Unthinking the Unthinkable — Narrated by Malcolm Burn
Original column by Malcolm Burn published on July 23, 2024
“I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.” — Mahatma Gandhi
Earlier this year I was contacted by my friend, former United Nations Chief Weapons Inspector Scott Ritter. Scott was one of the few people who was urging our Congress not to go to war against Iraq. One of the people who was vociferously opposed to Scott was Joe Biden, who was at that time a senator. And we all now know what a grave and terrible mistake that war was — as are all wars.
But currently, we’re facing something that’s much more of a threat to humanity. Obviously, climate change is probably the premier threat to humanity, to life on earth, but nuclear war seems to be something that people once again in our government seem quite comfortable talking about.
I saw a public service announcement for New York City a couple months ago. It was a cartoon-like picture and its message was what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. Considering half the people in our government can’t even pronounce the word properly, I’m more than a little concerned that people like US Republican Senator Lindsey Graham and even people in the Democratic Party are discussing the possibility of a nuclear confrontation with either Russia or China at the moment. I’m hoping whatever the new administration will be in November that it will at least de-escalate the situation with Russia.
Scott asked me to contribute to a project he’s doing called “Waging Peace.” I was very inspired after I spoke with Scott and I came up with a piece of music, which is now the theme music for “Between the Grooves,” my new show on Radio Kingston.” The piece is entitled “Destroyer of Worlds.” It utilizes some spoken word, including one of the most important speeches in our history by an American president. It’s President John F. Kennedy’s famous and what is now called his “Peace Speech,” which he delivered to graduating students at American University in Washington, DC in 1963.
It's a shame that Kennedy did not live to see his words put into action but, essentially, he was urging the world that despite our ideological differences and, perhaps, even revulsion at other countries and their policies, we need to be the adults in the room and exercise restraint and remain in contact and speak with the people we directly oppose.
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much of that happening these days. In fact, I don’t think that Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin ever sat down in the same room once. Now I’m not saying the guy who almost got his ear shot off would do the same but they’re all “two cheeks of the same ass” as far as I’m concerned, which is a quote by my friend George Galloway. They all represent the military industrial complex.
One of the greatest crimes against humanity was the dropping of nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States in 1945. America is the only country to have used a nuclear weapon in a conflict and to think that it would not do so again is rather naïve. US military doctrine now makes allowances for just such a possibility involving either Russia or China in what they like to call a “limited nuclear strike.”
Sometimes I feel like we’re all kind of sleepwalking toward oblivion. I include myself. I’m not pointing my finger anywhere. Life seems to just go on. But I recall my father telling me that when he was a boy around 1945 in Britain near the end of WWII (the war had already ended in Europe), he was sitting on a bus and there was a man sitting across from him holding a newspaper and he had his newspaper front page unfolded and my father was staring at the picture on the front page of a giant mushroom cloud. The headline said, “US drops atomic bomb over Japan.”
If there was another nuclear confrontation between, say, between Russia and the US and NATO or China, it wouldn’t be limited. It would affect everybody on the planet. With so many hotheads and nobody steering the ship the possibilities are greater than ever before.
Back in the old days they didn’t know about nuclear winters. Now we know that a nuclear war would not only cause the immediate casualties but also create a huge dust cloud that would blot out the sun and create years and perhaps decades-long nuclear winter where the world would turn into a dark, extremely cold wasteland.
I was thinking that if such an event happens again it won’t be something we read about a few days later in a faraway place. When these people talk about “limited nuclear war,” we have to remember they’re insane. There’s no such thing. If another nuclear war happens and it could very easily happen these accidents have occurred many times in the past.
It’s only by a stroke of luck that we’ve managed to avoid this.
And every day at 8:15 a.m. the bells ring in Hiroshima in remembrance — never again.