Edward Curtin
The world has actually been haunted by human violence considering that time immemorial. There are unknown millions (billions?) of individuals all over the world who have been scarred by it in all its types.
There are 2 fundamental reactions: one is to try to return that violence with violence and defeat one’s opponent; the other is, in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, to “not look for to defeat or humiliate the opponent, however to win his friendship and understanding” through a non-violent reaction. Politicians usually accept the former, while those who are called dreamers promote the latter.
Between these two, there are numerous blended actions, with sane politicians calling for mutual regard between nations and an end to aggressive provocations resulting in warfare, such has actually accompanied the United States provoking the war in Ukraine.
We have gotten in the time when the damage of all life on Earth through nuclear war impends unless a radical change occurs. If the word imminent noises severe, it is worth considering that there will be no announcement. The time to speak out is now. It is constantly now.
Terrific literature speaks to the issue of violence at the deepest levels.
Homer’s Odyssey is the timeless case of violent revenge. At the end of the story, Odysseus, who was scarred in youth by a wild boar, lastly returns house from the Trojan War after 10 years of wandering. Two times as scarred now by the scaries of war with its horrendous slaughters (see The Iliad), he comes to his house disguised in a beggar’s rags. His nursemaid from childhood recognizes him from the scar on his thigh. In his house he finds scores of suitors who are striking on his partner Penelope. He is infuriated and actions onto the limit, swindles his rags, and systematically massacres every last one of them. Flesh and gore swim in the blood-drenched room, while in the courtyard twelve unfaithful serving house maids hang from their necks. This is the essential western story of revenge where the wounded hero kills the bad men and the violent beat goes on and on.
It attract our lower angels, for while Odysseus’s rage is easy to understand, its effects leave a hazardous tradition.
But there is another response that makes use of another tradition that is represented by Jesus on the cross, executed by the Roman state as a subversive lawbreaker. He didn’t die on a personal cross, for his crime was public. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi are well-known exemplars of non-violent resistance in contemporary times, as they too were executed by the state. Non-violence seems, on the surface area at least, to be less reliable than violence and contrary to much of human history.
If it is, nevertheless, we are doomed. For we have nuclear weapons now, not bows and arrows and spears. We have nuclear weapons hitched to computers. Digital weapons of several sorts and mad leaders intent on pressing us to the edge of termination.
The United States’ instigation of the war in Ukraine against Russia and its push for war with China are existing prime examples. They become part of the continuing vast tapestry of lies that Harold Pinter mentioned in his 2005 Nobel Address. He stated, in part:
The United States supported and in a lot of cases stimulated every right wing military dictatorship worldwide after completion of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, obviously, Chile. The horror the United States caused upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never ever be forgiven … The criminal activities of the United States have actually been systematic, consistent, vicious, remorseless, however extremely few individuals have really discussed them.
This is still true, as John Pilger has just warned us in a powerful post: “There Is A War Coming Shrouded In Propaganda. It Will Include Us. Speak Up”
The increase of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or ‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism,’ as you choose. Ukraine as modern-day Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass killer who lauded Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy,’ which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews butchered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist pamphlet announced to Ukrainian Jews.
Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and ratings of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have actually been paid for by the EU and the U.S., replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.
In 2014, neo Nazis played a key function in an American bankrolled coup versus the chosen president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being “pro-Moscow.” The coup regime consisted of popular “extreme nationalists”– Nazis in all however name.
The U.S. led assistance for this war need to stop. Who will stop it?
Homer told us something quite essential as soon as upon a time, as did numerous poets, artists, and writers in the twentieth-century. They alerted us of the beasts we were generating, as Pilger says: “Arthur Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett alerted that fascism was increasing, often camouflaged, and the obligation lay with authors and journalists to speak up.” He appropriately complains the lack of such voices now, as writers have actually disappeared into post-modern silence, a part of the cultural war on dissent.
On a subtler and more personal note than Homer’s tale of revenge, we have the testimony of Albert Camus who became part of the Resistance to the German occupation of France throughout WW II. At the beginning of his beautiful, posthumous, and autobiographical novel, The Very first Man, Camus tells us about Jacques Cormery (Camus), who never ever understood his dad, a French soldier killed in World War I– the misnamed monstrous War to End All Wars– when Jacques was eleven months old.
Years later on, when he is forty years of ages and horrors of WW II have concluded, Jacques visits the cemetery in France where his dad is buried. As he towers above the gravestone in this massive field of the dead, silence engulfs him. Camus composes:
And the wave of tenderness and pity that at once filled his heart was not the stirring of the soul that leads the son to the memory of the vanished father, however the overwhelming enthusiasm that a grown male feels for an unjustly murdered kid– something here was not in the natural order and, in fact, there was no order however only madness and mayhem when the kid was older than the daddy. The course of time was shattering around him while he remained motionless among those tombs he no longer saw, and the years no longer kept to their places in the great river that flows to its end.
The tale continues, as did Camus’s, who always supported the victims of violence regardless of severe criticism from many corners, from the left and from the right. He wrote a famous essay, Reflections on the Guillotine, against capital penalty, based upon his dad’s nauseating experience of seeing a guy performed by the state. After hearing this story from his grandma, he would regularly have “a persistent headache” that “would haunt him, taking numerous forms, however always having the one style: they were constantly concerning take him, Jacques, to be performed.”
