How the Arts Play a Role in the Fight for Nuclear Disarmament
conversations surrounding nuclear weapons have been largely absent from the cultural zeitgeist. The Atomic Age, also known as the period of time between the detonation of the first atomic bombs in 1945 and the end of the Cold War in 1991, was saturated with pop culture that dealt heavily with themes of nuclear fallout.
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 6 2025 (IPS) -By Oritro Karim, https://www.ipsnews.net/2025/03/arts-play-role-fight-nuclear-disarmament/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=arts-play-role-fight-nuclear-disarmament
This week countries and communities converge in New York for the 3rd Meeting of State Parties on the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), with multiple side events to address the social, political and cultural impact of nuclear abolition across different sectors.
On March 5, the Permanent Mission of Mexico to the United Nations held an event called Fábulas Atómicas – Artists Against the Bomb in collaboration with Mexican artist Pedro Reyes, in which the relationship between the arts and the use of nuclear weapons was discussed. Throughout the last century, the arts have been used to provide cultural commentary on the threats that nuclear weapons pose to humanity.
“Using art for disarmament can take many different forms. I started by transforming gun parts into musical instruments, for instance taking a rifle and transforming it into a flute…What is the principle of a nuclear weapon? I thought it was possible to make a chain reaction that could be a creative force rather than a destructive force. That is how Artists Against the Bomb was born,” said Reyes.
Since 1952, the United Nations Disarmament Commission (UNDC) has continuously stressed the importance of international peace and disarmament. With geopolitical tensions on the rise and world superpowers such as Russia, North Korea, and the United States wielding more atomic weapons than ever before, the threat of nuclear proliferation is the highest it has been in decades.
“The bilateral and regional security arrangements that underwrote global peace and stability for decades are unravelling before our eyes. Trust is sinking, while uncertainty, insecurity, impunity and military spending are all rising. Others are expanding their inventories of nuclear weapons and materials. Some continue to rattle the nuclear sabre as a means of coercion. We see signs of new arms races including in outer space,” said United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres at the UN Conference on Disarmament in Geneva.
Despite this, conversations surrounding nuclear weapons have been largely absent from the cultural zeitgeist. The Atomic Age, also known as the period of time between the detonation of the first atomic bombs in 1945 and the end of the Cold War in 1991, was saturated with pop culture that dealt heavily with themes of nuclear fallout.
Since the late 1980s, projects began to shift away from these themes. Reyes highlighted the importance of art in relation to cultural commentary surrounding nuclear weapons by saying, “The end of the 80s made it seem like the cold war was over. To a certain extent, people born after 1989 had not been exposed to cultural materials…With the nuclear testing ban, there haven’t been any nuclear detonations since around 1999. There’s a saying called ‘out of sight out of mind’. The threat became somewhat invisible. It is our job to use culture to bring awareness to this issue through culture by provoking rage and fear.”
Reyes adds that the current undersaturation of the nuclear weapons issue in pop culture helps to facilitate conversations as the public has become wary of discussing issues that dominate culture today. “There is no fatigue about the subject. There’s a certain fatigue surrounding projects that have been strongly discussed in the past twenty years. Nuclear weapons are an issue that we have not spoken out about enough in recent times. We need to take advantage of this lack of fatigue,” he said.
The Nuclear Art movement rose in 1945, shortly after the United States’ detonation of two atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. At this time, the majority of the American public were unaware of the scale of destruction that had occurred in Japan.
Japanese photographers that had survived the attacks such as Yoshito Masushige (Hiroshima) and Yosuke Yamahata (Nagasaki), as well as American photographers such as Wayne Miller and Joe O’Donnell, published photos of the aftermath, which were classified by the United States government for decades. Much of the world instead relied on artwork that visualized the devastation.
Contemporary artists and corporations alike began incorporating themes of atomic weapons and nuclear fallout in their work shortly after the bombings in Japan. This movement grew more prominent after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which is considered to be the closest the world has ever come to nuclear warfare.
Western art pieces, such as Charles Bittinger’s 1946 painting, Atomic Bomb Atomic Bomb Mushroom Cloud, brought the now well-known mushroom cloud imagery into public consciousness in the United States. Other examples include U.S. military artist Standish Brackus’s pieces Still Life (1946) and At the Red Cross Hospital (1945), which depicted the wide scale destruction that nuclear weapons inflict on civilian infrastructure and the human body, respectively.
Additionally, Nuclear Art also became a fixture in Western propaganda. In 1957, the Walt Disney Company released an episode of Disneyland titled Our Friend the Atom, which highlighted the ways atomic weapons can be used for peace, falling in line with the themes of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace speech at the UN General Assembly in 1953.
In the early 1950s, blockbuster films from both American and Japanese studios led to a widening public consciousness surrounding nuclear weapons. Science-fiction films such as The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) and Godzilla (1959) highlighted the unintended biological consequences of nuclear fallout.
However, On the Beach (1959) marked a pivotal shift in the depiction of nuclear fallout by explicitly marking humans as responsible for a deliberate detonation that led to a societal collapse. Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) expanded on these themes by using absurdism to emphasize humanity’s role in nuclear proliferation.
Most recently, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer (2023) brought nuclear weapons into the public consciousness once more, particularly in the West, There have been critiques on if modern artists are depicting these themes effectively. Reyes told an IPS correspondent that the arts have the ability to sway audiences in either direction. Certain representations of nuclear weapons in pop culture can be classified as either “above the cloud” or “under the cloud”.
“Films like Oppenheimer show the overwhelming power of science and the moral conflict of atomic bombs but never show the victims or consequences. Films like that are almost pro-bomb because they fail to humanize these conflicts. Other films show what’s really at stake. It’s important to be able to identify which side cultural productions are on,” said Reyes.
It is crucial for contemporary artists to depict the correct messages in their work to achieve any substantial cultural progress in nuclear disarmament. Pop culture must continue to show the true extent of the dangers that nuclear weapons pose.
“We have to be very clear in arguing that nobody can win a nuclear war,” said Reyes. “And that’s why it’s very important to show the consequences. It has been normalized through video games and other mediums that make them seem not as problematic as they are. It’s our job to do a lot of explaining and find entertaining ways for people to understand.”
IPS UN Bureau Report
Why Welsh speakers oppose Wylfa nuclear plant
Letter David Thomas: I was dismayed to see your article (Report, February
8), blithely dismissing the impact of the planned Wylfa Newydd nuclear
power station on Welsh-speaking communities. You parrot the view of the
nuclear industry that nothing should stand in the way of the bulldozers,
with little regard for the wider picture here in Wales.
The valid concerns
of Welsh-speaking communities are deemed illegitimate by the nuclear
industry, and Welsh speakers’ interests are portrayed as akin to those of
bats and newts — as unnecessary “blockers” to progress.
The ongoing survival of the Welsh language is nothing short of a miracle in the face of
the linguistic, economic and political hegemony of our English neighbour.
To dismiss linguistic and cultural concerns that the Wylfa Newydd plan
might entail is to dismiss the very existence of Wales as a linguistic and
cultural entity.
The Welsh government has committed to a target of having
1mn Welsh speakers by 2050. This plan has been ratified on repeated
occasions by the Welsh electorate, and surveys show that an overwhelming
majority of the Welsh population are well disposed to the language, even
among groups of non Welsh speakers.
We might also question why Ynys Môn
(Anglesey) is perceived as a suitable site for a new nuclear power plant.
Wales is already a net exporter of energy, yet Welsh consumers pay more for
electricity than the vast majority of their English counterparts.
Possibilities for renewables in the form of onshore and offshore wind and
tidal energy appear promising, yet attempts to pioneer tidal power in Wales
have been blocked by successive UK governments.
FT 12th Feb 2025
https://www.ft.com/content/3c9045c5-8cb4-4db3-bdf1-734b7cd789bf
Pentagon Warns China Developing Love, The Greatest Weapon Of All
https://theonion.com/pentagon-warns-china-developing-love-the-greatest-weapon-of-all/ January 27, 2025
ARLINGTON, VA—In a high-level alert that revealed a geo-political rival of the United States could soon become the first nation capable of wielding the most powerful force in the universe, the Pentagon warned Friday that China was actively developing love, the greatest weapon of all.
The alert, issued to the American public and top U.S. allies, stated that China had made significant advances in love, a transcendent source of strength that ultimately triumphs over any defenses an enemy might try to erect against it. Weapons experts confirmed that if it were unleashed, the all-consuming feeling could strike the hearts of billions throughout Asia and the Pacific, even reaching the West Coast of the United States.
“Our assessments indicate love is stronger than any technology possessed by the U.S. military,” said Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, pledging to work with Japan, South Korea, Australia, and other regional partners to stop China from harnessing the invincible cosmic force that always emerges victorious. “Intelligence estimates suggest the program is in its final stages, so we must act quickly or love will overwhelm us and we will feel compelled to surrender to it.”
“If China succeeds, it will have the power to remake the global order by spreading universal love and understanding to every corner of the world,” Austin added.
Nations have vied for years to develop love, knowing it would provide their arsenals with a weapon that could overcome anyone or anything it encountered. According to sources within the Pentagon who spoke on condition of anonymity, the Defense Department’s own 10-year, $750 billion effort has failed to produce an abundance of love, bringing it no closer than it was a decade ago to equipping the military with a profound sense of devotion to one’s fellow human beings.
China is believed to have put similar resources into its far more successful program, with surveillance reports indicating that by 2030 the nation will have obtained an emotion that can create a profound sense of oneness with the universe. Previously, U.S. military analysts had questioned whether China possessed the emotional vulnerability necessary to develop love, believing it was still several decades away from acquiring a feeling so expansive it knows no bounds and flows outward into every aspect of existence.
