[Reader-list] The 64th Anniversary Of USA Terrorism Enlightened By The Wisdom of Nonviolence By Eileen Fleming (fwd from Countercurrents.org)

[Venugopalan K M]

The 64th Anniversary Of USA Terrorism Enlightened By The Wisdom of Nonviolence

By Eileen Fleming

02 August, 2009
Countercurrents.org

This August 6th and 9th mark the 64th anniversary of the most brutal
acts of terrorism upon innocent people; America's atomic bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

On Armistice Day, 1948 General Omar Nelson Bradley warned, "We live in
a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants, in a world that has
achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. We have
solved the mystery of the atom and forgotten the lessons of the Sermon
on The Mount. We know more about war than we know about peace, more
about dying than we know about living."

In 1995, from Ashkelon Prison, Mordechai Vanunu noted: "A radioactive
cloud consumed rubbed out Hiroshima...A live nuclear test sentenced
you. A nuclear laboratory…children women trees animals in and under a
nuclear mushroom…burning… burned…flattened to ground radioactive
ash-Hiroshima...Nuclear weapons gamblers win against you…Hollywood
doesn't know you - you are not a Jewish Holocaust." [1]

A little history:

At 2:45 AM, on August 6, 1945, an American B-29 bomber flew north from
Tinian Island toward Japan. Three and a half hours later, the Enola
Gay dropped "Little Boy" an 8,900-pound atomic weapon upon civilians
in Hiroshima and leveled almost 90% of the city. On August 9, "Fat
Man" was dropped on Nagasaki, and one third of that city was
destroyed.

"Little Boy" was fuelled by highly enriched uranium-235 and generated
a destructive force of about 15 kilotons—the equivalent of 15,000 tons
of TNT. "Fat Man" consisted of a plutonium core surrounded by high
explosives wired to explode simultaneously and yielded a 22 kiloton
explosion.

As a child, I could not comprehend how my country could cold bloodedly
target and murder Japanese citizens in order to 'save' American lives,
which was the lame response I always received from every adult I
questioned as to why after what we did to Hiroshima did we do it again
to Nagasaki?

If THAT DAY, we call 9/11 taught us anything, it should be that
America's nuclear arsenal cannot defeat 'terrorism' or provide
security from the actions of a few violent mad men who target and
murder innocent ones.

American money is imprinted with "IN GOD WE TRUST" but reality is we
have become a nation of hypocrites, for by our foreign policy we
expose that we live by the sword.

America has a nuclear arsenal of over 10,000 weapons and nearly 2,000
remain on hair-trigger alert ever since the end of the Cold War.

An estimated 150 – 240 tactical nuclear weapons remain based in 5 NATO
countries and the United States is the only country with nuclear
weapons deployed on foreign soil.

American taxpayers provide over $54 billion annually to maintain
WMD's, which is but a drop in the bucket of the overall U.S. military
spending. The U.S. is also a co-conspirator in international nuclear
apartheid and major collaborator in Israel's INEFFECTIVE policy of
nuclear ambiguity.

In April 2004, and just three days after Vanunu was released from 18
years in jail for providing the photographic proof and telling the
truth about Israel's clandestine seven story underground WMD Program
in the Negev, Uri Avnery wrote:

"Everybody understands that he has no more secrets. What can a
technician know after 18 years in jail, during which technology has
advanced with giant steps?

"But gradually it becomes clear what the security establishment is
really afraid of. Vanunu is in a position to expose the close
partnership with the United States in the development of Israel's
nuclear armaments.

"This worries Washington so much, that the man responsible in the
State Department for 'arms control', Under-Secretary John Bolton, has
come to Israel in person for the occasion. Vanunu, it appears, can
cause severe damage to the mighty super-power.

"The Americans, it seems, are very worried. The Israeli security
services have to dance to their tune. The world must be prevented by
all available means from hearing, from the lips of a credible witness,
that the Americans are full partners in Israel's nuclear arms program,
while pretending to be the world's sheriff for the prevention of
nuclear proliferation."[2]

On July 29, 2009, Archbishop Edwin F. O’Brien of Baltimore gave a
keynote talk at the first Deterrence Symposium, hosted by U.S.
Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.

