Edward Curtin
I sit here in the silence of the awakening dawn’s stillness stunned by the awareness that I exist. I wonder why. It is my birthday. The very first rays of the increasing sun bleed crimson over the eastern hills as I imagine my birth. Your house and my family sleep.
Someday I will die and I question why. This is the mystery I have been contemplating since I was young. That and the truth that I was born in a time of war which when my parents and sis were celebrating my very first birthday, my country’s esteemed civilian and military leaders celebrated another birth: the detonation of the first atomic bomb code-named Trinity.
Trinity has actually shadowed my life, while the other Trinity has actually enkindled my days.
Ill minds play sick word video games as they inflict discomfort and death. They nicknamed this death bomb “the Gizmo,” as if it were an innocent little toy. They took and blasphemed the Christian secret of the Trinity as if they were mocking God, which they were. They believed they were gods.
Now they are all dead gods, their fates sealed in their tombs.
Where are they now?
Where are all their victims, the innocent dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Where are the simply and the unfair?
Where are the living now, asleep or awake as Trinity’s progenitors in Washington, D.C. and the Pentagon prepare their end ofthe world machines for a rerun, the last first-strike run, the last lap in their race to annihilate all the living? Will they sing as they release the rockets– “So long, goodbye, auf Wiedersehen, excellent night?”
Joseph Biden, the 2nd Roman Catholic president, while mocking the essence of Jesus’s message, pushes the world towards a nuclear holocaust, unlike JFK, the first Catholic president, who was assassinated by the CIA for promoting the removal of nuclear weapons and the end of the Cold War.
The wheel turns. We count the years. We question why.
Years ago I began my scholastic life by composing a thesis entitled “Dealing With Death or Death Dealing.” It was a study of the transformation of cultural sign systems, death, and nuclear weapons. The last hundred years and more have brought an improvement and disintegration of the traditional spiritual symbol system– the spiritual canopy– that as soon as gave people convenience, significance, and hope. Science, technology, and nuclear weapons have changed all that. Death has actually been socially relocated and we live under the nuclear umbrella, a sinister “safeguard” that is cold convenience. The supreme power of death over all life has been moved from God to men, those managing the nuclear weapons. This subject has never ever left me. I expect it has haunted me. It is not a jolly subject, but I believe it has chosen me.
Was I born in a normal time? Is war time our regular time? It is. I was.
But to be born at a time and location when your nation’s leaders were knocking their German and Japanese enemies as savage war wrongdoers while execrably imitating them and then outshining them is something else once again. With Operation Paperclipfollowing World War II, the United States federal government covertly brought 1,600 or more Nazi war lawbreakers into the U.S. to run our government’s military, intelligence, space, chemical, and biological warfare programs. We became Nazis. Lewis Mumford put it this wayin The Pentagon of Power:
By the curious dialectic of history, Hitler’s augmentation and the repair of the Nazi megamachine generated the conditions for developing those counter-instruments that would conquer it and momentarily wreck it. In short, in the very act of dying the Nazis sent their disease to their American opponents; not only the methods of compulsive organization or physical destruction, however the ethical corruption that made it possible to utilize those methods without stirring opposition.
There are always excuses for such moral corruption. When throughout WW II the U.S. firebombed practically all Japanese cities, Dresden and Perfume in Germany, and then dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki eliminating numerous countless innocent civilians in gratuitously savage attacks, these were justified and even celebrated as essential to defeat wicked enemies. Simply as Nazi war crooks were welcomed into the U.S. government under the aegis of Allen Dulles who ended up being the longest running CIA director and the key to JFK’s assassination and coverup, the diabolic war criminal offenses of the U.S. were swept away as acts of a moral country combating a great war. What has actually followed are years of U.S. war criminal activities from Korea through Vietnam and Iraq, etc. A very long list.
The English dramatist Harold Pinter, in his Nobel Address, put it bluntly:
It never took place. Absolutely nothing ever took place. Even while it was occurring it wasn’t taking place. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been organized, constant, vicious, remorseless, however extremely couple of individuals have actually spoken about them. You need to hand it to America. It has worked out a quite scientific control of power around the world while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a fantastic, even witty, highly effective act of hypnosis.
Absolutely nothing could be truer. When in 2014 the U.S. crafted the coup in Ukraine (coups being an American specialty), it allied itself with neo-Nazi forces to oppose Russia. This alliance must have stunned nobody; it is the American way. Back in the 1980s when the U.S. was supporting death teams in Central America, Ronald Reagan informed the world that “The Contras are the moral equivalent of the Establishing Daddies.” Now the Ukrainian president Zelensky is feted as a fantastic hero, Biden telling him in an Oval Office visit that “it’s an honor to be by your side.” Such alliances are not anomalies however the unrefined truth of U. S. history.
However let me go back to “Trinity,” the supreme weapon of mass damage considering that I read a current post about it.
Kai Bird, the coauthor of American Prometheus: The Accomplishment and Disaster of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the book that inspired the new film Oppenheimerabout J. Robert Oppenheimer, the researcher credited as “the father of the atomic bomb” and the male who called the first atomic bomb Trinity, has actually composed an Op Ed piece in The New York City Timesentitled, “The Catastrophe of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” True in particular aspects, this article is an example of how history can be slyly utilized to distort today for political functions. In common NY Timesfashion, Bird tells particular realities while hiding, distorting, and falsifying others.