In 2019, the U.N. issued sanctions after it found evidence of China’s intent to open itself up to love’s embrace, but inspectors reportedly underestimated just how quickly the smallest seed of tenderness could flourish into a garden of eternal love. Today, international observers expressed concerns that if the weapon were used, the world would see a fallout of hundreds or even thousands of years in which love would endure all things.
“It is clearly a show of strength by China to love like its heart has never been broken,” said Daniel Feng, an expert on Sino-American relations at Georgetown University, noting that China’s ultimate goal was to assert its right as a sovereign nation to love freely and unselfishly by letting go of fears and expectations. “Quite frankly, no one can escape the power of love, and China knows it. By putting their hearts on the line, they are signaling that at any given moment they could shower the United States with a love so fierce it would leave their international rival unrecognizable afterward.”
“So what should the Pentagon do now?” he continued. “With new theories suggesting it has the potential to be far, far stronger than love, America’s best strategy may be developing the technology to harness the power of mild annoyance.”
Philosophy Against Nuclear Power
It is now clear that the residents of Fukushima are far from some voluntarist subjects but rather a people who live under constant subjection. The installation of nuclear power plants was not democratically decided, neither did it bring any halt to the historical subjection. Rather, nuclear power plants worsened the subjection by reproducing subjection. It should be clear that the one who bears the responsibility is the “village” (TEPCO, the government, etc.) rather than the victims.
How many times we should suffer from this “blindness to nuclear apocalypse” in order to realize that nuclear power is just a technology against humanity?
New Bloom, Shen Yun-Yen, 12/29/2024
Yoshiyuki SATO and Takumi TAGUCHI, Datsugenpatsu no tetsugaku (Philosophy for Abandoning Nuclear Power), Jimbun Shoin, 2016.
THE NUCLEAR BOMB certainly posed a serious problem for contemporary philosophy. From Heidegger to Arendt to Marcuse, philosophy in the mid-20th century struggled to deal with this all-annihilating artificial production. Unfortunately, most of these philosophers did not analyze the complex relationships between nuclear technology, capital, state, etc.
………………………………………………………….. ……………….Fortunately, two philosophers, Yoshiyuki Sato and Takumi Taguchi, accept the difficult challenge of philosophizing nuclear power. In their joint work Datsugenpatsu no tetsugaku, they argue at the outset that neither “pure philosophy” nor “philosophy as usual” will ever constitute an effective critique of nuclear power (13-4). What we need, according to Sato and Taguchi, is a Datsugenpatsu no tetsugaku, which can be translated as either a philosophy of abandoning nuclear power, or simply philosophy for abandoning nuclear power…………………………………………………..
The book is divided into four parts, each with three chapters, and a conclusion. The first part deals with the identity of kaku (nuclear weapons) and genpatsu (nuclear power plants); the second an ideology critique; the third a historico-politico-economic critique of the development of nuclear power; the fourth part attempts to consider nuclear power a public hazard; lastly, the conclusion provides a vision for a society without nuclear power.
1.
Even after the Fukushima catastrophe, many philosophers continued to philosophize the phenomenon as usual, or, to borrow a phrase from Adorno, touting the “jargon of authenticity.” It’s just weak. Ontology alone will never constitute a critique of nuclear power. Rather than providing a sound critique, these sorts of philosophy books seemed to reaffirm the ontological inability of philosophy when faced with nuclear catastrophe.
Fortunately, two philosophers, Yoshiyuki Sato and Takumi Taguchi, accept the difficult challenge of philosophizing nuclear power. In their joint work Datsugenpatsu no tetsugaku, they argue at the outset that neither “pure philosophy” nor “philosophy as usual” will ever constitute an effective critique of nuclear power (13-4). What we need, according to Sato and Taguchi, is a Datsugenpatsu no tetsugaku, which can be translated as either a philosophy of abandoning nuclear power, or simply philosophy for abandoning nuclear power. Each translation carries different connotations. “A philosophy of abandoning nuclear power” seems to make philosophy a means for abandoning nuclear power, while the other seems to be a sublation of “philosophy as usual.” The logic is actually clear: nuclear power serves as a medium for philosophy to sublate itself.
Like Marx, who philosophically criticized philosophy by incorporating political economy and history into philosophy, Sato and Taguchi incorporate different fields of thought in order to critique nuclear technology and renew philosophy. They not only bring Günther Ander, Foucault, Judith Butler, Montesquieu, etc. together and interpret their th
2.
THE BOOK OPENS with a warning: our stubborn “blindness” to the repetition of nuclear catastrophes. In 1945, nuclear bombs were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which made philosopher Günther Anders argue that “Hiroshima is everywhere,” that is, regardless of location, we were already living in an age where indiscriminate annihilation became possible, and irreversible. In 1954, the US conducted nuclear testing (H-Bomb) at Bikini Atoll, and the “ashes of death” fell all over the place, which led to the death of several Japanese fishermen fishing nearby. In the same year, Günther Anders lamented that, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we still suffered from the “apocalypse-blindness” to nuclear weapons. In 1979, the year of the Three Mile Island accident, Anders reasserted his arguments, and noted that nuclear plants served but a masquerade of nuclear weapons. And then there was Chernobyl (1986), which made Anders change his argument from “Hiroshima is everywhere” to “Chernobyl is everywhere.”
As Japanese philosophers, that is, philosophers from a country where nuclear tragedies happen most frequently (Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bikini, Tokaimura, Fukushima), Sato and Taguchi clearly understand that Fukushima is not something “accidental” (sōteigai), as many commentators and government officials claim to be, but a repetition of the above-listed catastrophes (29). They also critique the fake distinction of the “civil use” and “military use” of nuclear power by drawing on the works of critical scientists such as Takagi Jinzaburo.
For Sato and Taguchi, the identity between nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants is established historically, that is, nuclear power plants share every feature of the Manhattan Project, from the principle of secrecy, the concentration of capital, the state-centrism, to its technical principles and, perhaps most importantly, the subordination of scientific development to the ends of the state.
Indeed, scientific knowledge is never innocent, which is why Sato and Taguchi employ a Foucauldian analysis of power-knowledge in order to critique the interrelationship between the two. The state decides who is allowed to participate the project, what to research, how much money an experiment needs, etc., without public scrutiny. This is why nuclear technology is a product of the “state-industrial-knowledge complex” (56).
3
IF IN THE context of the U.S., the symbol of the “state-industrial-knowledge complex” is the Manhattan Project, in Japan it’s the “nuclear village” (genshiryoku-mura). The “village” is not a physical location but a principle of exclusion (murahachibu), that is, whoever holds opinions different from them will be excluded. As an entity of highly concentrated power, its impact should not be underrated.
…………………………………………..This top-down, exploitative, discriminatory system exists throughout the history of modern Japan, that is, from Meiji to the present. It is true that in the post-war occupied period, the main condition of getting back Japan’s sovereignty is to democratize the state. However, it is also true that, under the shadow of the Cold War, both the US and the Japanese government did not care much about democratization. The result is that former Class A war criminal suspect Nobusuke Kishi not only became the Prime Minister of Japan (1957-60) and President of the LDP (1957-60), but also played an important role in supporting the “village.” It is no wonder that Sato and Taguchi repetitively argue that nuclear development in Japan serves both economic and military ends, and that as long as this system exists, claims about the “democracy” or democratization of Japan will never make sense.
4
THE VILLAGE DECIDES everything, including what’s to be done after the Fukushima catastrophe. First of all, given the identity of the “military use” and “civil use” of nuclear power, the authors argue quite convincingly that the impact of a nuclear catastrophe can only be compared to that of a war (34-7). That is, nuclear power plants’ disasters often produce effects analogous to those of war. From Chernobyl to Fukushima, whenever a nuclear disaster happens, there are always numerous refugees, lands that are no longer inhabitable, and almost unbearable economic costs.
After the catastrophe of Fukushima, there are many issues that remain unresolved even to today. However, the village’s attitude remains the same. The basic tone is denial and ideological. ………… In the case of the Fukushima catastrophe, the village (including scientists and doctors) decides to abandon certain populations in order to reduce economic costs (102). That is, because “electricity provision is necessary,” the village decides to make hundreds of thousands of residents (or refugees) continue to live under constant radioactive exposure (142).
The village has always been trying to promote an unscientific view of an “acceptable amount of radioactive exposure,” intentionally ignoring many scientists’ strong objections against this hypothesis. Hence, when there are lands still heavily polluted, the government policy asks many refugees to go back to their hometowns out of a deliberate calculation of cost-effectiveness. Without the intertwining of “scientific knowledge” and state power, this operation would not have been possible.
Sato and Taguchi go further to claim that, this sort of calculation is one of the reasons of the catastrophe. As a country where earthquakes happen extremely frequent, Japan’s earthquake studies have always been famous in the field. Long before the Fukushima tragedy took place, many specialists had already warned of a possible earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster due to earthquake and tsunami. However, the village did not take action to prevent such a scenario from happening because the economic costs are just too high (138). It’s just not worth it.
After the Fukushima catastrophe, the village did not repent of its inaction. As for them, these warnings are not voiced from “specialists,” and this is the main reason why they will never take them seriously (134). As the authors point out, the so-called specialist is nothing but those who support the principle of the village (136).
