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Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Tuesday, August 8, 2017
The Beckoning of Nuclear War
A coup against the man in the White House is under way. This is not because he is an odious human being, but because he has consistently made clear he does not want war with Russia.
( August 7, 2017, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) The
US submarine captain says, “We’ve all got to die one day, some sooner
and some later. The trouble always has been that you’re never ready,
because you don’t know when it’s coming. Well, now we do know and
there’s nothing to be done about it.”
He says he will be dead by September. It will take about a week to die, though no one can be sure. Animals live the longest.
The war was over in a month. The United States, Russia and China were
the protagonists. It is not clear if it was started by accident or
mistake. There was no victor. The northern hemisphere is contaminated
and lifeless now.
A curtain of radioactivity is moving south towards Australia and New
Zealand, southern Africa and South America. By September, the last
cities, towns and villages will succumb. As in the north, most buildings
will remain untouched, some illuminated by the last flickers of
electric light.
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper
These lines from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men appear at the
beginning of Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach, which left me close to
tears. The endorsements on the cover said the same.
Published in 1957 at the height of the Cold War when too many writers
were silent or cowed, it is a masterpiece. At first the language
suggests a genteel relic; yet nothing I have read on nuclear war is as
unyielding in its warning. No book is more urgent.
Some readers will remember the black and white Hollywood film starring
Gregory Peck as the US Navy commander who takes his submarine to
Australia to await the silent, formless spectre descending on the last
of the living world.
I read On the Beach for the first time the other day, finishing it as
the US Congress passed a law to wage economic war on Russia, the world’s
second most lethal nuclear power. There was no justification for this
insane vote, except the promise of plunder.
The “sanctions” are aimed at Europe, too, mainly Germany, which depends
on Russian natural gas and on European companies that do legitimate
business with Russia. In what passed for debate on Capitol Hill, the
more garrulous senators left no doubt that the embargo was designed to
force Europe to import expensive American gas.
Their main aim seems to be war – real war. No provocation as extreme can
suggest anything else. They seem to crave it, even though Americans
have little idea what war is. The Civil War of 1861-5 was the last on
their mainland. War is what the United States does to others.
The only nation to have used nuclear weapons against human beings, they
have since destroyed scores of governments, many of them democracies,
and laid to waste whole societies – the million deaths in Iraq were a
fraction of the carnage in Indo-China, which President Reagan called “a
noble cause” and President Obama revised as the tragedy of an
“exceptional people”He was not referring to the Vietnamese.
Filming last year at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, I overheard a
National Parks Service guide lecturing a school party of young
teenagers. “Listen up,” he said. “We lost 58,000 young soldiers in
Vietnam, and they died defending your freedom.”
At a stroke, the truth was inverted. No freedom was defended. Freedom
was destroyed. A peasant country was invaded and millions of its people
were killed, maimed, dispossessed, poisoned; 60,000 of the invaders took
their own lives. Listen up, indeed.
A lobotomy is performed on each generation. Facts are removed. History
is excised and replaced by what Time magazine calls “an eternal
present”. Harold Pinter described this as “manipulation of power
worldwide, while masquerading as a force for universal good, a
brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis [which meant]
that it never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was
happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”
Those who call themselves liberals or tendentiously “the left” are eager
participants in this manipulation, and its brainwashing, which today
revert to one name: Trump.
Trump is mad, a fascist, a dupe of Russia. He is also a gift for
“liberal brains pickled in the formaldehyde of identity politics”, wrote
Luciana Bohne memorably. The obsession with Trump the man – not Trump
as a symptom and caricature of an enduring system – beckons great danger
for all of us.
While they pursue their fossilised anti-Russia agendas, narcissistic
media such as the Washington Post, the BBC and the Guardian suppress the
essence of the most important political story of our time as they
warmonger on a scale I cannot remember in my lifetime.
On 3 August, in contrast to the acreage the Guardian has given to drivel
that the Russians conspired with Trump (reminiscent of the far-right
smearing of John Kennedy as a “Soviet agent”), the paper buried, on page
16, news that the President of the United States was forced to sign a
Congressional bill declaring economic war on Russia. Unlike every other
Trump signing, this was conducted in virtual secrecy and attached with a
caveat from Trump himself that it was “clearly unconstitutional”.
