The title of this article is from T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men that appears at
the beginning of Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach, which left me close to tears. The
endorsements on the cover said the same.
Published
in 1957 at the height of the Cold War when too many writers were silent or
cowed, it is a masterpiece. At first the language suggests a genteel relic; yet
nothing I have read on nuclear war is as unyielding in its warning. No book is
more urgent.
Some
readers will remember the black and white 1959 Hollywood film starring Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck, as the US Navy commander who takes his submarine to Australia to await the
silent, formless spectre descending on the last of the living world.
I
read On the Beach when I began working on conflicts and read it again while the US Congress was passing a law to wage economic war on Russia, the world’s
second most lethal nuclear power. There was no justification for this
insane vote, except the promise of plunder.
The
“sanctions” are aimed at Europe, too, mainly Germany, which depends on Russian
natural gas and on European companies that do legitimate business with Russia.
In what passed for debate on Capitol Hill, the more garrulous senators left no
doubt that the embargo was designed to force Europe to import expensive
American gas.
Their
main aim seems to be war – real war. No provocation as extreme can suggest
anything else. They seem to crave it, even though Americans have little idea
what war is. The Civil War of 1861-5 was the last on their mainland. War is
what the United States does to others.
The
only nation to have used nuclear weapons against human beings, they have since
destroyed scores of governments, many of them democracies, and laid to waste
whole societies – the million deaths in Iraq were a fraction of the carnage in
Indo-China, which President Reagan called “a noble cause” and President Obama
revised as the tragedy of an “exceptional people”He was not referring to the
Vietnamese.
Those who call themselves liberals or tendentiously “the
left” are eager participants in this manipulation, and its brainwashing, which
today revert to one name: Trump.
The obsession with Trump the man —
not Trump as a symptom and caricature of an enduring system – beckons great
danger for all of us.
While they pursue their fossilised
anti-Russia agendas, narcissistic media such as the Washington Post, the BB, Le Monde and even the Guardian suppress the essence of the most important
political story of our time as they warmonger on a scale I cannot remember in
my lifetime.
On 3 August, in contrast to the acreage the Guardian has given to drivel that the Russians
conspired with Trump (reminiscent of the far-right smearing of John Kennedy as
a “Soviet agent”), the paper buried, on page 16, news that the President of the
United States was forced to sign a Congressional bill declaring economic war on
Russia.
Unlike every other Trump signing, this was
conducted in virtual secrecy and attached with a caveat from Trump himself that
it was “clearly unconstitutional”.
A coup against the man in the White House
is under way. This is not because he is an odious human being, but because he
has consistently made clear he does not want war with Russia.
This glimpse of sanity, or simple
pragmatism, is anathema to the “national security” managers who guard a system
based on war, surveillance, armaments, threats and extreme capitalism. Martin
Luther King called them “the greatest purveyors of violence in the world
today”.
They have encircled Russia and China with
missiles and a nuclear arsenal.
They have used neo-Nazis to instal an unstable,
aggressive regime on Russia’s “borderland” – the way through which Hitler
invaded, causing the deaths of 27 million people.
Their goal is to
dismember the modern Russian Federation.
In response, “partnership” is a word used
incessantly by Vladimir Putin — anything, it seems, that might halt an
evangelical drive to war in the United States. Incredulity in Russia may have
now turned to fear and perhaps a certain resolution. The Russians almost
certainly have war-gamed nuclear counter strikes. Air-raid drills are not
uncommon. Contrary to the Americans, Russians hate war, but their history tells them to get ready.
The threat is simultaneous. Russia is
first, China is next. The US has just completed a huge military exercise with
Australia known as Talisman Sabre. They rehearsed a blockade of the Malacca
Straits and the South China Sea, through which pass China’s economic lifelines.
The admiral commanding the US Pacific fleet
said that, “if required”, he would nuke China. That he would say such a thing
publicly in the current perfidious atmosphere begins to make fact of Nevil
Shute’s fiction.
None of this is considered news. No
connection is made as the bloodfest of Passchendaele a century ago is
remembered. Honest reporting is no longer welcome in much of the media.
Windbags, known as pundits, dominate: editors are infotainment or party line
managers. Where there was once sub-editing, there is the liberation of
axe-grinding clichés. Those journalists who do not comply are defenestrated.
The
urgency has plenty of precedents. In John Pilger film, The Coming War on China, John Bordne, a
member of a US Air Force missile combat crew based in Okinawa, Japan, describes
how in 1962 – during the Cuban missile crisis – he and his colleagues were
“told to launch all the missiles” from their silos. Nuclear armed, the missiles were aimed at
both China and Russia. A junior officer questioned this, and the order was
eventually rescinded – but only after they were issued with service revolvers
and ordered to shoot at others in a missile crew if they did not “stand down”.
At the height of the Cold War, the
anti-communist hysteria in the United States was such that US officials who
were on official business in China were accused of treason and sacked. In 1957
– the year Shute wrote On the
Beach – no official in the State Department could speak the
language of the world’s most populous nation. Mandarin speakers were purged
under strictures now echoed in the Congressional bill that has just passed,
aimed at Russia.
The bill was bipartisan. There is no
fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans. The terms “left” and
“right” are meaningless. Most of America’s modern wars were started not
by conservatives, but by liberal Democrats.
When Obama left office, he presided over a record seven wars, including America’s longest war and an unprecedented campaign of extrajudicial killings – murder – by drones.
When Obama left office, he presided over a record seven wars, including America’s longest war and an unprecedented campaign of extrajudicial killings – murder – by drones.
In his last year, according to a Council on
Foreign Relations study, Obama, the “reluctant liberal warrior”, dropped 26,171
bombs – three bombs every hour, 24 hours a day. Having pledged to help
“rid the world” of nuclear weapons, the Nobel Peace Laureate built more nuclear
warheads than any president since the Cold War.
Trump is a wimp by comparison. It was
Obama – with his secretary of state Hillary Clinton at his side – who destroyed
Libya as a modern state and launched the human stampede to Europe. At home,
immigration groups knew him as the “deporter-in-chief”.
Let's not forget that one of Obama’s last acts as president was
to sign a bill that handed a record $618billion to the Pentagon, reflecting the
soaring ascendancy of fascist militarism in the governance of the United
States. Trump has endorsed this, of course.
Buried in the detail was the establishment
of a “Center for Information Analysis and Response”. This is a ministry of
truth. It is tasked with providing an “official narrative of facts” that will
prepare us for the real possibility of nuclear war – if we allow it.
And this American hasbara is getting control of major world media right now, even through high rated TV shows such as House of Cards, making people believe that Putin is the Devil and that they, Americans, are much, much better, despite their war crimes worldwide.
So, watch out.
Roger Waters: We are living in 1984
Norman Finkelstein: International law and equal rights should be the focus for Palestine solidarity
PALESTINA
If you are in London this Fall, go to the Young Vic Theater to see:
Jewish Voice for Peace: USA & Israel's complicity grows stronger to repress and oppress
BRASIL - DIRETAS, JÁ!
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