10nfl1-Nukes-Cover
THE DISCOURSE SURROUNDING THIRD WORLD POSSESSION OF
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| THE DISCOURSE SURROUNDING THIRD WORLD POSSESSION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS IS OPPRESSIVE. Hugh Gusterson MIT, ʻ99] Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Feb, 1999), pp. 111-143 These metaphorical representations of threshold nuclear nations as criminals, women, and children assimilate the relationship between the West and the Third World to other hierarchies of dominance within Western culture. They use the symbolic force of domestic hierarchies-police over criminals, men over women, and adults over children to buttress and construct the global hierarchy of nations, telling us that, like women, children, and criminals, Third World nations have their proper place. The sense in the West that Third World nations have their proper place at the bottom of a global order in which nuclear weapons are the status symbols of the powerful alone- that nuclear proliferation is transgressing important symbolic hierarchies-is nicely conveyed by the condescending reactions in the Western media to India's and Pakistan's nuclear tests of 1998. Here many commentators sounded like secretaries of exclusive members-only clubs blackballing applications from the nouveau riche. "With scant regard for the admonitions of other members of the nuclear group, India has abruptly and loudly elbowed itself from the bottom into the top tier of this privileged elite" said one commentator (Smith A. Putting the upstarts back in their place, US. Secretary of State Madeline Albright said that it was "clear that what the Indians and Pakistanis did was unacceptable and that they are not now members of the nuclear club" (Marshall 1998b:A12). The same sentiment was expressed in stronger terms on the oped page of the New York Times by former National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, whose characterization of India draws on classic orientalist imagery to make its point that the Indians are not "our" kind of people "We must make clear to the Indian government that it is today what it was two weeks ago, an arrogant, overreaching cabal that, by its devotion to the caste system, the political and economic disenfranchisement of its people and its religious intolerance, is unworthy of membership in any club" (1998:13). Download 1.23 Mb. Share with your friends:
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