He said, "Our world and its leaders must stay focused on the
destination of a nuclear-weapons-free world and on the concrete steps
that lead there…[and] that deterrence, in the words of the U.S.
bishops, is not 'a long-term basis for peace' …the spread of nuclear
weapons and technology to other nations, and the threat of nuclear
terrorism, which cannot be deterred with nuclear weapons, point to the
need to move beyond nuclear deterrence as rapidly as
possible…Religious leaders, prominent officials, and other people of
goodwill who support a nuclear-weapons-free world are not naïve about
the task ahead. They know the path will be difficult and will require
determined political leadership, strong public support, and the
dedicated skills of many capable leaders and technical experts. But
difficult is not impossible.” [3]

The Archbishop outlined several concrete steps toward total nuclear
disarmament supported by the Catholic Church, including the Nuclear
Test Ban Treaty, negotiations on a Fissile Material Cut-Off Treaty,
and the revision of military doctrines of nuclear weapon states to
“renounce the first use of nuclear weapons” and “declare they will not
be used against non-nuclear threats.”[Ibid]

In Hiroshima on May 2008, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Mairead Maguire said:

"We live in an insecure, uncertain world; it is also a time of
opportunity. It is a time to put aside many of the old ways and with
creativity and imagination, develop new thinking, ideas, institutions,
etc. Young people and women will help this process; they know that
Nuclear weapons belong to the cold war thinking, and can never be
used. To do so, would be immoral, illogical and destroy the
Environment.

"They know our real problems, are: Poverty, Environment, unethical
globalization, abuse of Human Rights and International Laws, gender
inequality, ethnical/political conflict, State and paramilitary acts
of terror…They know that spending trillions on weapons that can never
be used, while each day over 30,000 children die of preventable
disease, is immoral and unacceptable.

"We are all aware that we are living in an increasing Culture of
violence, and if we are to survive we need to build a Culture of
Non-violence. Choosing not to kill another human being is the greatest
contribution each of us can make to peace. This is not a hard choice
when through prayer, meditation, morality, or logic, we come to
realize that our lives are sacred as is the life of all our brothers
and sisters, and there are always alternatives to violence which work.
Human beings are evolving and there is a new consciousness that we
must choose non-violence and build strong relationships and
community." [4]

On May 17, 2009, Mairead prevailed on seventeen Nobel laureates to
sign a letter called the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Declaration. Her friend,
author and Jesuit priest John Dear wrote of that day:

"Released in Hiroshima, it calls upon world leaders, and all people,
to eliminate nuclear weapons. And it warns that unless humanity fails
in that endeavor, 'the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki' will be
repeated. Such weapons, [Mairead] says, belong to the tragic past.
They belong to a time when the world lacked the wisdom to realize that
each culture needs the other to survive.

"Governments which still hold such weapons violate the prohibition of
war in the UN charter. But more than that, she says, they’re operating
anachronistically. They’re out of touch with the insights of the
times. Nowadays our enemies aren’t across the border. The enemies of
humanity today are poverty, environmental destruction, militarism, and
war.

"Our security nowadays lies in nonviolence and love. She insists that
we all need to heed the wisdom of nonviolence and apply it
institutionally, internationally, globally and concluded in The Vision
of Peace, 'Everyone of us has a role to play in the creation of a new
culture of nonviolence.'" [5]

2009 is the final year in the United Nations Decade of Creating a
Culture of Nonviolence for All the Children of the World. America is
on the record in the UN as abstaining from voting because to support
such an initiative would make it "too hard for us to go to war."

Many Americans live under the delusion that the USA is a Christian
nation. If that were true, we would lead the way in nuclear
disarmament and abolish war.

John Dear also wrote:

"Contrary to what the Pentagon tells us, that our God is not a god of
war, but the God of peace; not a god of injustice, but the God of
justice; not a god of vengeance and retaliation, but the God of
compassion and mercy; not a god of violence, but the God of
non-violence; not a god of death, but the living God of life.

"[And then] we discover a new image of God. As we begin to imagine the
peace and non-violence of God; we learn to worship the God of peace
and non-violence; and in the process, become people of peace and
non-violence.

"The one thing we can say for sure about Jesus is that he practiced
active, public, creative non-violence. He called us to love our
neighbors; to show compassion toward everyone; to seek justice for the
poor; to forgive everyone; to put down the sword; to take up the cross
in the struggle for justice and peace; to lay down our lives, to risk
our lives if necessary, in love for all humanity, and most of all, to
love our enemies. His last words to the community, to the church, to
us, as the soldiers dragged him away, could not be clearer or more to
the point: "Put down the sword."

"That's it. We are not allowed to kill. That's why they run away; they
realize he is serious about non-violence…Jesus dies on the cross
saying, "The violence stops here in my body, which is given for you.
You are forgiven, but from now on, you are not allowed to kill:

"Violence doesn't work. War doesn't work. Violence in response to
violence always leads to further violence. Those who live by the sword
will die by the sword. Those who live by the bomb, the gun, the
nuclear weapon, will die by bombs, guns and nuclear weapons. You reap
what you sow. The means are the ends. What goes around comes around.
War can not stop terrorism because war is terrorism. War only sows the
seeds for future wars.