5
……………………………………………………………………………..For the authors, the process of subjection begins with the above-mentioned policy, or the “long-distance electricity provision system.” The state chose certain regions to develop nuclear power plants because the regions were economically poor (as a result of systematic discrimination). The nuclear power plants, however, are more like drug addiction rather than hope. After conducting a rigorous economic analysis, Sato and Taguchi show that the more the regions attach to the nuclear economy, the more they become poorer, since this is nothing but a core-peripheral exploitative system (201-2)………………………………
It is now clear that the residents of Fukushima are far from some voluntarist subjects but rather a people who live under constant subjection. The installation of nuclear power plants was not democratically decided, neither did it bring any halt to the historical subjection. Rather, nuclear power plants worsened the subjection by reproducing subjection. It should be clear that the one who bears the responsibility is the “village” (TEPCO, the government, etc.) rather than the victims.
The Fukushima catastrophe makes the subjection clear, while also provides an opportunity to halt the subjection, according to the authors. That is, as an “event,” it changes the mindset of many of the residents and citizens. Many people chose to live without nuclear power (216), and one court decision even made clear that the lives of residents are above economic prosperity (87).
Seizing the opportunity to formulate a possible future against nuclear power, Sato and Taguchi argue that, firstly, nuclear power is entirely irresponsible for future generations, an idea they take from Hans Jonas (406). The reason is actually quite scientific: nuclear power cannot function without producing radioactive waste, which is inconceivable to be really “disposed.” The profit-seeking mindset of this generation will definitely do harm to next generations, if the world still exists.
Secondly, they argue that the government should formulate a system of referendum, as a way of practicing democracy (442-3). Given that the nuclear village almost always monopolizes any decisions regarding nuclear power, a referendum constitutes a way of abolishing the undemocratic structures of the state-industrial-knowledge complex.
Thirdly, the government, and every citizen, should take renewable energy seriously, and implement concrete policies to facilitate the transition from nuclear energy and highly polluting energies to renewable clean energy. They also go further to propose that energy provision should be taken as a common, rather than some private property monopolized by the “village” (448-50).
It is clear that, as for Sato and Taguchi, nuclear power is not just a feature of the Japanese state. Nuclear power, through its interconnections with capital, knowledge, science, etc., defines the state. A state defined by nuclear power, governed by the nuclear village, is necessarily unscientific, undemocratic, and irresponsible. Abandoning nuclear power, therefore, amounts to restructuring the state. If the Japanese government has always been touting its formal democracy, what the authors call for is a movement of democratizing democracy.
6
……………………………………………………………What I feel most bizarre is the fact that the Japanese government still tries to reopen the nuclear power plants, with little objection from the majority of the Japanese citizens. How many times we should suffer from this “blindness to nuclear apocalypse” in order to realize that nuclear power is just a technology against humanity?
Fukushima triggered a new round of anti-nuclear movements in Taiwan, with the final result of a zero-nuclear policy that will soon be implemented in 2025. When I discuss the recent development of the nuclear village with my Taiwanese friends who have all witnessed, through television, the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, their reaction is always the same: What the fuck? Did the Japanese suffer from collective amnesia?
I would say yes.
But Sato and Taguchi demonstrate how this collective amnesia is produced rather than natural. Without the official ideology (the so-called “safety myth”) and the support from pseudo-scientific communities, this amnesia would not have been possible. Speaking of “collective amnesia,” one couldn’t help but think of issues regarding war responsibility and post-war responsibility. But, again, only a radical democratization can help the country to really face its past wrongs. https://newbloommag.net/2024/12/29/philosophy-nuclear-power/
The Atom & Us: Min-Kyoo Kim
“These people not only died in a moment of unfathomable violence; they were almost erased from memory altogether.”
Meandering over the pebbles, Vicki Lesley, Nov 16, 2024
Welcome to ‘The Atom & Us’, a new series of interviews in which I will be spotlighting the work and thought contributions of some of the incredibly interesting individuals I’ve been privileged to get to know through making & distributing my own nuclear history film, ‘The Atom: A Love Affair‘.
…………………………………… it’s my absolute pleasure to introduce you to my first contributor in the series:
Min-Kyoo Kim
…………………………………………………………….. Is there an event or experience from your personal involvement with nuclear that particularly stands out in your memory and why?
After finishing my Master’s, I went travelling in Korea. It was in a local museum in Busan, in the south-east of the country, that I first learned that tens of thousands of Koreans – alongside Chinese and other East Asians, as colonised subjects of Japan – had been killed in the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These people not only died in a moment of unfathomable violence; they were almost erased from memory altogether.
This, I think, is the horrifying character of nuclear weapons; under the spectacle of the mushroom cloud lies a multitude of stories yet to be told, injustices yet to be redressed. Crucially, it’s not just the bombs themselves – it’s the untold legacies of extracting radioactive material in places like Congo, or the consequences of tests conducted on Indigenous territories around the globe, that demand our attention.
Why do you personally find it a compelling topic?
I have two answers, one academic and one more personal and political.
Regarding my research, I’ve been interested in how eye-witness testimonies of nuclear explosions focus on the blinding effects of the atomic flash. The very impossibility of perceiving this violence obviously poses a challenge to the medium of film and photography. For me, this blinding effect of the bomb also enacts a metaphor for how mainstream culture and politics tend to forget the other myriad forms of violence associated with nuclear proliferation, as in the cases I outlined in the previous answer.
Then, there’s the personal/ political answer, which is altogether simpler: I believe in a world without nuclear weapons. Now, like any stressed PhD student, I find myself asking what my work actually means, if anything. It’s why I’ve so appreciated meeting other scholars, activists and artists working in this area; the opportunity to share knowledge, not only with each other but with the wider public, is something that keeps me going.
Why do you think it has always been such a polarising issue and do you have any thoughts on if/how the discourse can be expanded to move beyond a simplistic pro- or anti- binary opposition?
I do believe – simplistically – that there is no moral justification for nuclear weapons. According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the Doomsday Clock is closer to Midnight (the symbolic hour of apocalypse) than at any previous point, so as far as I’m concerned, there is no time for ambiguity.
The real complexity of the discourse is when we talk about nuclear power in the civil sphere. It would seem that nuclear power is indispensable to any hopes of a future with clean, renewable energy.
I would just bear in mind, at the same time, that the boundaries between civil and military uses of nuclear power are blurred, and that these infrastructures can be appropriated for either purpose: the case of the Windscale fire in 1957, in the U.K., was an early example, while EDF recently announced that they would produce radioactive material for France’s nuclear weapons programme………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
…………………………………………………………………………………more https://vickilesley.substack.com/p/the-atom-and-us-min-kyoo-kim?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=2042878&post_id=151644494&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Patrick Lawrence: Zionists in Amsterdam
Western print and broadcast media purposefully falsified all representations of these events to turn reality upside down
November 14, 2024 By Patrick Lawrence / Consortium News, more https://consortiumnews.com/2024/11/12/patrick-lawrence-zionists-in-amsterdam/
In the annals of “anti–Semitism,” if not anti–Semitism in its un-weaponized form, the events before, during, and since an ill-fated soccer match in Amsterdam last week merit a prominent entry.
We find in these chaotic days a picture in miniature of the sickness that has overtaken “the Jewish state,” the shameless apology those purporting to lead the Western post-democracies make for the straight-out barbarities of Zionist zealots, and the full-frontal disinformation spread by corporate and state-funded media as they pose as the first line of defense against disinformation.
It’s a three-fer, then, the whole banana in one place and at one time —all of this in the cause of the Zionist regime as it prosecutes its yearlong genocide in Gaza and sets about expanding its campaign of murder and destruction across West Asia.
Bad enough that planeloads of freak-show Israeli extremists arrived in Amsterdam last week for a match between Maccabi Tel Aviv and Ajax, the famous Dutch side, and instantly set about terrorizing the city in the name of Zionist chauvinism.
Worse were the authorities, starting but not ending with Amsterdam’s mayor and the Dutch foreign and prime ministers, recasting what was bound to follow as anti–Semitism, a 21st century pogrom, and so on down the list of hyperbolic absurdities.
Worst — and I indeed count this worst for its consequences — Western print and broadcast media purposefully falsified all representations of these events to turn reality upside down: Wall-to-wall, the criminals became the innocents in the news accounts, the victimizers became victims, and the victims became condemnable, anti–Semitic menaces to human decency.
See what I mean? Violence, lies, distortion, inverted reality: Two days in Amsterdam last week look now like one of those 16th century paintings the Dutch called “world landscapes,” wherein the whole of the earth is depicted in a compact panorama.
What happened in one Dutch city is the world as we have it since the Zionist regime began its limitlessly barbaric assault on the Palestinians of Gaza, the Western powers blessed it, and Western media determined to hide it from view.
Language is the instrument of my trade, and there must be words adequate to these depravities and corruptions. There must, there must. But the only one I know that matches the task at this point is “No!” Bear with me, please, as I struggle to find others.
It has been long and well documented that the Zionist ideologues who have fashioned a national consciousness among Israelis have systematically cultivated a presumption of Jewish superiority and — the contradiction here is only apparent — a corresponding belief that the rest of humanity detests Jews and the world is in consequence a dangerous place.
This project, wherein Old Testament tales of Jewish barbarities are routinely invoked, predates World War II by many decades; since 1945, as is plain to anyone who looks honestly, the Holocaust has been fully instrumentalized in this cause.
Systematic Indoctrination
I recall video footage shot in Jerusalem during the crisis at al–Aqsa Mosque in May 2021. It showed young Israelis, the girls in prim blue-and-white school uniforms, leaping up and down in a sort of blissed-out frenzy shouting “Kill all Arabs!” and other such obscenities.
What in hell? I wondered. Zionism is racism, yes, but how did it sink to this level of crudity? I should have understood. I did not know then the extent to which the minds of Israelis and Zionists the world over have been mutilated.
