Surrealistically, the entangled web of profiteering, militarism, and political power embracing nuclear madness is ignored. Despite the mounting peril, we, the people, appear incongruously and woefully befogged, ineffectual, and apathetic
Since Vietnam, the US's legion of illegal and deceptive militaristic exploits in the Middle East, South America, and Africa have been met with sporadic (except Media Benjamin's Code Pink) and effete whimpers of protest. Nuclear protest that surged throughout the 1970s and peaked in the massive global demonstrations of 1981 (one million people in NYC alone), has vanished (except for the Plowshares).
The US juggernaut grinds on with the support of a public manipulated and deceived into indifference and passivity. Insidious normalization of nuclear weapons' heinous promise has crept into the collective conscious. Younger generations, born into virtual reality style endless war accept it as background noise. They are untouched by the horrors of Hiroshima and the child's terror of "duck beneath the desk" drills.
Words slip accommodating attitudes into minds, "Nuke it" becomes "nuke them," confounding microwaving a hamburger with evaporating millions and rendering a lifeless planet. Generals and politicians routinely threaten the once "unthinkable" use of nuclear weapons without eliciting massive recoil. Grimly, a Gallup Poll after 9/11 showed one quarter of us approving nuclear bombing of terrorist targets.
Denial reigns here in the belly of the monster. Fatuous myths deny the darkening of the city on the hill, and sentimental, duplicitous invocations of democratic values and "who we are" prevail. The US's proper name, purpose, and methods are muffled to near silence except for the few (unheard) who voice the ugly truth: the US Empire wages endless wars in pursuit of global domination.
The dollar and its international network of banks and institutions lay siege to whole societies with ruthless sanctions that inflict misery and kill innocent people (in our name, 500,000, half of them children, died from US sanctions on Iraq); our military and stealthy "intelligence" agents topple regimes that resist our hegemony; and the ace in our hand, or as one hawk pictured it, the nuclear weapons on our hip, as in Trump's threat of "total annihilation" for fractious North Korea.
The recent murder of Soleimani reveals the dark heart of this Empire: US foreign policy rests on the pillar of nuclear terrorism. To keep these transcendentally destructive powers in our hands exclusively, and to use the terror they inspire to justify our belligerence, are wound together. We annihilated Iraq allegedly for nuclear weapons control; we demonize North Korea for its efforts at self-defense; we starve Iran to bring it to its knees. Recall that after a string of lies about impending attacks, Trump's opening statement in his disingenuous, offensive defense of Soleimani's murder was, "Iran will not have a nuclear bomb." Of course, this nuclear policy in the case of Iran also masks the other "American interests" that rationalized sabotage of the nuclear treaty with Iran, - that is, to prevent Iran from possessing anti-ballistic missiles to defend itself from Israel and Saudi Arabia.
While we the people are cloaked in myth and pretense, the international community considers the US the number 1 threat to global life and peace. The US ship of state, like Ahab's, is on a mad, power-driven cruise that originated in World War II victory and the atomic bomb, and has sharply increased and accelerated into swift moving journey churning chaos and destruction. The paroxysms of violence and mayhem spreading worldwide stem largely from the machinations of US foreign policy. And these are conducted to the beat of blatant lies and sordid duplicities, - from the Gulf of Tonkin to weapons of mass destruction, to terrorism. Done in the name of we the people, nonetheless we are but pawns, kept in the ship's hull, manipulated to mute complicity, riding these violent waves on a stupid, arrogant, moribund quest to rule the world for the ego of our leaders and the acquisitive freedom of our markets.
The Plowshares are a surviving counter stream to the pernicious current rushing and cascading towards a tsunami of unimaginable destruction, a fate that was imagined at point of origin. Churchill when hearing of the atomic bomb imagined the "wrath of the Second Coming." Touch to his primal, instinctual core at the sight of Big Boy's unprecedented blast and heat, Oppenheimer's words, a blend of hubris and transcendent destruction, are chillingly, eerily foreboding: "I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds," the physicist uttered.
The Plowshares would have us look into the face of horror beyond words: Kings Bay alone portends devastation 3800 times that of Hiroshima, or the capacity to extinguish life on earth.
A few days ago, the Doomsday clock inched up to its highest level: we are 100 seconds before midnight. At the 11th hour of such consequence, we must wrench ourselves from the slough of denial, accommodation, docility, and ideological paralysis, for, as Representative Nina Turner enjoins, "the sake of all we love."
Each of us can start the empowering process by spreading the word of their courage and the legal dangers they face and by generating support for the Plowshares: go to kingsbayplowshares7.org
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