"Underneath this culture of war and injustice is a sophisticated
spirituality of violence, a spirituality of war, a spirituality of
empire, a spirituality of injustice that has nothing to do with the
living God or the Gospel of Jesus. [Ibid]

Jesus is best known as The Prince of Peace and when he told Nicodemus,
that you must be born again to enter the kingdom of heaven, he was not
talking about an emotional high, but a TRANSFORMATION of heart and
mind to wake up and see The Divine in ALL people and all of creation.

Every August 6th in the Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, and Anglican
churches, there is a celebration of the Feast of the Transfiguration
of Jesus, an event reported in the synoptic gospels in which Jesus
became radiant having undergone a metamorphosis; a transformation.

In 2008, at the National Press Club, Rev. Dr. John Chryssavgis,
Theological Advisor to the Ecumenical Patriarch on Environmental
Issues, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America addressed President
Bush's agenda known as COMPLEX TRANSFORMATION:

"The question is not how much more sophisticated our plants and
weapons can become, but how serious we are as a nation to lead the
world with an alternative vision which interprets power differently
and promotes peaceful coexistence globally.

"Complex Transformation is the Bush administration proposed plan to
restructure the nation's nuclear weapons infrastructure. The
administration's goal is to consolidate existing nuclear facilities
while increasing the capacity to produce material for new nuclear
weapons.

"According to a report jointly released by the Energy Department (DOE)
on January 10, 2008, the administration seeks an annual production
capacity of 80 plutonium pits (read: triggers for new nuclear bombs)
as a result of the transformation.

"The main justification for the program is the perceived need for a
more adaptable and responsive nuclear infrastructure to react to
unnamed future threats."[6]

The Wisdom of Nonviolence

"The God of peace is never glorified by human violence… The radical
truth of reality is that we are all one." –Thomas Merton

Gandhi's non-violence was a political tactic that evolved from the
inner realization of spiritual unity within himself. Gandhi studied
all the world's religions and after attending many churches, he
remarked that Christianity was a great religion and all Christians
should "TRY IT!"

The problem is not with Christianity, but that too few who claim to be
have taken The Sermon on The Mount as their manifesto and live lives
that express that God is Love and God Loves All.

"Love is not the starving of whole populations. Love is not the
bombardment of open cities. Love is not killing......Our manifesto is
the Sermon on the Mount, which means that we will try to be
peacemakers." -Dorothy Day

"The wisdom of non-violence teaches that war is not the way to follow
Jesus. War is not the will of God. War is never justified. War is
never blessed by God. War is not endorsed by any religion. War is the
very definition of mortal sin. War is demonic, evil, anti-human,
anti-life, anti-God, and anti-Christ." [7]

"In all of earth’s sixty-five-million-year history, we are living in
the most dangerous of times. The fact that a bomb was dropped on
Hiroshima and two hundred thousand lives were vaporized within twenty
minutes has not prevented man from dreaming up more ways to fill space
with weapons of mass destruction. We were not created for militarism,
but to turn our swords into plowshares. We have arrived here today by
no accident. We have been summoned by the universe to claim the
highest common ground. As the Dali Lama said, the radicalism of our
age is to be compassionate human beings. We have been called to bring
love and compassion back into the equation and assist others to
connect with the deepest parts of themselves. Now is the time to
realize, as never before, that when any of us suffer, we all suffer.
All life is interconnected, interdependent, and greatly loved by the
creator, the sustainer of the universe. We are called by love, for
love, and to love.”- Franciscan Fr. Louis Vitale, July 20, 2005,
Berkeley, California at TIKKUN’s first annual conference for spiritual
progressives. [8]

>From Ashkelon prison in 1987, Mordechai Vanunu asked:

"Any country, which manufactures and stocks nuclear weapons, is first
of all endangering its own citizens. This is why the citizens must
confront their government and warn it that it has no right to expose
them to this danger. Because, in effect, the citizens are being held
hostage by their own government, just as if they have been hijacked
and deprived of their freedom and threatened…when governments develop
nuclear weapons without the consent of their citizens - and this is
true in most cases - they are violating the basic rights of their
citizens, the basic right not to live under constant threat of
annihilation…Is any government qualified and authorized to produce
such weapons?"

On April 5, 2009, President Obama stood on the world stage amongst
thousands of flag-waving Czechs and spoke of good humor, home town
Chicago, the will of the people over tanks and guns, old conflicts,
revolution, moral leadership as the most powerful weapon, iron
curtains that fell and the state of 21st century nuclear weapons:

"We are here today because enough people ignored the voices who told
them that the world could not change. We're here today because of the
courage of those who stood up and took risks to say that freedom is a
right for all people, no matter what side of a wall they live on, and
no matter what they look like. We are here today because the simple
and principled pursuit of liberty and opportunity shamed those who
relied on the power of tanks and arms to put down the will of a
people.

