The world has been haunted by human violence since time
immemorial. There are untold millions (billions?) of people all over the
world who have been scarred by it in all its forms. There are two basic
responses: one is to try to return that violence with violence and
defeat one’s enemy; the other is, in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s
words, to “not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his
friendship and understanding” through a non-violent response.
Politicians usually embrace the former, while those who are called
dreamers advocate the latter.
Between these two, there are various mixed responses, with sane
political leaders calling for mutual respect between countries and an
end to aggressive provocations leading to warfare, such has occurred
with the United States provoking the war in Ukraine.
We have entered the time when the destruction of all life on
earth through nuclear war is imminent unless a radical transformation
occurs. If the word imminent sounds extreme, it is worth considering
that there will be no announcement. The time to speak up is now. It is
always now.
Great literature speaks to the issue of violence at the deepest levels.
Homer’s Odyssey is the classic case of violent
revenge. At the end of the story, Odysseus, who was scarred in youth by a
wild boar, finally returns home from the Trojan War after ten years of
wandering. Doubly scarred now by the horrors of war with its horrendous
slaughters (see The Iliad), he arrives at his home disguised in
a beggar’s rags. His nursemaid from childhood recognizes him from the
scar on his thigh. In his house he finds scores of suitors who are
hitting on his wife Penelope. He is enraged and steps onto the
threshold, rips off his rags, and systematically massacres every last
one of them. Flesh and gore swim in the blood-drenched room, while in
the courtyard twelve unfaithful serving maids hang from their necks.
This is the quintessential western story of revenge where the wounded
hero kills the bad guys and the violent beat goes on and on.
It appeals to our lesser angels, for while Odysseus’s rage is understandable, its consequences leave a toxic legacy.
But there is another response that draws on another tradition
that is symbolized by Jesus on the cross, executed by the Roman state as
a subversive criminal. He didn’t die on a private cross, for his crime
was public. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi
are famous exemplars of non-violent resistance in modern times, as they
too were executed by the state. Non-violence seems, on the surface at
least, to be less effective than violence and contrary to much of human
history.
If it is, however, we are doomed. For we have nuclear weapons
now, not bows and arrows and spears. We have nuclear weapons hitched to
computers. Digital weapons of multiple sorts and mad leaders intent on
pushing us to the brink of extinction.
The United States’ instigation of the war in Ukraine against
Russia and its push for war with China are current prime examples. They
are part of the continuing vast tapestry of lies that Harold Pinter
spoke of in his 2005 Nobel Address. He said, in part:
The United States supported and in many cases engendered every
right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the
Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil,
Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and,
of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in
1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven. . . . The crimes of
the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless,
but very few people have actually talked about them.
This is still true, as John Pilger has just warned us in a powerful article: “There Is A War Coming Shrouded In Propaganda. It Will Involve Us. Speak Up”
The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or
‘neo-Nazism’ or ‘extreme nationalism,’ as you prefer. Ukraine as modern
Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan
Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded
Hitler’s ‘Jewish policy,’ which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews
slaughtered. ‘We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,’ a Banderist
pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.
Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores
of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have been paid for by the EU
and the U.S., replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who
liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.
In 2014, neo Nazis played a key role in an American bankrolled
coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused
of being “pro-Moscow.” The coup regime included prominent “extreme
nationalists” — Nazis in all but name.
The U.S. led support for this war must stop. Who will stop it?
Homer told us something quite important once upon a time, as
did many poets, artists, and writers in the twentieth-century. They
warned us of the monsters we were spawning, as Pilger says: “Arthur
Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism
was rising, often disguised, and the responsibility lay with writers
and journalists to speak out.” He rightly bemoans the absence of such
voices now, as writers have disappeared into post-modern silence, a part
of the cultural war on dissent.
On a subtler and more personal note than Homer’s tale of
revenge, we have the testimony of Albert Camus who was part of the
Resistance to the German occupation of France during WW II. At the
beginning of his beautiful, posthumous, and autobiographical novel, The First Man,
Camus tells us about Jacques Cormery (Camus), who never knew his
father, a French soldier killed in World War I – the misnamed grotesque
War to End All Wars – when Jacques was eleven months old. Years later,
when he is forty years old and horrors of WW II have concluded, Jacques
visits the cemetery in France where his father is buried. As he stands
over the gravestone in this massive field of the dead, silence engulfs
him. Camus writes:
And the wave of tenderness and pity that at once filled his
heart was not the stirring of the soul that leads the son to the memory
of the vanished father, but the overwhelming passion that a grown man
feels for an unjustly murdered child – something here was not in the
natural order and, in truth, there was no order but only madness and
chaos when the son was older than the father. The course of time was
shattering around him while he remained motionless among those tombs he
no longer saw, and the years no longer kept to their places in the great
river that flows to its end.
The tale continues, as did Camus’s, who always supported the
victims of violence despite harsh criticism from many corners, from the
left and from the right. He wrote a famous essay, “Reflections on the
Guillotine,” against capital punishment, based on his father’s
nauseating experience of seeing a man executed by the state. After
hearing this story from his grandmother, he would regularly have ”a
recurrent nightmare” that “would haunt him, taking many forms, but
always having the one theme: they were always coming to take him,
Jacques, to be executed.”