In addition, Camus cautioned us not to become murderers and executioners and to create more victims, when he wrote a series of essays soon after WW II for the French Resistance paper,Battle.– Neither Victims nor Executioners. He wrote that yes, we must raise our voices:
It requires only that we show and then choose, clearly, whether humanity’s lot need to be made still more unpleasant in order to accomplish far-off and shadowy ends, whether we must accept a world bristling with arms where bro kills brother; or whether, on the contrary, we ought to prevent bloodshed and anguish as much as possible so that we give a possibility for survival to later generations much better equipped than we are.Which leads me to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his run for the US presidency in this most dangerous time. He is a male not terrified into silence regardless of all the efforts to censor him. From a really tender age he was scarred by death; is surely
an injured warrior, not one of those who went to a real war, however one who had a various war forced upon him when he was nine and fourteen years-old, when his uncle and daddy were assassinated by the CIA. Some quelch the implications of such memories; he has faced them and permitted them to spur him to truth and action. No boar gored him, nor has he killed suitors in his house, since he has actually taken, not the roadway of revenge, however that of reconciliation, in spite of having lost his daddy and others to demonic government forces. This is the method of non-violence, a path unfamiliar to most of those looking for political office. I don’t know his inner ideas about this, but I read his words and actions to decipher where he
is attempting to take this extremely violent nation. He is a non-violent warrior in the spirit of Gandhi’s fact force or satyagraha. Not a passive non-action, but an active resistance to wicked and violence. Notone seekingvengeance on all the warmongers and Covid liars(which does not prevent legal prosecutions for crimes), but one who looks for to fix up the warring parties. To appeal to our higher angels and not the satanic forces advising us to renounce the great, however to the love that is our only hope. I am not saying he is a pacifist. Such a term muddies the water. He is clearly devoted to the defense of the country if it were ever
assaulted. But he is emphatically opposed to the limitless U.S. attacks on other nations. He knows the vicious history of the CIA. He is an extremely rare political prospect dedicated to reconciliation in the house and abroad. He is waging peace. Like his dad Senator Robert Kennedy and his uncle, President Kennedy, he is anti-war, dedicated to ending the unlimited cycle of abroad wars sustained by the military-industrial complex and the corporations who feed at the trough of war costs. He opposes the policies of those political leaders who support such unlimited carnage, which is the majority of them, consisting of most emphatically Joe Biden. He understands the threat of nuclear war. He tells us on his site, Kennedy24: As President, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will start the process of relaxing empire. We will bring the soldiers house. We will stop racking up unpayable financial obligation to fight one war after another . The armed force will return to its correct role of defending our country. We will end the proxy wars, bombing campaigns, concealed operations, coups, paramilitaries, and whatever else that has actually ended up being so typical many people don’t understand it’s occurring. But it is happening, a continuous drain on our strength. It’s time to come house and restore this country … We will lead by example. When an aggressive royal nation disarms of its own accord, it sets a design template for peace all over. It is not too late for us to voluntarily release empire and serve peace rather, as a strong and healthy country. Those are really strong words and I make sure he indicates them. However he is opposed by demonic forces within the U.S., what former CIA expert Ray McGovern aptly calls the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-MEDIA-Academia-Think-Tank complex (MICIMATT).
They run the propaganda shit program and will throw lie after lie(have already done so)at Kennedy and put in all their pressure to ensure he can not fulfill his guarantees. Their propaganda is limitless and aims to hypnotize. Pinter described it thus:”I put to you that the United States is without doubt the best show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and callous it might be but it is also extremely clever. As a salesman it is out by itself and its most saleable commodity is self-love.” It is this self-love and American exceptionalism that Bobby Kennedy will need to neutralize by highlighting the humankind of all people and their desire to live in peace. He will need to make it really clear that the U.S. government’s involvement in Ukraine was never humanitarian, but from the start was part
of a strategy to disable Russia. That is was an effort to continue the Cold War by pressing closer to Russia’s borders. Just fools believe that vengeance and violence will result in a better world. It may feel great– and I understand the sensation– to strike back in anger, but it is just a vicious cycle as all history has actually shown. Vengeance just brings bitterness, a cycle of recriminations and reactions.
Reconciliation is the method forward, however it can just become a reality by an upswelling of resistance of excellent people everywhere to the lies of the war-loving propagandists who are leading us to annihilation. RFK, Jr. can refrain from doing it alone. He can lead, but we require a vast chorus of millions of voices to resist, in Pilger’s words, “the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of’ identity’.”If not, democracy will remain notional. Kennedy is so right to state that the U.S.A. can not be an empire abroad and continue to be a democracy in your home. Silence must be changed with resistance and his words made real by countless individuals opposing the killers. Composing in another time of extremity, but composing genuinely, Camus, stated: At the end of this tunnel of darkness, nevertheless, there is inevitably a light, which we already divine and for which we only need to battle to ensure its coming. All of us, amongst the ruins, are preparing a renaissance beyond the limits of nihilism.
However few people understand it. So let us battle with words and actions. As MLK, Jr. informed us
about the U.S. war versus Vietnam:”There comes a time when silence is betrayal. “Edward Curtin is an independent author whose work has actually appeared widely over several years. His website is edwardcurtin.com and his new book is Seeking Reality in a Nation of Lies. ASSISTANCE OFFGUARDIAN For direct-transfer bank information click here.