Dome and caution about limits to what the US can do with respect to aerial support for expanding warfare: because it’s in the US’s best interests to seed uncertainty.
Such strategically placed public information works in two ways, for foreign policy:
It tempers Israeli expectations of firepower that will be brought to bear in any expanded regional fight. Moderate voices in Israel can then leverage these widely disseminated talking points to try to be heard over the madding far-right fray, and to push for different crisis mitigation strategies. But also,
It paves the way for greater local consent to whatever material and financial aid the US might then be compelled to offer, if Netanyahu and his far-right government push forward into full-out war. By letting the public know now how vulnerable Israel’s defence system might be, the US government is creating a robust political argument, even amid sharp and rising dissent around the country’s support of Israel in Gaza, for further military expenditures.
And boy, do I wish the first option had as much chance of working as the second.
But as much as I’ve been closely following the diplomatic and info-war strategies employed these past eight months to try to temper an Israeli government guided internally by far-right extremists, the power of the warmongers is strong.
It doesn’t matter how much violence has been enacted in Gaza already, and in the spiralling brutality of settlers, police, military, and politicians in the West Bank.
It doesn’t matter how much life has already been lost or irreparably transformed.
And it doesn’t matter how much protesters in Israel and around the world are clamouring for a change of government and ceasefire. (With members of Israeli and US government alike stepping down after trying for months to offer a voice of reason amid strategies that relentlessly favour indulging the most hawkish radicals.)
We’re living through the morally degrading aftermath of 9/11 all over again: another time in which governments were led in their policy decisions not by what was just, not by what was humane, but by the perceived need to prioritize navigating a whirlwind of hawkish attitudes that can feel inescapable whenever they rise up—even though they never represent us all. Even though people protested, condemned, critiqued, and documented atrocity all throughout that last, unwinnable quagmire of a “War on Terror”, too. Even though plenty of us knew damned well that framing every action as righteous self-defence against a vague and ever-growing threat never leads to peace.
Despite how recent that history of failure was, it shouldn’t surprise us that history rhymes. National extremists have always had a knack for intimidating the rest of us into believing that war is inevitable, and that if war is inevitable then it should also be accelerated, total, and celebrated as an inherently noble outing when it comes.
National extremists have had us all by our real or proverbial ’nads for so long, that I also understand why some people might not even be able to imagine an alternative anymore. There are still so many who think that the answer to the world’s incredible range of hateful and bad-faith actors is to keep smashing and smashing and smashing at every possible site of conflict until everything is levelled—as if then, somehow, all the preconditions for hate will magically disappear.
Once you’ve been tricked or traumatized by the overwhelming push of worldly horror into zero-sum thinking, how do you go back?
Godzilla Minus One
In 2013, Takashi Yamazaki’s The Eternal Zero, inspired by Naoki Hyakuta’s book of the same name, gave us the story of Kyuzo Miyabe, a kamikaze pilot in World War II considered a coward because he always came home alive. There, the story was about finding a cause worth dying for, even in a losing war.
Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One (2023) also follows a “coward” of a kamikaze pilot, but its message is about finding something to live for—even when gripped with survivor’s guilt and haunted by the knowledge that other people might have lived if you had made another choice. It is one of the most effective depictions of wartime PTSD I have ever seen, with the condition framed as a battle that continues in the mind of any person who cannot see themself as a person who “deserved” to survive at all.
Staged in ways that show clear homages not only to early Gojira films, but also the character nuance of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and the cinematic awe-factor of Jurassic Park (1993), Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One only shows indifference to the idea that wartime trauma must always be represented in realist terms.
The title has been described as a reference to post-war Japan already being at “zero”, when the arrival of this storied kaiju takes it down another notch. But as Yamazaki’s 2013 outing suggests, one can feel like a “zero” on a personal level, as much as on the level of a state, or whole human society, when faced with a destructive force ever so much greater than oneself. War trauma is war trauma, at every scale and in every form.
Both films tackle the complex shame of wanting to live in a non-war-driven way, when war permeates the culture all around you. No one can really say that one more “successful” kamikaze pilot would have made all the difference for Japan, but if a kamikaze pilot comes home to a village reduced to rubble, their mere presence among survivors freshly grieving lost loved ones could be construed as an insult to the dead, and offer a lightning rod for all their fury at the senselessness of war writ large.
Warmongers will tell us that war is the only way, and that we’re foolish to act as if there’s any other reasonable course of action when a destructive force arrives. What? Are we supposed to sit back, fold arms, and let atrocity wipe us out? Hold hands and sing peace songs, or flash memes about similar on social media, and hope that works?
Driven by this all-or-nothing attitude toward conflict, though, any sacrifice of human life becomes excusable, in service to the vague belief that just a little more constant vigilance, a little more direct military engagement as a show of force, and a little more “ground and pound” will surely pay out in greater safety and security down the line.
What makes Godzilla Minus One so extraordinary, then, is not just its nuanced portrayal of war trauma and recovery, but also how it advances an alternative: a way of responding to the hard fact of destructive forces in the world without giving over to the warmongers’ logic that battles should be fought with sacrifice taken for granted.
It all begins and ends with our attitude toward the value of human life.
If we go into an already destructive scenario whipped up by grand notions of righteous battle, we’ve already lost a key part of our humanity. We’ve set ourselves down the path to rationalizing all sorts of loss in service to a delusion of a noble end.
But if we face disaster scenarios from a vantage point that truly dwells on the horror of death and war, and which elevates how good it is to live in peace instead, we begin the work of breaking the warmonger’s knee-jerk instinct to answer death ever and always with more death—and also their clever way, in public politics, of shaming anyone who disagrees as being a traitor or a defect in the greater shield of civil defence.
Now, before anyone accuses me of wishful or blinkered thinking, Godzilla Minus One is of course a work of fiction, which means it gets to craft a more ideal universe than the one we have. Its inspired attitude toward conflict comes only from war vets joining a civilian-led outfit openly committed to trying to save every life as it takes down Godzilla. To highlight how fragile the lesson they’re enacting is, Yamazaki even gives us one character too young to have served in the war himself, who’s filled with inane ideas of war’s “glory”, and foolishly envious of all the haunted older men around him.
In other words, so long as there are young people looking to prove themselves, and so long as there are militaries in need of a soldier’s unwavering commitment to orders, there will always be this other school of rhetoric: people who treat war as a game that might as well grow big enough to tear down the world, for all that it can be stopped.
It’s a battle as ageless as the archetypal monster we have in Godzilla: a manifestation of humanity’s worst parts, which will always rear up in lightning-spewing rage from time to time, and bring to ruin everything we hold dear—unless we can find some way to live in better balance with what its fearsome existence teaches us about ourselves.
We are very good at bringing down not only our cities and each other, but also our capacity to imagine lives outside the press of ever-escalating slaughter, whenever extremists get their zealous little hands on the war drum.
The key is to keep trying for something better, all the same.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML
The subject is almost too big for any of us, but you have an eminent way of coming in sideways to these over-arching conundrums.
I can forever be pointing out the obvious to buttress my own dead-end, long-ago-etched conclusions about techno bombing military rhymes, but I did notice in Normon Solomon's recent book about this absurd human pastime that the people of Afghanistan faced and died in monumental numbers from the same empire-imposed malnutrition/slaughter just a few, wholly unremembered years ago.
And that the Center for American Progress was positively giddy about the changes that Obama/Trump/Biden's campaign of high-tech killing and famine was going to bring to Afghani girls.