"Some argue that the spread of these weapons cannot be stopped, cannot
be checked -– that we are destined to live in a world where more
nations and more people possess the ultimate tools of destruction.
Such fatalism is a deadly adversary, for if we believe that the spread
of nuclear weapons is inevitable, then in some way we are admitting to
ourselves that the use of nuclear weapons is inevitable.

"As the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United
States has a moral responsibility to act…It will take patience and
persistence. But now we, too, must ignore the voices who tell us that
the world cannot change. We have to insist, "Yes, we can."

"There is violence and injustice in our world that must be confronted.
We must confront it by standing together as free nations, as free
people. I know that a call to arms can stir the souls of men and women
more than a call to lay them down. But that is why the voices for
peace and progress must be raised together.

"Let us honor our past by reaching for a better future. Let us bridge
our divisions, build upon our hopes, and accept our responsibility to
leave this world more prosperous and more peaceful than we found it.
Together we can do it.

"Words must mean something [and] violence and injustice must be
confronted by standing together as free nations, as free people…[and]
Human destiny will be what we make of it."[9]

To this day, the USA and Israel claim to be peace seekers and democracies.

"Israel is a not a democracy but is an Ethnocracy, meaning a country
run and controlled by a national group with some democratic elements
but set up with Jews in control and structured to keep them in
control.”-Jeff Halper, American Israeli, Founder and Coordinator of
ICAHD/Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and a Noble Peace
Prize Nominee for 2006.

To this day Vanunu remains an open air prisoner captive in occupied
east Jerusalem denied the right to leave the Jewish State. What
Vanunu's Freedom of Speech trial exposed since it began on January 25,
2006 is that the Israeli SECURITY System controls the Israeli Ministry
of Justice. [Learn more: Vanunu Archives @ WeAreWideAwake.org]

To this day, Tel Aviv persists to attempt to deflect its egregious
transgressions of international law and human rights abuses aided and
abetted by well funded publicity campaigns, an AIPAC beholden Congress
and an American media that has failed at its commission to seek and
report all sides of a story when in comes to the now 42 years of
military occupation of Palestine.

In April 1999, thirty-six members of the House of Representatives
signed a letter calling for Vanunu's release from prison because they
believed "we have a duty to stand up for men and women like Mordechai
Vanunu who dare to articulate a brighter vision for humanity."

President Clinton responded with a public statement expressing concern
for Vanunu and the need for Israel and other non-parties to the
Non-Proliferation Treaty to adhere to it and accept IAEA safeguards.

However, ever since the silence had been deafening, until hope
resurrected in Prague:

"Words must mean something [and] violence and injustice must be
confronted by standing together as free nations, as free people…Human
destiny will be what we make of it."-President Obama

"You cannot talk like sane men around a peace table while the atomic
bomb itself is ticking beneath it. Do not treat the atomic bomb as a
weapon of offense; do not treat it as an instrument of the police.
Treat the bomb for what it is: the visible insanity of a civilization
that has ceased...to obey the laws of life."- Lewis Mumford, 1946

"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think
we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends...I believe that as soon
as people want peace in the world they can have it. The only trouble
is they are not aware they can get it…You're just left with yourself
all the time, whatever you do anyway. You've got to get down to your
own God in your own temple. It's all down to you, mate...All we are
saying is give peace a chance...All you need is love...Imagine all the
people living life in peace. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not
the only one. I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will be as
one...Reality leaves a lot to the imagination."-John Lennon

"If you are not apart of the solution; you are apart of the
problem."-Eldridge Cleaver

Learn more and please and thanks for doing something:

http://www.paxchristiusa.org/newsletters/
October2008NewsletterWeb.pdf

http://www.wearewideawake.org/index.php?
option=com_content&task=view&id=660&Itemid=175

1. http://vanunu.com/poems/mvpoemhiroshima.html

2. http://www.fromoccupiedpalestine.org
/taxonomy/term/226

3. www.usccb.org/sdwp/international/n. The full text of Archbishop
O’Brien’s talk, “Nuclear Weapons and Moral Questions: The Path to
Zero,” uclearzero.shtml.

4. http://peacepeople.com

5. http://www.fatherjohndear.org/articles
/Nobel_Laureates.html

6. http://www.faithfulsecurity.org/
html/complex_transformation.html

7. http://www.fatherjohndear.org/speeches
/thomas_merton_wisdom.htm

8. eileen fleming, KEEP HOPE ALIVE, page 156

9. http://wearewideawake.org/index.php?option=com_
content&task=view&id=1247&Itemid=219

Eileen Fleming, A Feature Correspondent for Arabisto.com and Founder
of WeAreWideAwake.org Author of "Keep Hope Alive" and "Memoirs of a
Nice Irish American 'Girl's' Life in Occupied Territory"Producer "30
Minutes with Vanunu" and "13 Minutes with Vanunu"



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