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History Is Screaming
Nobody opines sagely anymore that the races will never get along, calmly ladling conventional certainties over the earnest idealism of civil-rights activists. But we live in a world so permeated with militarized fear of demagogic leaders and rogue states that nuclear deterrence retains enough of the default credibility it had during the Cold War, as the opposite of utopian naïveté, that common sense is still on the defensive.
No matter that some of the most prominent old Cold Warriors have lost their faith in nuclear weapons, and grasp that us vs. them security concepts are disastrously counterproductive in today's more complex, more nationally porous global reality, and have downgraded that era's most notorious acronym — M.A.D., as in Mutually Assured Destruction — to just plain mad.
"U.S. leadership will be required to take the world to the next stage . . ."
Let` those words reverberate, as we ponder their seriousness: ". . . to a solid consensus for reversing reliance on nuclear weapons . . . and ultimately ending them as a threat to the world. . . . (which) is now on the precipice of a new and dangerous nuclear era."
They were written, in early 2007, by two former secretaries of state, Henry Kissinger and George Schultz; a former secretary of defense, William Perry; and former Sen. Sam Nunn, long-time chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. All are ex-hawks, stalwart defenders of the Free World back in the day, but here they are speaking in humbler language, language that is plaintive and almost prayer-like, of "a world free" — of nuclear weapons.
They warn: ". . .the U.S. soon will be compelled to enter a new nuclear era that will be more precarious, psychologically disorienting, and economically even more costly than was Cold War deterrence. It is far from certain that we can successfully replicate the old Soviet-American 'mutually assured destruction' with an increasing number of potential nuclear enemies world-wide without dramatically increasing the risk that nuclear weapons will be used."
And they quote JFK: "The world was not meant to be a prison in which man awaits his execution."
Their words have given courage to editorial boards here and there. In August, the San Francisco Chronicle, citing the support of "well-known realists" Kissinger and Shultz, editorialized that "the United States should take the lead in building a consensus for reducing, and ultimately disarming, global stocks of nuclear weapons."
In other words, reduction of the world's supply of 25,000 nuclear weapons isn't enough. Foreswearing "the next generation" of nuclear weapons, and the multi-billion-dollar weapons industry hell-bent on birthing it, isn't enough. National and, indeed, human security demands nothing short of the complete elimination of nuclear weapons, a goal that can only be achieved, in the words of Kissinger, et al, as a global "joint enterprise" — you know, with international or trans-national cooperation, kind of the opposite of the Bush/neocon vision of American hegemony and its comic-book battle with evil.
"U.S. leadership will be required to take the world to the next stage . . ."
So far this remains the cry of the powerless. The old Cold Warriors are out of the game now, as they lend their voices and their realpolitik bona fides to those who were never in the game. And therefore these voices, no matter their urgency, can still be dismissed as utopian and "a bit Pollyanaish" (a comment I received recently) because the vision they are articulating doesn't have the status of conventional wisdom yet.
The default response is still too easily a mocking flicker of "father knows best," a replay of the old canards of institutional racism. The races can never get along. Bad people are out there; we have to protect ourselves.
Only someone currently in full possession of the blessings and curses of power can give this vision the credibility of inevitability, which brings me to my point: We have just elected such a person president, and, as the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg put it, "there is already the feel of the beginning of a new era." The prevailing fabric of political cynicism has a gash from top to bottom, and a global yearning for change rushes in.
Why else are a million and a half people expected to pack the D.C. mall for Barack Obama's inauguration? Scalpers are selling tickets to the event for as high $60,000. History is screaming. Surely it is a cry for international cooperation, a safer world, a new way of thinking. Surely it is a cry that we step away from the madness of our nuclear suicide pact.
But only the man of the moment can give this cry political traction. Obama needs more than our cheers. He needs our ultimatum as well: our insistence that he step into the future we voted for.
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17 Comments so far
Show AllOakknot
I just sent this to www.change.gov. Based on what is going on with the selection process for Obama, I seriously doubt it will come of much. We can only do what we do.
It is better to die on your feet that to live on your knees-Zapata
Apparently the only thing that can be expected from the President-elect is the gift of promises. Accept the change of tone, but not of substance. Hope for the hype of hope. Conservatism has failed – now liberalism returns … with more conservatism until conservatism returns once again.
It seems America, alongside Jesus, has failed and in the rage of Caliban, rejecting the face in the mirror, will agonize over the course of moderate, responsible actions … and take the world down with it.
Another lifetime pessimist. You and your brethren will go on with your negative, dismissive blah-blah-blah forever, no matter what happens. By publicly announcing your resolute denial of any opportunities for positive change that exist, you actually contribute to the failure you assure us has already happened.
When America really needs a true Statesman, we get another professional political prostitute. Now that Obama is elected we are seeing his true colors: white, white and more white. Doesn't Obama have any black friends?
Hoa binh
You're afraid of change.
You feel hopeless.
But I have hope for you.
Join us in uniting around Obama to build a better tomorrow.
There are no Red States or Blue States - we are all proud Americans.
I would say "history is screaming" for humanity to become civilized. For until humanity becomes civilized, there can be no true "international cooperation" to solve the problems caused by the current barbaric behavior of most countries, especially the leading, most barbaric country--the USA. Some will say Myanmar or North Korea is more barbaric; I would reply: How many millions have they killed since the end of WW2, or since 1992, or since 11 September 2001; how many countries have they poisoned with herbicides and depleted uranium; how many coups have they fomented in other countries; if they had an electoral process, would their candidates for president vow to kill even more people to get elected?
