India’s oldest Socialist Weekly!
Editor: Dr. G.G. Parikh | Associate Editor: Neeraj Jain | Managing Editor: Guddi
I stare blankly at the news. Little men with guns once again stir the country – the world – into a state of shock and grief and chaos. Attention: Every last one of us is vulnerable to being eliminated… randomly.
Fifty-five years after his death, the U.S. government has restored J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, which the Atomic Energy Commission had taken away from him in 1954, declaring him to be not simply a communist but, in all likelihood, a Soviet spy.
Every lost soul matters. It’s one thing to reduce life to an abstract statistic, but far more problematic is quietly aligning with the world of the policymakers and accepting murder – war, especially the unprovoked kind – as a necessary facet of national, let alone human, security.
Gun control isn’t enough. We also need hatred control. The lone wolves out there, the lost souls, who have chosen to play real war in response to their own demons, might seek another course of action if they had fewer political and corporate role models.
If we continue to wage the “war on evil” that George W. Bush began, we will continue to be part of that evil. Think about the millions of Afghans facing starvation in their shattered country, then imagine the consequences coming home.
Martin Luther King’s speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence”, is a detailed analysis of the politics of colonialism and the cruel absurdity of war, as well as a deep plunge into the human future, pulsating with complex sanity and more relevant than ever 50-plus years later.
When I proclaim a belief in democracy, I mean the right to truly participate in the creation of our world. If it weren’t for democracy, we could easily be an undivided nation — united, with a shrug, in our acceptance of slavery, or at least in the necessity of whites-only drinking fountains.
I fear that as we unite, we diminish our ability to respect, and understand, the complexity of the universe, and of our fellow humans…. This is history’s primary lesson: The savage we need to civilize, continually, is within ourselves.
We can start a nuclear war in five minutes; but it took the world 72 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki to officially declare nukes illegal, at least for some.
Waging peace is more complex than waging war, but we’ve given ourselves no choice but to take on the challenge.
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