Two films — maybe there are more — explain the systematized indoctrination that produced the outcome at al–Aqsa.
Defamation is a cleverly done documentary from 2009 that follows adolescent students as they are brainwashed, during a summer sojourn in Europe, to fear a world that hates them.
Israelism, released last year, shows how American Jews are similarly instructed in Hebrew school — and how the eyes of many of these victims are opening to the frauds and racist cruelties of Zionist ideology.
You can watch Defamation here and Israelism here. These films are brilliant and brave.
And there is a straight line from the purposefully inculcated xenophobia and paranoia they depict to the scene on Jerusalem’s streets during the crisis at al–Aqsa and now — my point here — to the repulsive mobs of Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam last week.
These are people, hundreds of them, who began their provocative aggressions as soon as they disembarked at Schiphol, Amsterdam’s airport.
The video and reported record shows them marching through the streets in what amounts to a rampage, tearing down Palestinian flags displayed on house fronts, vandalizing a taxicab with its driver (Moroccan) inside, attacking local people with pipes and clubs, chanting obscene, probably criminal slogans — “Kill the Arabs,” “Fuck you Palestine,” “There are no schools in Gaza because there are no children left,” “Let the IDF fuck the Arabs,” and on and on in this line.
The last is a reference to recent protests in Israel in defense of Israel Defense Forces soldiers found to have gang-raped Palestinian prisoners. Violent demonstrators, among them members of the Netanyahu cabinet, thought sodomizing Palestinians held in what amount to torture camps, should be made legal.
Numerous videos and news reports detail the horrific conduct of these repellent punks and the to-be-expected response from local people.
Here is one published last Friday in Middle East Eye. Here is a nine-minute video from Owen Jones, The Guardian columnist who has had a lot of things wrong over the years but has this story very right. Here is an exceptionally pithy commentary in MEE by the estimable Jonathan Cook.
On Sunday The Grayzone published the excellent video reporting of a young Dutch journalist-in-the-making that records Israelis attacking a contingent of uniformed Amsterdam police officers.
We can dispense with the ridiculous thought that these are football hooligans of the common variety and do not represent ordinary Israelis. Out of the question.
Owen Jones put out a second video Sunday, this one 17 minutes, that includes within it a video of the scene when the Israelis who went to Amsterdam arrived home. It is another raving paroxysm of racist delirium.
Let us take good care to understand these people and what they signify.
Sickness of a Nation
One, we see in them the sickness of a nation. Amsterdam showed this to the world in real-time video, reports on “X” and various other social media platforms.
I do not know when the apartheid state can be said to have succumbed to a perfectly diagnosable case of collective psychosis, but this is its condition now and it should be treated as such. Israel as now constituted, and arguably from the start, I mean to say, is not an acceptable presence in the community of nations.
See, for easy reference, the international community’s long, eventually successful ostracization of South Africa under the old apartheid regime. The time has come.
Two, it is one thing to indulge in deranged eruptions of hatred toward Palestinians and Arabs generally within the (internationally recognized) borders of an hysterical state.
Let us invoke the principle of noninterference in the affairs of others, even if these affairs amount to crazed ravings, and leave Israel’s freakish majority to itself. Gaza, and the Occupied Territories are, of course, another matter.
The Amsterdam events were something else. They were effectively an attempt to transport the extreme to which Israel has taken a premodern, even primitive ideology into a modern milieu and tell the world it must accept it.
This is what makes the mess in Amsterdam significant. And it is why it is important that it turned out to be, indeed, a mess.
Israeli terror did badly when it put its show on the road in the Netherlands last week. Ajax trounced Maccabi Tel Aviv 5 to zip. Zionism’s score was no better.
To consider this another way, listen carefully to all the racist chants. What were the Zionist deplorables who flew to Amsterdam saying?
In my read they were terrorists asserting that Israeli terror has a legitimate place in what we call Western civilization. They demanded acceptance. And why shouldn’t they try this on, given the Western powers’ unequivocal endorsement of all the state-sponsored barbarism?
The lesson here: It falls to those not of high office but of high principle to defend, in the streets or elsewhere, the remnants of the humane in the Western post-democracies.
Finally, let us not forget that in almost all cases history records, victimizers are also victims.
In this case, to praise gang rape and the slaughter of children amounts to an inverted, perverted admission that one’s psyche has been grotesquely disfigured at the hands of manipulating ideologues desperate to make a nation out of a diaspora that, as various Jews have argued over the years, ought to have remained a diaspora.
As to those who counter-demonstrated as these damaged people ripped through Amsterdam’s streets, it has been de rigueur this past week to include in one’s thoughts and observations some variation of, “There is no excuse for violence in response to the Israelis’ conduct.”
I go back to that important word mentioned above, “No!” The violence of those protesting the Israeli racists as they exported their nation’s terror to Europe, and the extent of this violence cannot be measured and so not known, is perfectly understandable in my view.
We are talking about a city — one with a large Muslim population, as the Israelis surely knew — that was confronted with a manifestation of evil that is nearly as pure as it gets. And those subjected to this viciously aggressive display are to be criticized because they did not respond as angelic pacifists?
I am simply not on for this. It has long seemed to me that we in the West, to dilate the lens briefly, have a very peculiar attitude toward violence given we live under regimes whose policies at home as well as abroad begin and end with violence or the threat of it. But I will leave this topic for another time.
For now, this: However many Muslims were among those countering the Israelis in Amsterdam’s streets, and we cannot know this either, they are absolutely correct to read the small-time terrorists who arrived last week as manifestations of a global system that, in its centuries of racist ideology, has violently made of them its victims.
Israeli officials ran all the miles their legs could carry them as they cast the Amsterdam events as another demonstration of a rampant wave of anti–Semitism sweeping across the globe. “It was a pogrom!” “It was another Kristallnacht!”
And among my favorites in this line for its faux desolation, this from Issac Herzog, the Israeli president: “I had hoped we would never again see these things.”
This kind of stuff is altogether predictable. Zionist officials long ago lost the privilege of being taken seriously.
Dishonesty Exposed
It is the responses of Dutch officials, and soon enough others in Europe, Britain and the U.S., I take seriously indeed. Their dishonesty — pervasive, distant from reality — has consequences running to free speech, all manner of other democratic rights, and popular opposition to terrorist Israel’s gross offenses to our shared humanity.
As is now well-reported in many independent media, in the early aftermath of last week’s chaos Dutch officials and others — among them the egregious Ursula von der Leyen, president of the E.U. Commission — assiduously erased the provocations of the Israeli mobs, turning them into the innocent victims of Jew-hating urban marauders.
This narrative is now more or less in ruins. But there is no indication that officials at any level are prepared to self-correct in light of now-established facts.
“What happened over the past few days is a toxic cocktail of antisemitism, hooligan behavior and anger over the war in Palestine and Israel and other countries in the Middle East.” That is Femke Halsema, Amsterdam’s mayor, diagnosing last week’s events as quoted in The New York Times’ Tuesday editions.
Once again, “No!” There is no equivalence among the three items on Halsema’s list.
The “war in Palestine and Israel” — what does this mean, while I am at it? — is by a long way the main event. Thuggery and anti–Semitism, and I will get to the latter shortly, are of passing importance in any honest evaluation of last week’s chaos.
Dick Schoof, the Dutch premier, asserted that many or most of those so far arrested — 60-odd at this point, and who knows how true this is — were of “a migration background.” He added, “We have an integration problem. This is an expression of that.”
We are now dismissing last week’s events as unimportant, symptoms of the Netherlands’ social problems, nothing more than the resentments of brown people? “No!” once more. This is not an integration problem. It is a Zionism problem.
It was inevitable that the riot of Zionist excess the Netanyahu government set in motion a year ago last month would spill well beyond Gaza and the rest of West Asia, given the Western powers’ enthusiasm for it.
Amsterdam can be reasonably interpreted as merely a chicken come home to roost.
Dick Schoof will not get anywhere near addressing this reality. Dick Schoof is what I mean when I suggest that leadership in the Western post-democracies, artful dodgers all, is hopeless. As we must all face, there is no getting any sense or decency out of them.
It is likely — once again, we have no confirmation of this — that there were declared anti–Semites among those who countered the Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam’s streets.
One cannot condone this, of course, but neither can one take these people, however many their number, as defining of the last week’s events, and neither can we neglect to put their presence in context.
Israel is Judaism and Judaism is Israel: This has long been the Zionist state’s refrain — and the Netanyahu regime’s incessant refrain since it began its assault on Gaza on Oct. 8, 2023.
The identification is, of course, key to the Israelis’ way of protecting themselves against criticism. Attack Israel and you attack the Jewish faith: You are an anti–Semite.
One of the responsibilities of those who oppose Israeli barbarism now is to reject this false congruence as a trap set by Zionist propagandists. This is not so easy for many people.
However many anti–Semites were on Amsterdam’s streets last week, it is likely some did not think this question through sufficiently to refuse the bait. To succumb to anti–Semitic sentiments at this point is to serve, in upside-down fashion, the Israeli cause.
It is years since various government departments, universities, and other entities operating in the public sphere have endorsed the equivalence of opposition to Israel and anti–Semitism.
This is well-enough known. Since the Gaza crisis and the demonstrations across the Western post-democracies, this project has accelerated markedly.
Official responses to the Amsterdam events seem to me disturbing in that they suggest the erasure of this vital distinction now appears to be more or less complete. This is a war not only of words but also of individual and democratic rights in the post-democracies.
Let us not, let us never allow this preposterous conflation to pass without vigorous objection. Voices raised in opposition to Zionist terrorism — at this point to the Zionist state, indeed — are too important to let the charge of anti–Semitism silence them.