And how many more will be mamed and killed as Obama sends us "back" into Afghanistan....and then into Pakistan?
The Agent Orange trial cases are finally getting underway in a serious manner.
As a professional historian, I would hypothesize that it is hard pressed to find any society, at any given time and place, to live up to "civilized" standards - But of course what does "civilized" fully mean anyway? Americans claim they are civilized, yet they murder, rape, and pillage the rest of the world.
The same hawks that brought us to the brink are now backpedaling. These realists have simply realized that the only way for us to stay no. 1 is for everybody else to foreswear nukes, (except US, of course).
Bring America Back !!!! And, the screaming will reach its fever-pitch
on Jan 20 upcoming.
**Mr Koehler should have mentioned the words of a time-honored philosopher
======='Those who do not remember the past, are condemned to repeat it'
**So with the screams of Joy comes the immense responsibility to deliver on,
what one blogger below says===...the Future we Voted For !
**Should Obama blow this off in the next four years, as did Jimmy Carter only
four years after Watergate, then what does that say for our upcoming persons
of color, and their chances at leading the Nation ever again ???
**Two things I know===Hillary Clinton is NO Secretary of State, and
Robert Gates is NO Secretary of Defense !!!!
"... selling tickets to the event for as high $60,000" says to me that much of the emphasis is still on symbolism and that the general populace is engaged at a superficial level. The "comic-book battle with evil" of Bush is being replaced by the comic book rescue of the universe by Obama.
When Gandhi was asked by a reporter what he thought about western civilization he replied that he thought that would be an excellent idea.
I think god needs to come down from the heavens and tell everyone once and for all that he doesn't exist. Maybe then we'll have true peace on this earth.
Come On People. Koehler is trying to fine tune the issue of global nuclear deproliferation and you are responding how?
Please allow me to redirect the issue... There should not be deproliferation to ZERO because we need nuclear weapons to divert an asteroid that may be heading toward the earth's gravitational field. This should be (and probably already is) a Joint Venture among the nuclear states.
***
Koehler is a really fine writer; worth re-reading...
-30-
Yup.
Somehow, there must be a way to distinguish between the different "America"s.
It's plain that most of the actions and results seen at the output side of "America" have been what one might expect from a global-capitalist-militarist-empire totally co-opted by corporate commercial interests. Yet there still exists the ideal, the myth, and, occasionally, the reality of an "America" of people who are just like others in the world who share or hope for the ideals and principles of the Constitution, too.
Lots of cognitive dissonance around all this.
We are certainly at a make-or-break point in human evolution. Population, climate, and war. Seems that if we could solve the war thing, we'd have a chance at the others.
Obviously, if war could bring us peace, we would have it by now. Humans are the only creatures on the planet that do war. Is the short-fall with those who drive us to war, or those who let themselves be driven or tricked into war? Is war the result of the billions of small decisions we all make every day? Do we "make" war like one "makes" a cake?---the ingredients determining the product? If so, how do we get a different recipe, say, to "make" peace, to give ourselves a chance to become a successful species?
Bringing this down to the present moment, we see that, from 1/20/09, a majority want to "make" our nation and world from a different recipe---the recipe that results in Peace. The leader and the team we have just elected need to show us, not TELL us, how they will make a different cake from the same ingredients.
We have RENTED them our power. We want a different cake for ourselves and everyone else our nation affects. We hope they understand that.
But continue to give BHO your support, he is a smart man.
Barry Clemson
Obama is doing just what he promised - to reach out, seek really smart people, and try to unite us so that we can be about solving problems.
We face terrible difficulties but then Americans tend to rise to the occasion. And clearly, we can not successfully deal with global warming, peak oil, and a plummeting economy while waging wars. This just might be our chance to get rid of nuclear weapons and to seriously look at nonviolent strategies.
What we need to do is to build political pressure for a saner, non-nuclear, nonviolent world that takes seriously core American values of fairness, equality, and liberty. Keep Obama's feet to the fire so that he can lead us in the right directions!
Yes, history certainly is screaming, and more and more of us appear to be listening to our true history - the real, raw, dirty, fundamentalist, ego driven, grasping, greedy, violent, cruel, disturbing truth of what we have allowed to happen in the name of "progress."
The frontier mentality that misguided, brainwashed Americans have allowed themselves to believe and perpetuate with such noble expectations around the world, has been nothing more than blind adherence to, and brutal enforcement of, corporate america's bastard child they named 'Free Market Economics' - empire building and gluttony of global proportions. The raping (literally and figuratively) and pillaging, the bribes, the puppet regimes, the drugs, the wars, the tortures - were all at the expense of millions of peoples lives, freedoms, comfort and dignity, as well as the destruction of our planet.
We are all fully culpable in contributing to turning the rest of the world (China, Cambodia, India, etc.) into the sweatshops of the western world, in order to support the very lifestyle - the "American Dream" - that American's have been taught was their birthright. That very dream is, in truth, the "American Nightmare."
It is time to wake up. Anyone who is ready to do so, and would like a dose of truth unlike any that one would get from the bought and paid for main stream media, would be well served to read Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine,' (The Rise of Disaster Capitalism), 2008.
"the United States should take the lead in building a consensus for reducing, and ultimately disarming, global stocks of nuclear weapons." – anyways who made US the leader of the word.? Look at what they have doe to the world economic order. They are not fit for leadership of any kind. They should follow rather than try to lead for a change and then get used that idea.