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At first glance, Hen­ry Vseems to be one of Shakespeare’s sim­pler plays. It is often inter­preted as straight­for­ward patri­otic pro­pa­ganda. Lau­rence Olivi­er treat­ed it more or less this way in his bril­liant 1944 film ver­sion. But the play con­tains many ele­ments that don’t fit into this inter­pre­ta­tion. I’m more inclined to see it as a study of how a charis­matic fig­ure can delude oth­ers and him­self, using var­i­ous tech­niques of manip­u­la­tion. Shake­speare was always aware of these tech­niques. Marc Antony’s speech to the plebs in Julius Cae­saris prac­ti­cally a text­book on how to manip­u­late a crowd. Hen­ry uses sim­i­lar meth­ods to keep his war in France rolling, and Shake­spear iron­i­cally points out the end results for the ordi­nary men who are caught up in his ambi­tions. He does this very sub­tly, how­ev­er. The play also con­tains the ances­tor of all those Amer­i­can World War II movie scenes where the infantry pla­toon has a guy from Texas, a guy from Iowa, a guy from New Eng­land, and a guy from Brook­lyn, each with his accent and com­ic shtick. In this case, it’s Gow­er (Eng­lish), Fluellen (Welsh), Mac­mor­ris (Irish) and Jamy (Scot­tish) each play­ing out their eth­nic stereo­types which, appar­ent­ly, have remained unchanged for the last five hun­dred years.

Edward Teller in a Lawrence-Liv­er­more Labs pub­lic­i­ty photo.

In 1958, the Atom­ic Ener­gy Com­mis­sion made a con­certed effort to con­vince the cit­i­zens of Alas­ka to allow them to explode a series of nuclear weapons on the north­west­ern coast of that state. The effort was direct­ed by Edward Teller, the “father of the hydro­gen bomb”, who trav­elled to Alas­ka to pro­mote the idea. Teller was a for­mi­da­ble oppo­nent of the nuclear test ban treaty. Pres­i­dent Eisen­hower, already extreme­ly dis­trust­ful of what he was already begin­ing to think of as the “mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al com­plex” and expe­ri­enced in the real pol­i­tics of war, was not swayed against the treaty, but he was amenable to Teller’s claims that nuclear weapons could be used for peace­ful pur­poses. The Alas­ka project was at first dubbed “Ploughshare” and then lat­er changed to “Char­i­ot”.

The project was to use nuclear weapons to exca­vate a huge har­bour in a place where it had no con­ceiv­able eco­nomic util­ity, and where it would wreak spec­tac­u­lar destruc­tion of both the ecosys­tem and the human com­mu­nity. It was pro­moted to the Alaskans with raz­zle-daz­zle, con­stantly chang­ing jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, and a land­slide of bare-faced lies. Teller him­self appears to have been an almost path­e­l­og­i­cal liar. Alaskans were told the most fan­tas­tic and absurd things imag­in­able, any con­coc­tion of untruths and half-truths that would pla­cate doubts or shut up oppo­si­tion. Pre­dictably, the local Cham­ber of Com­merce types, the Press, and State leg­is­la­tors jumped on the band­wagon. Here is an exam­ple of the kind of think­ing dis­played by the Anchor­age Times: “Ask­ing Alaskans for a deci­sion on this pro­posed atom exper­i­ment is like a doc­tor ask­ing his patient whether he wants an oper­a­tion. The eas­i­est answer is ‘no’. The doc­tor usu­ally tells the patient he must have one for his own good, and the patient does as the doc­tor says. The atom sci­en­tists are the doc­tor in this case. If they say that ade­quate safe­guards for life and prop­erty have been pro­vided, how can lay­men say oth­er­wise?” Wow, there’s some rugged indi­vid­u­al­ism and crit­i­cal jour­nal­ism for you. Read more »