Mainstream media across the Western world, as has now been well-exposed, have made an ungodly mess of their coverage of the Amsterdam events — and so of themselves.
By all appearance they complacently assumed they could control the narrative, chiefly by obscuring the chronology of events, and maintain their simply disgusting defense of Israel’s genocide and the freakery abroad among its citizens.
Stories with bold-faced lies, lies of omission, accurate broadcast news segments published and pulled as “not up to our standards”: You had all of this as events unfolded. Those videos Owen Jones put out, linked above, give a good inventory of these derelictions.
As the days went by, it was very fine to see independent media force the corporate press and state-funded broadcasters such as the BBC to run for cover. This has to go down among the most revelatory, embarrassing occasions in the long decline of the mainstream.
I salute all those independent practitioners who got this work done.
The Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the big Swiss daily, published a piece in its Tuesday editions to this effect:
“The reconstruction of events in Amsterdam reveals a differentiated picture: The scenes surrounding the Champions League match between Ajax Amsterdam and Maccabi Tel Aviv went around the world, with top politicians outdoing each other in condemning the anti–Semitic incidents. However, amateur videos show a differentiated picture of the escalation. Maccabi fans were also violent before the anti–Israeli hunts.”
Plenty of blur remains but here you see how the major media in the West are trying to climb out of the hole they dug for themselves without being seen to be climbing. This is likely to prove as far they will go in the direction of honesty.
My favorite in this line involves one of those amateurs the NZZ mentions. In its first-day story from Amsterdam, the Times included a brief, indistinct video showing, it said without equivocation, a gang of Dutch people running down a Maccabi Tel Aviv fan along an Amsterdam street.
“Verified by The New York Times” it assured readers with all that faux authority to which the once-but-no-longer newspaper of record no longer has any claim.
The video made the rounds among mainstream media. And in days following, its maker protested that all those reproducing it had turned it on its head: It was Israeli crazies chasing down a Dutch person. Her name turned out to be Annet de Graaf, and Annet de Graaf went public to demand retractions and apologies.
So far as I know she has had one, from Tagesschau, Evening News, in Germany.
And then this, from a piece in The New York Times Sunday. At this point our friends on Eighth Avenue appear a touch desperate to obscure all the false reporting published in previous days:
“A video taken after midnight by a teenage Dutch YouTube personality and verified by The Times shows a group of men, many wearing Maccabi fan colors, picking up pipes and boards from a construction site, then chasing and beating a man. The incident was also captured in a video shot by a photographer, Annet de Graaf.”
Punks. Joe Kahn, the Times’ executive editor, is a punk to let his foreign desk pull this stunt. This is the same video it published several days earlier with the roles of victim and victimizers reversed.
Zionist Israel lost, lost big in Amsterdam. The horror it has made of itself is now plain for the world to see. The apologist pols, already hanging on for dear life in the post-democracies, lost. Mainstream media lost.
Annnet de Graaf, all the Annnet de Graafs — they won. They spoke the word and spoke for many. They said, “No!”
Trump Puts An Appropriately Ugly Face On A Very Ugly Empire
Caitlin Johnstone, Nov 09, 2024, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/trump-puts-an-appropriately-ugly?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=151402607&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
The only thing I like about Trump is exactly what so many empire managers hate about him: he gives the game away. He says the quiet parts out loud. He’s the only president who’ll openly boast that US troops are in Syria to keep the oil or lament that they failed to take the oil from Venezuela, or just come right out and tell everyone he’s bought and owned by Zionist oligarchs.
Trump is the opposite of Obama, who was very skillful at putting a pretty face on the evil empire. Trump puts a very ugly face on a very ugly thing. He is a much more honest face to have on the empire. A crude, stupid plutocrat who is owned by other plutocrats is the perfect representative of that tyrannical power structure.
The propaganda machine has been spinning its head off trying to frame soccer brawls in Amsterdam as a horrifying “pogrom” against Jewish people because the side instigating the violence were supporters of team Maccabi Tel Aviv who flew in from Israel.
Video evidence shows far right Israeli hooligans terrorizing the streets of Amsterdam, chanting “Fuck the Arabs”, starting fights, beating people, tearing down Palestinian flags, attacking a cab driver, and singing “Let the IDF win and fuck the Arabs! Why is school out in Gaza? There are no children left there!”
In the face of all this evidence of atrocious behavior by Israeli soccer fans, The New York Times ran a story with the headline “Antisemitic Attacks Prompt Emergency Flights for Israeli Soccer Fans”. The Wall Street Journal ran with “Antisemitic Attacks in Amsterdam Prompt Tight Security at Jewish Sites”. “Pogroms have returned to Europe, and the ‘anti-racist’ Left are silent,” says The Telegraph.
Meanwhile the Daily Mail sports section ran with a headline more in line with what people actually saw: “Israeli football hooligans tear down Palestine flags in Amsterdam as taxi drivers ‘fight back’ in night of chaos ahead of Maccabi Tel Aviv’s visit to Ajax”
Leaders of western nations like the US, UK, Canada and France joined the Dutch king in framing these soccer brawls and hooliganism as a historic mass-scale hate crime against Jews, while Israeli officials have been melodramatically shrieking like their hair is on fire.
These exhausting victim-LARPing freaks. Stop playing sports with Israel. Stop holding sporting events which could lead to the deranged members of a genocidal apartheid state showing up in your community stirring up violence and hate so they can cry victim and say you holocausted them.
Another thing that sucks about the fake “antisemitism” crisis that the western political-media class are pretending to believe in is that it will probably become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy which creates real hatred of Jewish people.
You can’t keep telling everyone over and over and over again that Jews and Israel are one and the same and that any criticism of one is always necessarily an attack on the other while the state of Israel is murdering children by the tens of thousands without contributing to unfair prejudice against Jewish people everywhere. Israel is exacerbating this effect by insisting its actions represent all Jews and are done in defense of Judaism while committing genocidal atrocities under a Star of David flag.
If you understand the truth that modern Israel is a settler-colonialist project of the western empire which uses the Jewish religion as an excuse to inflict violence and tyranny in a crucial geostrategic region, then you understand that there’s no real connection between modern Israel and the Jews you encounter in your community. Sure a majority of western Jews buy into the empire’s lies and support Israel, but a majority of the westerners of all faiths buy into the empire’s lies about its wars and official enemies and all its other propaganda too. This is just what it looks like when you live in a highly propagandized society which is structured to psychologically manipulate people into consenting to nonstop military violence.
Once you understand this, you see that blaming ordinary Jews in your society for the actions of the state of Israel makes about as much sense as blaming ordinary Muslims for the actions of the Saudi royals — but most people don’t understand this. It takes a lot of learning and close examination, and most people haven’t reached that level of lucidity in our confusing information landscape which is distorted by lies and propaganda.
So when they see a self-evidently evil thing being done and hear their leaders and pundits telling them over and over again that if you hate what you’re seeing then you necessarily hate Jewish people, what understanding do you think they’re going to form in their minds?
Greater hatred and prejudice looks like a fairly inevitable consequence of this messaging from where I’m sitting. And it will all be the fault of the western pundits and politicians who are aggressively promulgating this message throughout our society right now in an effort to stomp out criticism of an active genocide.
The garment-rending emotional reaction to the US election results compared to the apathy on Gaza over the last year tells you that liberals don’t see Palestinians as human beings. They’ll deny it, but it’s true. Their emotions show you much more than their words ever will. This is who they are.
Ignore their words and watch their actions. It works with politicians, it works with entire governments, and it works with individuals too. If you see someone flailing around on the ground because their genocidal candidate lost after spending a year walking around functioning perfectly fine throughout a year of genocide, that tells you something about them that their words would never tell you.
People are always much more honest with their actions than their words, because words can spin narratives and actions cannot. If you’re ever unsure of someone’s true motivations and where they really stand, don’t ask them, just watch them. They’ll tell you eventually, with their actions and not their words.
TODAY. The Trump period and the use of language
I struggle to think about what language to use.
Today, Caitlin Johnstone writes “The Evil Warmongering Zionist Won” – (No Not That One, The Other One)
I read her article, and agree with every word. But do some readers find this title a “turnoff”? I did, because I was brung up to believe that quieter, less emotive language was the way to go. Now, I’m not sure.
The people of world’s greatest power have elected a foul-mouthed, misogynist, deluded megalomaniac who is a convicted felon, strongly supported by another deluded billionaire megalomaniac the ketamine-and-Mars addled Elon Musk. Trump is surrounded by yes-mean of no integrity whatsoever, and promoted by billionaires of no integrity.
How did it happen?
How did they put it over not only the disgruntled poor of the USA, but many others – to believe that if times are bad now – this despicable sociopath could magically put things right?
By now, some of my very limited reading public will have turned away – because of my use of language. But I’m not as “bad” as Caitlin. Trouble is – we’re actually telling the truth.
It is going to be very hard now, for all of us to weave our way through all the commentaries – all made more difficult by the tsunami of social media, of the ‘respectable mainstream media’ and of AI.
I wish that I could give wonderful advice on how to assess the truth or otherwise, of what we read, see and hear. But there are people of integrity out there, and it is our job to find them and listen to them – and indeed , to avoid emotive language (when possible).
The Mainstream Western Worldview Pretends The Global South Does Not Exist
Caitlin Johnstone, Nov 04, 2024
Mainstream western politics and culture pretend the rest of the world does not exist. The mainstream western worldview shrinks the earth down to US-aligned countries and acts as though the billions of people who live in the global south do not share a planet with us.