I do rule out Oppenheimer a tragic figure, as does Bird. Complicated, yes; but he was essentially a hubristic researcher who lent his services to a demonic project, and afterwards, having let the feline out of the bag by creating the Bomb, guiltily prompted the federal government that utilized it in massive war criminal activities to restrain itself in the future. Requesting for such self-regulation is as ridiculous as asking the pharmaceutical or huge tech industries to manage themselves.
Bird appropriately states that Oppenheimer did not regret his work creating the atomic bomb, and he properly explains the oppression of his being maligned and removed of his security clearance in 1954 in a secret hearing by a vote of 2 to 1 of a security panel of The Atomic Energy Commission for having communist associations. “Commemorated in 1945 as the ‘daddy of the atomic bomb,'” Bird composes, “nine years later he would become the chief celebrity victim of the McCarthyite maelstrom.” A “victim,” I should include, who called names to save his own track record.
However tucked within his post, Bird tells us: “Just take a look at what took place to our public health civil servants during the current pandemic.” By which he indicates these authorities like Anthony Fauci were maligned when they offered the public right clinical details. This is unreasonable. Fauci– “attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science”– and other federal government “civil servants” misleaded the general public and lied over and over once again, but Bird implies they too were terrible figures like Oppenheimer.
He writes:
We base on the cusp of another technological revolution in which artificial intelligence will transform how we live and work, and yet we are not yet having the kind of notified civil discourse with its innovators that might help us to make smart policy decisions on its guideline. Our politicians require to listen more to innovation innovators like Sam Altmanand quantum physicists like Kip Thorne and Michio Kaku.
Here too he urges “us” to listen to the very individuals responsible for Artificial Intelligence, just as “we” need to have listened to Oppenheimer after he brought us the atomic bomb. Implicit here is the belief that science just marches gradually on and there’s no stopping it, and when harmful technologies emerge from scientists’ work, we need to trust them to manage them.
No place does Bird recommend that scientists have a moral responsibility before the fact to not pursue a particular line of research study due to the fact that of its serious possible repercussions. Maybe he has actually never ever read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, only written over two hundred years back.
Lastly, and most importantly, Bird begins his concluding paragraph with these words:
Today, Vladimir Putin’s not-so-veiled risks to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine are a stark suggestion that we can never be contented about coping with nuclear weapons.
This is merely U.S. propaganda. The U.S. has actually provoked and sustained the war in Ukraine, broken all nuclear weapon treaties, surrounded Russia with military bases, stationed nuclear weapons in Europe, engaged in nuclear blackmail with its descent on policy and hazards, and so on. Putin has actually said in reaction that if– and only if– the extremely existence of the Russian state and land is threatened with termination would the use of nuclear weapons be considered.
A little history is informative.
“Hardly six weeks after the Hiroshima-Nagsaki bombings,” Michel Chossudovsky informs us, “the US War Department [Pentagon] provided a plan(September 15, 1945) to ‘Clean the Soviet Union off the Map’ (66 cities with 204 atomic bombs), when the United States and the USSR were allies. This infamous project is validated by declassified documents.” (For more information see Chossudovsky, 2017)
Below is the image of the 66 cities of the Soviet Union which had been imagined as targets by the United States War Department.
The 66 cities. Click here to enlarge
See likewise Michel Chossudovsky, Nuclear War. “90 Seconds to Midnight”: The Pentagon’s 1945 “End ofthe world Plan” to “Clean the Soviet Union off the Map”
However back to Bird, who, in composing a piece about Oppenheimer’s “disaster” and defending science, has likewise subtly safeguarded a trinity of other matters: the government “science” on Covid, the transformative power coming from AI, and the U.S. propaganda about Russia and nuclear weapons. There is no mention of JFK’s call to abolish nuclear weapons. This is how the “paper of record” does its job.
I sit here now at the end of the day. Shadows are falling and I contemplate such trinities. I am stunned by the fact that we exist, but under a terrifying Shadow that many dream to disregard. Jung saw this shadow side as not simply personal however social, and when it is overlooked, the cumulative evils of modern societies can autonomously emerge.
Bird argues that nuclear weapons are the result of a clinical quest that is unstoppable. He composes that Oppenheimer “understood that you can not stop curious humans from discovering the physical world around them [and after that making nukes or designer babies]”
This is the ideology of progress that brooks no opposition since it is stated inescapable. It is a viewpoint that believes there need to be no limitations to human knowledge, which would include the knowledge of excellent and evil, but which can then be overlooked because it and all thought and beliefs are considered a priori to be relative.
The contemporary premise that whatever is relative is obviously a contradiction considering that it is an absolute declaration. Numerous share this approach of despair disguised as progress as it has crept into everything today. It is awful, for if individuals accept it, we are destined follow a Faustian pact with the devil and all hell will follow.
I think of Bob Dylan singing:
I just don’t see why I must even care
It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there
But I do care, and I wonder why. As night comes on, I sit here and question.