Death by Nationalism? – UncommonThought

[Photo: SPLC via MR Online]

By Robert C. Koehler
Supply:  CommonWonders

Robert C. Koehler

The recreation could be nearly over.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies place it this way:

“The irresolvable dilemma going through Western leaders is that this is a no-gain scenario. How can they militarily defeat Russia, when it possesses 6,000 nuclear warheads and its army doctrine explicitly states that it will use them prior to it will accept an existential armed forces defeat?”

Neither side is eager to permit go of its motivation: to shield, to expand, a piece of the entire earth, no issue what the price. The sport of conquest — the game of war, and all that arrives with it, e.g., the dehumanization of most of humanity, and the indifference to its toll on the world itself — has been going on for thousands of decades. It’s our “history.” Certainly, history is taught from war to war to war.

Wars — who wins, who loses — are the building blocks of who we are, and they have managed to consume the several counter-philosophies that crop up, these kinds of as religious belief in really like and interconnectedness, and flip them into allies. Adore thy enemy? Nah, that is foolish. Enjoy is not feasible till you defeat the devil. And, oh yeah, violence is morally neutral, as per St. Augustine and the “just war theory” he came up with sixteen hundred several years back (as I wrote about last 7 days). This created things so easy for would-be conquerors.

And that philosophy has hardened into reality: We’re quantity a single! Our empire is far better than yours! And humanity’s weaponry — its potential to battle and kill — has highly developed, from golf equipment to spears to guns to . . . uh, nukes.

Slight challenge! Nuclear weapons explain a fact we have previously been in a position to overlook: The consequences of war and dehumanization always, often, generally come house. There are no “nations,” except in our imagi-nations.

So are we stuck with all this electric power we’ve aligned against ourselves in protection of a falsehood? That seems to be the circumstance, as the war in Ukraine continues and escalates, pushing itself (and all of us) closer to Armageddon. Much of the entire world is mindful of the threat of this falsehood we even have a world wide corporation, the United Nations, that retains seeking to unite the earth, but it has no ability to drive unity (or sanity) on the planet. The destiny of all of us appears to be in the palms of a number of leaders who really have nuclear weapons, and will use them if “necessary.”

And often I anxiety the worst: that the only way these leaders will lose their energy — to acquire and maybe use their nukes — is for 1 or quite a few of them far too, oh my God, launch a nuclear war. Girls and gentlemen, we’re a break up-next selection absent from this kind of an occurrence. Seemingly, in the wake of this sort of a war — if human lifetime has survived and is equipped to start off rebuilding civilization — sanity and a perception of international wholeness may discover their way to the core of the human social framework and our collective considering, acquiring no other option, will eventually see over and above war and war preparing.

Let me drop the narrative at this position. I have no plan what is heading to occur, let on your own what’s heading to transpire “next.” I can only get to into the depths of my soul and begin praying, you may say, to each God on this earth. Oh Lords, let humanity grow up in advance of it kills by itself.

And as I pray, who shows up but the French thinker and political activist Simone Weil, who died in 1943, two years prior to the nuclear age birthed by itself, but who understood some thing was deeply incorrect? And of training course, much was presently completely wrong. The Nazis managed her state. She was equipped to flee France with her mom and dad, but she died at age 34, evidently of a mix of tuberculosis and self-hunger.

But what she remaining powering in her writing is a important pearl of consciousness. Is it way too late? Here’s in which I drop to my knees.

“Weil,” wrote Christy Wampole in a New York Moments op-ed a few many years ago, “saw in her historical moment a decline of a perception of scale, a creeping ineptitude in judgment and conversation and, in the end, a forfeiture of rational believed. She observed how political platforms currently being developed upon words and phrases like ‘roots’ or ‘homeland’ could use extra abstractions — like ‘the foreigner,’ ‘the immigrant,’ ‘the minority’ and ‘the refugee’ — to switch flesh-and-blood people today into targets.”

No human remaining is an abstraction! Is this where the rebuilding commences?

And then a tune began taking part in in my head, in my soul. The song is “Deportee,” created and sung by Woody Guthrie 75 a long time ago, right after a airplane crashed over California’s Los Gatos Canyon, killing 32 folks — largely Mexicans, remaining sent back again to Mexico since they have been either here “illegally” or their visitor worker contracts had expired. Originally, the media recognized by title only the real Individuals who died (pilot, copilot, stewardess). The relaxation have been just deportees.

Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria
You will not have your names when you ride the large plane,
All they will phone you will be “deportees.”

https://www.youtube.com/look at?v=gtigp6DA314

What does this have to do with a Doomsday Clock at 100 seconds to midnight, ongoing slaughter and nuclear powers at odds with every other in Ukraine, a world in unlimited and bloody conflict just about all over the place? I have no strategy.

Apart from, probably, this: If a nuclear war occurs, absolutely everyone on the world is no more than a deportee.

Robert Koehler, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-successful journalist and editor. His e book, Braveness Grows Solid at the Wound is accessible. Get hold of him at [email protected] or pay a visit to his web page at commonwonders.com.