You really see this illustrated in US presidential election season, when debates will feature five or six minutes on “foreign policy” with the remaining two hours dedicated to “domestic policy” and culture war wedge issues despite the the White House’s relationship with foreign countries having orders of magnitude more significant real-world consequences. Americans discuss election results as though the whole thing revolves around them and their feelings and how much more convenient or inconvenient the next president might make their lives, while Europeans discuss what the results might mean for NATO expenses and trade agreements. The fact that the next US president will be committing genocide, starving people with economic sanctions and increasing Washington’s stranglehold on earth’s population by any amount of violence and tyranny necessary barely ever enters into the conversation.
Whenever you hear western officials talking about how “the international community” views a particular issue, they’re almost always talking about the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, and maybe a few US-aligned Asian countries like Japan and South Korea — while pretending the rest of the world just isn’t there.
You see it in politics, but you see it throughout our culture too. In our movies, our shows, our conversations, our thoughts. We don’t really think about all the exploitative imperialist extraction of resources and labor that makes our lifestyles possible, even though it directly affects damn near every waking moment of our lives. You wouldn’t be reading this sentence right now had not this exact dynamic led to a highly complex electronic device making its way into your field of vision.
We just conduct ourselves from moment to moment like this relationship isn’t happening. It’s as though we’re all walking around with living people strapped to our feet like slippers, but we’re just laughing and talking about the weather and celebrities and how we’re feeling about this and that without ever acknowledging the existence of the human beings we’re standing on top of.
The global south is omitted from our thinking and our conversations in this way all the time, leaving us in this fractured, redacted mental universe where we pretend we’re the only people living in this rapidly shrinking world. Our lives are no less significant or valuable than those of people in Africa or Asia, but we live as though they don’t exist, even when their labor may affect our moment to moment reality far more than the white-skinned person we’re paying attention to in this instant.
This is going to have to change if we’re to become a conscious species and create a healthy world together. Our perception of the world is going to have to reflect the actual world, not just the small cloistered segment which exists within the confines of western civilization. We’re going to have to start thinking about humanity as a whole and stop living the lie that we are not intimately interconnected with the lives on every populated continent.
Until we open up our worldview and begin taking into account the needs and struggles of our fellow human beings around the world, it will be like we’re at a dinner party that’s being waited on by slaves. We’re all looking at each other and talking about our lives and our families as the slaves clear our plates and refill our drinks, never acknowledging them or discussing the fact that they’re being kept as material property and forced to do what they’re doing to avoid punishment and torture. Until we demand their freedom and invite them to come and dine with us, we’re going to be in a highly dysfunctional and abusive relationship with them, and nothing will ever feel quite right — because it won’t be
We’re Spending 2 Trillion Dollars on Weapons That Must Never Be Used
By Donald A. Smith, PhD. Using my lyrics and Udio.com for the music, I created this military march about the risk and costs of the nuclear modernization program. 14 Oct24
Audio on original https://progressivememes.org/war/We-are-Spending-Two-Trillion-Dollars-on-Weapons-That-Must-Never-Be-Used.html
We are spending two trillion dollars
on weapons that must never be used.
Nuclear missile modernization they call it.
The waste and risks cannot be excused.
Two trillion dollars, and what does it buy?
Weapons of extinction to light up the sky.
Corruption and greed keep the war machine alive.
If the weapons are ever used, no one will survive.
Politicians grin, saying "jobs will be made"
While the truth is that we're all being played.
For every job made building weapons of war,
Money spent elsewhere creates two or three times more.
We’re spending 2 trillion dollars on death's quiet plan,
Building bombs in the shadows, buried deep in the land.
Sentinel missiles standing ready to fly.
If they ever launch, we’ll watch the world die.
We tore up arms treaties, walked away from the deals.
Now the money flows faster, greased by power’s appeal.
What’s the true cost when we flirt with the flame?
It’s humanity’s end, in this high-stakes game.
Cost overruns soar and the profits are high.
Politicians line pockets, with kickbacks that satisfy.
What are the opportunity costs? And who’s made more safe?
The end of the world is the risk that we face.
We are pawns in a system that’s broken and blind,
Building weapons of war that will wipe out mankind.
For some jobs and for profit, for power and gain,
We face a future of deprivation, death and pain.
We are spending 2 trillion dollars, but it’s all for the few.
As we edge toward the brink, what can we do?
A system so broken, with the darkest design,
Where we gamble existence, for the sake of their bottom line.
One Horrible Year on from October 7 2023, a Bleak Reflection.
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larryjhs September 27, 2024, https://webstylus.net/2024/09/27/a-bleak-year/?fbclid=IwY2xjawF1TM9leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHesplRcX1423JwSpof6CAkT303FkdzIX_bEcTdRO5SkXXOkPsj9hdRcULg_aem_XDLROjlruTcdEBP9ZqlzlQ—
The past year since Hamas’ attack has been traumatic for the Australian Jewish community locally and internationally. The fate of hostages appears to in the hands of Netanyahu, his generals, and extremists, who despite public outrage, has continued to prosecute an unwinnable war. It is now clear that that Hamas has made numerous offers for a prisoner exchange and ceasefire, but these have been deliberately refused with a preference for war at all costs by the Israeli government. Israeli Jews who protest are now arrested and beaten up. This includes hostage members’ families and protesting members of the Israeli establishment. The forces of anti-democratic extreme nationalism and militarism have taken over the country, unimpeded. Sadly, this mentality appears to be held by some Jews locally.
This war against the Palestinian people has now been extended to the West Bank and into Lebanon against Hezbollah for firing rockets. For liberal Zionists, the sum total of such a military strategy is a betrayal of what they thought was possible, to negotiate a peaceful political settlement for two peoples, in two states. Zionism as an ideal now appears bereft of a moral foundation and liberal Zionists are flailing. For non-Zionists and anti-Zionist Jews, it is confirmation of their worst fears about the seemingly inevitable drift of Zionism to extremism of the worst sort.
Some now call what is going on genocide, others reject the term as offensive, and in fact, it is up to the Internal Court of Justice to make the final ruling. But with the ongoing evidence of incitement to genocide in the Israeli media, we should call a spade a spade. This is a situation where some Israeli Jews are calling for, or taking part in war crimes.
The violence in real time – aided by an almost unimpeded flow of American arms is like nothing we have seen before, and we have rapidly entered into the world of science fiction with remote explosions of pagers and other devices.
There is always the same excuse for such violence and its “collateral” damage – Hamas or Hezbollah are our eternal enemies and the fight is existential. The only solution is military eradication. Sadly, this is the script that has been in use for decades, but it has worn thin. This violence is an attempt to permanently destroy anything that amounts to independent Palestinian life. The Israel State rejects the existence of an independent Palestine. But people’s wars – which is what the revolt in Gaza is about – are not won by military force, as learned in Algeria and Vietnam.
Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, far beyond Hamas’ own act on October 7. Israeli soldiers have been filmed rejoicing in destruction and using Palestinians as human shields. Hospitals and schools and universities have been destroyed and journalists killed. Aljazeerah is closed down. Thousands are arrested for unspecified crimes. Starvation is taking place. This is not an ordinary war for legitimate defence. It is something far, far worse. For Palestinians and their supporters, this is considered to be a continuation of what went on in 1948 and thereafter, but this time, the world sees the brutality on its screens.
This brutality helps to explain why the atrocity against Jews and foreign workers on October 7 is now considered by many on the left as of secondary importance, when it has become an obsession among Jews, used to reinforce the sense of eternal victimhood. It also helps to explain the simplistic identification by some with Hamas’ actions and its war machine as a justified form of resistance “by any means possible”, when the result has been the superior and brutal murder conducted by Israel. It also helps to explain why so many have doubted accounts of sex crimes and atrocities by Hamas, when Israel manipulated unclear information from the very beginning. In war, truth is the first casualty.
Israel/Palestine brings together issues of war and peace, identity, and great power politics as a social media event. It has become a focus for culture and political wars that particularly affect the thinking of alienated young people in a world that appears to be falling apart under the pressure of climate change, political corruption, and technological abuse.
The brutality of Israel’s assault also helps to explain how the uncritical acceptance of formerly specialist academic theories about colonialism, imperialism, and racism, have found root in many corners of the left internationally, angered by the lack of action by the US and others to stop the carnage. Palestine has become the cause celebre even a surrogate for all international injustice even though other brutal regional wars and massacres also call for attention. The difference is of course, that Israel has claimed to be acting as a democracy and in the interests of the West. At times of course, this anger over Israel has at times segued into explicitly conspiratorial antisemitism, though this is abhorrent to responsible pro-Palestine advocates.
In fact, the idea that only the colonized, not the colonialist has any rights is totally ahistorical. Theories should not be set in stone and exclude other insights. In this case, the current take on Israel as a colony reflects theoretical narrowness and the absence of deep knowledge or particular empathy for the peculiar and awful historical circumstances that brought about migration of so many Jews to historical Palestine, as Zionists of one sort or other, or desperate refugees. Once a colony, damned as a colony for ever, including its children. This is determinism. It has got to a point that the idea of a “conflict” is rejected, since the situation is seen as a pure invasion. The Jews of modernity are thus regarded as wholly outside interlopers to an imagined Palestine, when in fact Palestine was always multicultural, subject to migration forces and domination by great powers. I’ve thus got a real concern that Palestinian nationalism, for all its talk of future equality, shares a similar thread of intolerance of difference as the Zionist project. In fact, as the great Palestinian historian and activity Rashid Khalidi said in his The Hundred Years War on Palestine “[T]here are now two peoples in Palestine, irrespective of how they came into being, and the conflict between them cannot be resolved as long as the national existence of each is denied by the other.”