Furthermore, Camus warned us not to become murderers and
executioners and to create more victims, when he wrote a series of
essays shortly after WW II for the French Resistance paper, Combat. – Neither Victims nor Executioners. He wrote that yes, we must raise our voices:
It demands only that we reflect and then decide, clearly,
whether humanity’s lot must be made still more miserable in order to
achieve far-off and shadowy ends, whether we should accept a world
bristling with arms where brother kills brother; or whether, on the
contrary, we should avoid bloodshed and misery as much as possible so
that we give a chance for survival to later generations better equipped
than we are.
Which leads me to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and
his run for the U.S. presidency in this most dangerous time. He is a man
not scared into silence despite all the efforts to censor him.
From a very tender age he was scarred by death; is surely a
wounded warrior, not one of those who went to an actual war, but one who
had a different war forced upon him when he was nine and fourteen
years-old, when his uncle and father were assassinated by the CIA. Some
repress the implications of such memories; he has faced them and
allowed them to spur him to truth and action.
No boar gored him, nor has he slain suitors in his house,
because he has taken, not the road of revenge, but that of
reconciliation, despite having lost his father and others to demonic
government forces. This is the way of non-violence, a path unfamiliar to
most of those seeking political office.
I don’t know his inner thoughts about this, but I read his
words and actions to decipher where he is trying to take this very
violent country. He is a non-violent warrior in the spirit of Gandhi’s
truth force or satyagraha. Not a passive non-action, but an
active resistance to evil and violence. Not one seeking revenge on all
the warmongers and Covid liars (which does not preclude legal
prosecutions for crimes), but one who seeks to reconcile the warring
parties. To appeal to our higher angels and not the demons urging us to
renounce the good, but to the love that is our only hope.
I am not saying he is a pacifist. Such a term muddies the
water. He is clearly committed to the defense of the country if it were
ever attacked. But he is emphatically opposed to the endless U.S.
attacks on other countries. He knows the vicious history of the CIA. He
is a very rare political candidate committed to reconciliation at home
and abroad. He is waging peace.
Like his father Senator Robert Kennedy and his uncle, President John F. Kennedy,
he is anti-war, committed to ending the endless cycle of overseas wars
sustained by the military-industrial complex and the corporations who
feed at the trough of war spending. He opposes the policies of those
politicians who support such endless carnage, which is most of them,
including most emphatically Joe Biden. He realizes the danger of nuclear war. He tells us on his website, Kennedy24:
As President, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will start the process of
unwinding empire. We will bring the troops home. We will stop racking up
unpayable debt to fight one war after another. The military will return
to its proper role of defending our country. We will end the proxy
wars, bombing campaigns, covert operations, coups, paramilitaries, and
everything else that has become so normal most people don’t know it’s
happening. But it is happening, a constant drain on our strength. It’s
time to come home and restore this country. . . . We will lead by
example. When a warlike imperial nation disarms of its own accord, it
sets a template for peace everywhere. It is not too late for us to
voluntarily let go of empire and serve peace instead, as a strong and
healthy nation.
Those are very strong words and I am sure he means them. But he
is opposed by demonic forces within the U.S., what former CIA analyst
Ray McGovern aptly calls the
Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-MEDIA-Academia-Think-Tank
complex (MICIMATT). They run the propaganda shit show and will throw
lie after lie (have already done so) at Kennedy and exert all their
pressure to make sure he can not fulfill his promises. Their propaganda
is endless and aims to hypnotize. Pinter described it thus: “I put to
you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the
road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless it may be but it is
also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most
saleable commodity is self-love.”
It is this self-love and American exceptionalism that Bobby
Kennedy will have to counteract by emphasizing the humanity of all
people and their desire to live in peace. He will have to make it very
clear that the U.S. government’s involvement in Ukraine was never
humanitarian, but from the start was part of a plan to disable Russia.
That is was an effort to continue the Cold War by pushing closer to
Russia’s borders.
Only fools think that revenge and violence will lead to a
better world. It may feel good – and I know the feeling – to strike
back in anger, but it is only a vicious circle as all history has shown.
Revenge only brings bitterness, a cycle of recriminations and
reactions. Reconciliation is the way forward, but it can only become a
reality by an upswelling of resistance of good people everywhere to the
lies of the war-loving propagandists who are leading us to annihilation.
RFK, Jr. can not do it alone. He can lead, but we need a vast
chorus of millions of voices to resist, in Pilger’s words, “the
all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the
demands of ‘identity’.” If not, democracy will remain notional. Kennedy
is so right to say that the U.S.A. cannot be an empire abroad and
continue to be a democracy at home. Silence must be replaced with
resistance and his words made real by millions of people opposing the
killers.
Writing in another time of extremity, but writing truly, Camus, said:
At the end of this tunnel of darkness, however, there is
inevitably a light, which we already divine and for which we only have
to fight to ensure its coming. All of us, among the ruins, are preparing
a renaissance beyond the limits of nihilism. But few of us know it.
So let us fight with words and actions. As MLK, Jr. told us
about the U.S. war against Vietnam: “There comes a time when silence is
betrayal.”
GLOBAL RESEARCH
May 03, 2023
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