A coup against the man in the White House is under way. This is not
because he is an odious human being, but because he has consistently
made clear he does not want war with Russia.
This glimpse of sanity, or simple pragmatism, is anathema to the
“national security” managers who guard a system based on war,
surveillance, armaments, threats and extreme capitalism. Martin Luther
King called them “the greatest purveyors of violence in the world
today”.
They have encircled Russia and China with missiles and a nuclear
arsenal. They have used neo-Nazis to instal an unstable, aggressive
regime on Russia’s “borderland” – the way through which Hitler invaded,
causing the deaths of 27 million people. Their goal is to dismember the
modern Russian Federation.
In response, “partnership” is a word used incessantly by Vladimir Putin –
anything, it seems, that might halt an evangelical drive to war in the
United States. Incredulity in Russia may have now turned to fear and
perhaps a certain resolution. The Russians almost certainly have
war-gamed nuclear counter strikes. Air-raid drills are not uncommon.
Their history tells them to get ready.
The threat is simultaneous. Russia is first, China is next. The US has
just completed a huge military exercise with Australia known as Talisman
Sabre. They rehearsed a blockade of the Malacca Straits and the South
China Sea, through which pass China’s economic lifelines.
The admiral commanding the US Pacific fleet said that, “if required”, he
would nuke China. That he would say such a thing publicly in the
current perfidious atmosphere begins to make fact of Nevil Shute’s
fiction.
None of this is considered news. No connection is made as the bloodfest
of Passchendaele a century ago is remembered. Honest reporting is no
longer welcome in much of the media. Windbags, known as pundits,
dominate: editors are infotainment or party line managers. Where there
was once sub-editing, there is the liberation of axe-grinding clichés.
Those journalists who do not comply are defenestrated.
The urgency has plenty of precedents. In my film, The Coming War on
China, John Bordne, a member of a US Air Force missile combat crew based
in Okinawa, Japan, describes how in 1962 – during the Cuban missile
crisis – he and his colleagues were “told to launch all the missiles”
from their silos.
Nuclear armed, the missiles were aimed at both China and Russia. A
junior officer questioned this, and the order was eventually rescinded –
but only after they were issued with service revolvers and ordered to
shoot at others in a missile crew if they did not “stand down”.
At the height of the Cold War, the anti-communist hysteria in the United
States was such that US officials who were on official business in
China were accused of treason and sacked. In 1957 – the year Shute wrote
On the Beach – no official in the State Department could speak the
language of the world’s most populous nation. Mandarin speakers were
purged under strictures now echoed in the Congressional bill that has
just passed, aimed at Russia.
The bill was bipartisan. There is no fundamental difference between
Democrats and Republicans. The terms “left” and “right” are meaningless.
Most of America’s modern wars were started not by conservatives, but by
liberal Democrats.
When Obama left office, he presided over a record seven wars, including
America’s longest war and an unprecedented campaign of extrajudicial
killings – murder – by drones.
In his last year, according to a Council on Foreign Relations study,
Obama, the “reluctant liberal warrior”, dropped 26,171 bombs – three
bombs every hour, 24 hours a day. Having pledged to help “rid the world”
of nuclear weapons, the Nobel Peace Laureate built more nuclear
warheads than any president since the Cold War.
Trump is a wimp by comparison. It was Obama – with his secretary of
state Hillary Clinton at his side – who destroyed Libya as a modern
state and launched the human stampede to Europe. At home, immigration
groups knew him as the “deporter-in-chief”.
One of Obama’s last acts as president was to sign a bill that handed a
record $618billion to the Pentagon, reflecting the soaring ascendancy of
fascist militarism in the governance of the United States. Trump has
endorsed this.
Buried in the detail was the establishment of a “Center for Information
Analysis and Response”. This is a ministry of truth. It is tasked with
providing an “official narrative of facts” that will prepare us for the
real possibility of nuclear war – if we allow it.