But such subtlety now appears to be rejected by many on the left in Australia with dogmatic calls for particular forms of future arrangements that smack of an antidemocratic form of thought and political control, and are devoid of any understanding of the reality of peacemaking in conflict zones, whatever the cause. The result, as we all know, has even been a political nightmare even in Australia as accusations are made about the direct complicity of any number of institutions for any connection to Israel and politicians are accused of heinous crimes well out of their direct control. Many Jews feel unsafe whether or not the threat is real. But as a number of commentators have said, there should be no confusion between the perception of unsafety because of political criticism that upsets a privileged comfort zone and blindness or indifference to the plight of others (as distinct from real antisemitism), and the truly and physically unsafe position of Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank.
Of course, the intolerance shown by elements of the left to anything identified as “Zionist” deserves condemnation because it leads to stereotypes and oversimplification. Consequently, I have greatly regretted the lack of support on the left in Australia for the activist Israeli Jewish left which while a minority in the Israel, has taken on the hard task of standing up for Palestine. This criticism extends to elements of the anti-Zionist Jewish left who appear bereft of any empathy for 50% of the world’s Jews. This lack of support may be due to position that this amounts to “legitimatization” of Jewish -Israeli domination over that of oppressed of Palestinians. I think this is a wrong position to take. Conflict resolution needs people of goodwill from all sides, whatever the shape of final political arrangements, which I hope are based on principles of full and equal rights for all, the end to the occupation and the apartheid system and restorative justice for Palestinians. Huge political & psychological concessions are required by both sides, something hardliners refuse to admit at both ends.
Of course, actions of major Australian Jewish organisations, aligned to dominant political interests in acting as echoes for hasbarah and attacking Israel’s critics has been destructive. Their and others’ attack on universities for alleged and widespread antisemitism is also flawed, exaggerated, highly partisan, and a threat to academic freedom. Crying wolf over antisemitism is destructive to the interests of free political speech. Likewise, uninformed sloganeering, exaggerations and barbs on both sides, and attacks by Zionist or leftist thugs do nothing to progress social cohesion. They detract from political efforts to alter Australian foreign policy to take a strong stand against the Israeli state.
Sadly, I may be wrong in all this and we will be stuck with unceasing violence by the military state, a largely compliant population, continuing repression of Palestians and violent blowback while the world stands by. The US will be constrained by internal weakness to do any thing, and there will be an increased fracture between Israel and a fair proportion of world Jewry, while an unrepentant and fanatical faction pours in money and support and exerts political pressure. Bleak Bleak Bleak.
(edited a bit for clarification)
[The image is “Exterminating the cockroach” Yosi Even Kama came up with these posters about the fascist state in 2010 as part of an art project about how things would be in 2023]
Nuclear Free Local Authorities want to lament, not ‘celebrate’ nuclear legacy.
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has published its first Heritage Vision and Strategy[i] to ‘celebrate the history and cultural heritage of the nuclear industry’, but to the Nuclear Free Local Authorities the history of the industry is rather something to lament.
The NDA claims that the ‘benefits of preserving, safeguarding, and celebrating nuclear heritage are many, ranging from learning lessons of the past so we can support decommissioning and future nuclear developments, to realising significant social value potential by connecting with local communities and other stakeholders’ but the Nuclear Free Local Authorities are concerned that the strategy will only look to capture the ‘fluffy side’ of nuclear history and will disregard cataloguing its ‘sinister side’.
For the history of the nuclear industry is littered with money, scientific and human resources wasted on abortive, failed or delayed nuclear power designs; the major accidents at Windscale and Wylfa[ii] which endangered large parts of Britain; cancer clusters; the employment of civil nuclear facilities to produce plutonium for British nuclear weapons which poisoned Indigenous people and their lands and ruined the health and took the lives of many of the British military personnel involved in the test programme; a disastrous and costly venture into reprocessing; and a legacy of radioactive contamination of land, air, watercourses and seas, and radioactive buildings to demolish and a stockpile of high-level radioactive waste to manage that will cost over £280 Billion of taxpayers money at current prices.
Councillor Lawrence O’Neill, Chair of the NFLA Steering Committee, said: “Glorifying nuclear history by celebrating it, and ignoring its dark side, will only help facilitate the development of yet more nuclear plants in the future by boosting its acceptability at a time when every available penny and every national resource should be focused on building more renewable energy and storage capacity to achieve Net Zero and the Labour Government’s ambition to make Britain a clean energy superpower.”
The NDA opened Nucleus, the Nuclear and Caithness Archives, near the airport in Wick, Caithness in 2017[iii]. With a team of approximately 20 including archivists, preservation experts and support staff, Nucleus holds archives and artefacts from the nuclear industry. The organisation will work with staff from other sections of the NDA and national heritage organisations from England, Scotland, and Wales to deliver the new strategy.
Nucleus is open to the public Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm. Archives may be viewed in our public search room between 10am to 4pm. Visitors are urged to make an appointment and pre-order documents at least two days in advance. Drop-in customers will also be accommodated as far as possible on the day. Documents can be requested under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. Please phone 01925 802077 or email enquiries@nda.gov.uk. Members of the public are also invited to visit our exhibition space located at the front of the building.
Ends://For more information, contact NFLA Secretary Richard Outram by email to richard.outram@manchester.gov.uk
The western way of war – Owning the narrative trumps reality
Take, for example, the NATO-orchestrated and equipped incursion into the symbolically significant Kursk Oblast. In terms of a ‘winning narrative’, its appeal to the West is obvious: Ukraine ‘takes the war to into Russia’.
Alastair Crooke, Strategic Culture Foundation, Mon, 26 Aug 2024
War propaganda and feint are as old as the hills. Nothing new. But what is new is that infowar is no longer the adjunct to wider war objectives – but has become an end in and of itself.
The West has come to view ‘owning’ the winning narrative – and presenting the Other’s as clunky, dissonant, and extremist – as being more important than facing facts-on-the ground. Owning the winning narrative is to win, in this view. Virtual ‘victory’ thus trumps ‘real’ reality.
Had the Ukrainian forces succeeded in capturing the Kursk Nuclear Power Station, they then would have had a significant bargaining chip, and might well have syphoned away Russian forces from the steadily collapsing Ukrainian ‘Line’ in Donbas.
And to top it off, (in infowar terms), the western media was prepped and aligned to show President Putin as “frozen” by the surprise incursion, and “wobbling” with anxiety that the Russian public would turn against him in their anger at the humiliation.
Bill Burns, head of CIA, opined that “Russia would offer no concessions on Ukraine, until Putin’s over-confidence was challenged, and Ukraine could show strength“. Other U.S. officials added that the Kursk incursion – in itself – would not bring Russia to the negotiating table; It would be necessary to build on the Kursk operation with other daring operations (to shake Moscow’s sang froid).
Of course, the overall aim was to show Russia as fragile and vulnerable, in line with the narrative that, at any moment Russia, could crack apart and scatter to the wind, in fragments. Leaving the West as winner, of course.
In fact, the Kursk incursion was a huge NATO gamble: It involved mortgaging Ukraine’s military reserves and armour, as chips on the roulette table, as a bet that an ephemeral success in Kursk would upend the strategic balance. The bet was lost, and the chips forfeit.
So, war becomes rather the setting for imposing ideological alignment across a wide global alliance and enforcing it via compliant media.
This objective enjoys a higher priority than, say, ensuring a manufacturing capacity sufficient to sustain military objectives. Crafting an imagined ‘reality’ has taken precedence over shaping the ground reality.
The point here is that this approach – being a function of whole of society alignment (both at home and abroad) – creates entrapments into false realities, false expectations, from which an exit (when such becomes necessary), turns near impossible, precisely because imposed alignment has ossified public sentiment. The possibility for a State to change course as events unfold becomes curtailed or lost, and the accurate reading of facts on the ground veers toward the politically correct and away from reality.
The cumulative effect of ‘a winning virtual narrative’ holds the risk nonetheless, of sliding incrementally toward inadvertent ‘real war’.
Take, for example, the NATO-orchestrated and equipped incursion into the symbolically significant Kursk Oblast. In terms of a ‘winning narrative’, its appeal to the West is obvious: Ukraine ‘takes the war to into Russia’.
Plainly put, this Kursk affair exemplifies the West’s problem with ‘winning narratives’: Their inherent flaw is that they are grounded in emotivism and eschew argumentation. Inevitably, they are simplistic. They are simply intended to fuel a ‘whole of society’ common alignment. Which is to say that across MSM; business, federal agencies, NGOs and the security sector, all should adhere to opposing all ‘extremisms’ threatening ‘our democracy’.
This aim, of itself, dictates that the narrative be undemanding and relatively uncontentious: ‘Our Democracy, Our Values and Our Consensus’. The Democratic National Convention, for example, embraces ‘Joy’ (repeated endlessly), ‘moving Forward’ and ‘opposing weirdness’ as key statements. They are banal, however, these memes are given their energy and momentum, not by content so much, as by the deliberate Hollywood setting lending them razzamatazz and glamour.
It is not hard to see how this one-dimensional zeitgeist may have contributed to the U.S. and its allies’ misreading the impact of today’s Kursk ‘daring adventure’ on ordinary Russians.
‘Kursk’ has history. In 1943, Germany invaded Russia in Kursk to divert from its own losses, with Germany ultimately defeated at the Battle of Kursk. The return of German military equipment to the environs of Kursk must have left many gaping; the current battlefield around the town of Sudzha is precisely the spot where, in 1943, the Soviet 38th and 40th armies coiled for a counteroffensive against the German 4th Army.
