This morning I received an email from a friend in America urging me to go and watch the new blockbuster Hollywood movie, Christopher Nolan’s “OPPENHEIMER”. Below is what he wrote and if you scroll further down you can read my immediate response to him .
QUOTE: “On persuasion of my second daughter I saw the Movie OPPENHEIMER at AMC theatre here.
It is a classic. scholarly theme profusely dialogue oriented–of course true to Hollywood– few sleazy scenes and the spectacular fission extravaganza are remarkably choreographed. In one particular scene his lady love was holding Bhagavad Gita on her pelvis. Intrigued, I found out more and read that Oppenheimer is rightly termed Prometheus of US nuclear bomb- as well a great admirer of Bhagwad Gita.
Should you get a chance to try to watch this, perhaps wait for the subtitled version. Regards. (name withheld)
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QUOTE (continued) : “Oppenheimer’s diverse interests sometimes interrupted his focus on science. He liked things that were difficult and since much of the scientific work appeared easy for him, he developed an interest in the mystical and the cryptic. After leaving Harvard, he began to acquaint himself with the classical Hindu texts through their English translations.He also had an interest in learning languages and learned Sanskrit, under Arthur W. Ryder at Berkeley in 1933. He eventually read literary works such as the Bhagavad Gita and Meghaduta in the original Sanskrit, and deeply pondered them. He later cited the Gita as one of the books that most shaped his philosophy of life.He wrote to his brother that the Gita was “very easy and quite marvelous”, and called it “the most beautiful philosophical song existing in any known tongue.” He later gave copies of it as presents to his friends and kept a personal, worn-out copy on the bookshelf by his desk. He nicknamed his car Garuda, the mount bird of the Hindu god Vishnu.
Oppenheimer never became a Hindu in the traditional sense; he did not join any temple nor pray to any god. He “was really taken by the charm and the general wisdom of the Bhagavad-Gita”, his brother said.It is speculated that Oppenheimer’s interest in Hindu thought started during his earlier association with Niels Bohr. Both Bohr and Oppenheimer had been very analytical and critical about the ancient Hindu mythological stories and the metaphysics embedded in them.In one conversation with David Hawkins before the war, while talking about the literature of ancient Greece, Oppenheimer remarked, “I have read the Greeks; I find the Hindus deeper.”
UNQUOTE
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Below was my reply to the above :
Hollywood script writers and movie production artists are a very creative lot …. They can paint the picture of the devil incarnate even as an angel of heavenly goodness….
Oppenheimer the scientist must be credited with the invention of the most lethal weapon of mass destruction ever known to the human race in history. His discovery of how to employ fusion physics to develop the atom bomb is what has led even today to the whole world cowering in the dark and deadly shadow of nuclear war . In the raging Ukraine-War today in 2023 the world stands on the brink of a looming all-out nuclear war ….
But for Oppenheimer’s pioneering work on fissile nuclear material, our world would not have experienced or witnessed Hiroshima and Nagasaki following which the terrible Cold War rivalry between the so-called Superpower nations broke out too and led to “lesser” but more populous and militarily vulnerable nations — like India, Pakistan , North Korea and Israel — being forced to spend billions of dollars worth of precious resources of their respective peoples wastefully for decades on developing their own nuclear armaments. They were resources which otherwise could have been spent gainfully on poverty elimination, hunger, education , health and environment protection.
Just imagine this: today the crying need of the hour for the whole world is warding off Climate Change hazards for which the world has no adequate money…. If all the money spent since the Cold War on adding to the nuclear arsenal and stockpile of “nuclear-power nations” had been available instead today to use on Climate Change, wouldn’t it have saved our planet from the looming disaster of worldwide ecological damage that all humanity faces?
Oppenheimer in my opinion must be regarded as much the arch-villain of Science as Hitler is judged today in history to be the arch-villain of geopolitics.
It was Hitler and his toxic worldview that spawned the modern ideas of racism, authoritarianism and militaristic hegemonism. And in my view, similarly, it was Oppenheimer’s nuclear-science which really spawned what we know to be the toxic idea of Terrorism, a constant dimension of all international relations and geo-strategic diplomacy today. Before Oppenheimer and Hiroshima and Nagasaki the word Terrorism was itself unknown in the lexicon of international affairs. Oppenheimer is from a moral standpoint the founding father of world Terrorism. Through his scientific discovery of the Atom Bomb the world came to discover the power and impact on human affairs that Terrorism has the potential to wreak.
Hollywood today is the centre of very creative excellence in America but it is also the principal artistic mouthpiece and propaganda machinery of American hegemonism.
Christopher Nolan’s much hyped-up biopic on Oppenheimer is nothing but an attempt to romanticise the nuclear-physicist’s biography. It aims to idolise him as a modern-day good–intentioned but tragic Hamlet caught between the horns of a moral dilemma between two moral imperatives: on one hand, his responsibility as a scientist to make scientific advancement serve his country’s national interest; and, on the other hand, to temper such science with humanitarian ethical responsibility and conscience. Hell is paved with good intentions too …. and scientists like Oppenheimer are it’s road-layers indeed.
Hollywood and Nolan’s efforts to portray Oppenheimer as a good-souled Hamlet who is morally torn between “to be or not to be” is just a slick and mushy cinematographic attempt to whitewash him… to skilfully fashion some kind of a convincing apology for him and his terrible scientific discovery. The purpose of Hollywood producing and retelling this “touching human-interest story” is mainly to soothe America’s guilty conscience over the heinous crime it perpetrated on humanity with the cool balm of a nice, emollient touch of artistic class …
What a terrible irony indeed that Hollywood and America makes no apology yet to the Japanese people and the world for what was done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but today makes — through a box-office-busting Nolan-crafted aesthetic cinematic drama — a subtle apology meant to resurrect in the minds of America at large the portrait of an agent of Satan who patented the atom bomb, as though he were some kind of an endearing tragic hero!
I do like to watch well-made Hollywood movies …. But not this one , though … It may be very well made but it is inherently evil-intentioned nevertheless. To me it is not biography on celluloid screen. It is pure political propaganda burning bright on the silver-screen.
Sudarshan Madabushi
60 years ago a play ‘The Physicists’ by the Swiss Friedrich Dürrenmatt became popular worldwide. This modern morality play about science is generally considered his best play. Any intellectual debate on the subject would be welcome in our days as well. Instead the public is served with propaganda pieces like ‘Oppenheimer’.