Over the centuries, Russia has been variously attacked on its vulnerable flank from the West. And more recently by Napoleon and Hitler. Unsurprisingly, Russians are acutely sensitive to this bloody history. Did Bill Burns et al think this through? Did they imagine that NATO invading Russia itself would make Putin feel ‘challenged’, and that with one further shove, he would fold, and agree to a ‘frozen’ outcome in Ukraine – with the latter entering NATO? Maybe they did.
Ultimately the message that western services sent was that the West (NATO) is coming for Russia. This is the meaning of deliberately choosing Kursk. Reading the runes of Bill Burns message says prepare for war with NATO.
Just to be clear, this genre of ‘winning narrative’ surrounding Kursk is neither deceit nor feint. The Minsk Accords were examples of deceit, but they were deceits grounded in rational strategy (i.e. they were historically normal). The Minsk deceits were intended to buy the West time to further Ukraine’s militarisation – before attacking the Donbas. The deceit worked, but only at the price of a rupture of trust between Russia and the West. The Minsk deceits however, also accelerated an end to the 200-year era of the westification of Russia.
Kursk rather, is a different ‘fish’. It is grounded in the notions of western exceptionalism. The West perceives itself as tacking to ‘the right side of History’. ‘Winning narratives’ essentially assert – in secular format – the inevitability of the western eschatological Mission for global redemption and convergence. In this new narrative context, facts-on-the-ground become mere irritants, and not realities that must be taken into account.
This their Achilles’ Heel.
The DNC convention in Chicago however, underscored a further concern:………………………………………………………………….
The Kursk ploy no doubt seemed clever and audacious to London and Washington. Yet with what result? It achieved neither objective of taking Kursk NPP, nor of syphoning Russian troops from the Contact Line. The Ukrainian presence in the Kursk Oblast will be eliminated.
What it did do, however, is put an end to all prospects of an eventual negotiated settlement in Ukraine. Distrust of the U.S. in Russia is now absolute. It has made Moscow more determined to prosecute the special operation to conclusion. German equipment visible in Kursk has raised old ghosts, and consolidated awareness of the hostile western intentions toward Russia. ‘Never again’ is the unspoken riposte. https://www.sott.net/article/494279-The-western-way-of-war-Owning-the-narrative-trumps-reality
Farewell, the American Century
What flag-wavers tend to leave out of their account of the American Century is not only the contributions of others, but the various missteps perpetrated by the United States — missteps, it should be noted, that spawned many of the problems bedeviling us today.
Rewriting the Past by Adding In What’s Been Left Out
By Andrew Bacevich TomDispatch, 25 Aug 24
In a recent column, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen wrote, “What Henry Luce called ‘the American Century’ is over.” Cohen is right. All that remains is to drive a stake through the heart of Luce’s pernicious creation, lest it come back to life. This promises to take some doing.
To solve our problems requires that we see ourselves as we really are. And that requires shedding, once and for all, the illusions embodied in the American Century.
When the Time-Life publisher coined his famous phrase, his intent was to prod his fellow citizens into action. Appearing in the February 7, 1941 issue of Life, his essay, “The American Century,” hit the newsstands at a moment when the world was in the throes of a vast crisis. A war in Europe had gone disastrously awry. A second almost equally dangerous conflict was unfolding in the Far East. Aggressors were on the march.
With the fate of democracy hanging in the balance, Americans diddled. Luce urged them to get off the dime. More than that, he summoned them to “accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world… to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”
Read today, Luce’s essay, with its strange mix of chauvinism, religiosity, and bombast (“We must now undertake to be the Good Samaritan to the entire world…”), does not stand up well. Yet the phrase “American Century” stuck and has enjoyed a remarkable run. It stands in relation to the contemporary era much as “Victorian Age” does to the nineteenth century. In one pithy phrase, it captures (or at least seems to capture) the essence of some defining truth: America as alpha and omega, source of salvation and sustenance, vanguard of history, guiding spirit and inspiration for all humankind.
In its classic formulation, the central theme of the American Century has been one of righteousness overcoming evil. The United States (above all the U.S. military) made that triumph possible. When, having been given a final nudge on December 7, 1941, Americans finally accepted their duty to lead, they saved the world from successive diabolical totalitarianisms. In doing so, the U.S. not only preserved the possibility of human freedom but modeled what freedom ought to look like.
Thank You, Comrades
So goes the preferred narrative of the American Century, as recounted by its celebrants.
The problems with this account are two-fold. First, it claims for the United States excessive credit. Second, it excludes, ignores, or trivializes matters at odds with the triumphal story-line.
The net effect is to perpetuate an array of illusions that, whatever their value in prior decades, have long since outlived their usefulness. In short, the persistence of this self-congratulatory account deprives Americans of self-awareness, hindering our efforts to navigate the treacherous waters in which the country finds itself at present. Bluntly, we are perpetuating a mythic version of the past that never even approximated reality and today has become downright malignant. Although Richard Cohen may be right in declaring the American Century over, the American people — and especially the American political class — still remain in its thrall.
Constructing a past usable to the present requires a willingness to include much that the American Century leaves out.
For example, to the extent that the demolition of totalitarianism deserves to be seen as a prominent theme of contemporary history (and it does), the primary credit for that achievement surely belongs to the Soviet Union. When it came to defeating the Third Reich, the Soviets bore by far the preponderant burden, sustaining 65% of all Allied deaths in World War II.
By comparison, the United States suffered 2% of those losses, for which any American whose father or grandfather served in and survived that war should be saying: Thank you, Comrade Stalin.
For the United States to claim credit for destroying the Wehrmacht is the equivalent of Toyota claiming credit for inventing the automobile. We entered the game late and then shrewdly scooped up more than our fair share of the winnings. The true “Greatest Generation” is the one that willingly expended millions of their fellow Russians while killing millions of German soldiers.
Hard on the heels of World War II came the Cold War, during which erstwhile allies became rivals. Once again, after a decades-long struggle, the United States came out on top…………………………………………….
What flag-wavers tend to leave out of their account of the American Century is not only the contributions of others, but the various missteps perpetrated by the United States — missteps, it should be noted, that spawned many of the problems bedeviling us today.
The instances of folly and criminality bearing the label “made-in-Washington” may not rank up there with the Armenian genocide, the Bolshevik Revolution, the appeasement of Adolf Hitler, or the Holocaust, but they sure don’t qualify as small change. To give them their due is necessarily to render the standard account of the American Century untenable.
Here are several examples, each one familiar, even if its implications for the problems we face today are studiously ignored:
Cuba. In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain for the proclaimed purpose of liberating the so-called Pearl of the Antilles. When that brief war ended, Washington reneged on its promise. If there actually has been an American Century, it begins here, with the U.S. government breaking a solemn commitment, while baldly insisting otherwise. By converting Cuba into a protectorate, the United States set in motion a long train of events leading eventually to the rise of Fidel Castro, the Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and even today’s Guantanamo Bay prison camp. The line connecting these various developments may not be a straight one, given the many twists and turns along the way, but the dots do connect.
The Bomb.…………………..the role the United States played in afflicting humankind with this scourge.
The United States invented the bomb. The United States — alone among members of the nuclear club — actually employed it as a weapon of war. The U.S. led the way in defining nuclear-strike capacity as the benchmark of power in the postwar world, leaving other powers like the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China scrambling to catch up. Today, the U.S. still maintains an enormous nuclear arsenal at the ready and adamantly refuses to commit itself to a no-first-use policy, even as it professes its horror at the prospect of some other nation doing as the United States itself has done.
Iran. Extending his hand to Tehran, President Obama has invited those who govern the Islamic republic to “unclench their fists.” Yet to a considerable degree, those clenched fists are of our own making………………….
Afghanistan.………………………………………………………………..
……………………………………..All we know for sure is that policies concocted in Washington by reputedly savvy statesmen now look exceedingly ill-advised.
What are we to make of these blunders? The temptation may be to avert our gaze, thereby preserving the reassuring tale of the American Century. We should avoid that temptation and take the opposite course, acknowledging openly, freely, and unabashedly where we have gone wrong. We should carve such acknowledgments into the face of a new monument smack in the middle of the Mall in Washington: We blew it. We screwed the pooch. We caught a case of the stupids. We got it ass-backwards.
Only through the exercise of candor might we avoid replicating such mistakes.
……………………………………………………….. apologize to them, but for our own good — to free ourselves from the accumulated conceits of the American Century and to acknowledge that the United States participated fully in the barbarism, folly, and tragedy that defines our time. For those sins, we must hold ourselves accountable. https://tomdispatch.com/farewell-the-american-century-2/
The UK nuclear lobby’s festival of joyous propaganda.
The Sizewell C team has been raising awareness of the new nuclear power
project at community events across the county this summer. From The Suffolk
Show and the First Light Festival to Sotterley Country Fair, the team have
been engaging with thousands of people across the county as the project
continues to make significant progress.
“We’re really lucky in Suffolk to
have some of the best summer festivals and community events in the
country,” says Marjorie Barnes, Head of Regional External Affairs and
Development, Sizewell C. This week, Sizewell C volunteers attended the
Aldeburgh Carnival, and in September the team will be at the first Leiston
Book Festival.
Sizewell C 23rd Aug 2024
1 This Month.
Let’s keep radioactive waste away from our river!
Nuclear Power? -Never again
(Switzerland –https://www.greenpeace.ch/de/handeln/atomkraft-nie-wieder/+)
PETITION – Close Down the Monticello Nuclear Reactor on the Mississippi River!
Now until to February 10, 2026 Radioactive waste storage in France: the debate is finally open! How to participate?
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