|
June 2, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Bush 9/11 Scandal for Dummies
June 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
The
Strange Math of Roberto Carlos: Brazil v. Turkey
Gavin Keeney
Bush and Mies van der Rohe:
Architecture and Ideology
Jeff Halper
Sharon's
Post-Incursion Plan:
Incarceration or Transfer?
Walt Brasch
Crumpling the Constitution
May 31, 2002
Rev. Sandra Olewine
Land Grabs and Occupation:
Silent Destruction of Palestine
James Dunlop
Russian
Colonel:
"Insane But Fit for Duty"
Chomsky / Bennett
Debating "Terrorism"
May 30, 2002
Steve Perry
Jim Carrey:
"Love Me!"
Tom Turnipseed
Sex Among the Sacred
George Monbiot
Corporate
Phantoms
Web of Deciet over GM Foods
Robert Jensen
Are You a Journalist
or a Patriot?
Gary Leupp
Georgia
and the War on Terror
May 29, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Age of Inequality
Philip Farruggio
The
Cleaning Lady
Bill Christison
Disastrous US Foreign Policy:
Part 2, Globalization
May 28, 2002
Michael Leon
Lincoln
Brigades Memorial
Scott Lucas
Christopher Hitchens:
No Longer an Authentic
Voice of Dissent
Nelson P. Valdes
Castro,
Bioterrorism and
the State Department
Harvey Wasserman
What Does the White House Know
About Atomic Terror?
Norman Madarasz
France,
Brazil, the Politics
of the World Cup
May 27, 2002
Dave Marsh
Why I Voted for Nader:
Ticketmaster's Stranglehold
on Music and Politics
Robert Fisk
The Coming
Firestorm:
Bush's Crazed Remarks
May 26, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
Diary of a Northwest Trip:
Why Reds Live Longer
May 25, 2002
Chris Floyd
General
Principles:
Unmasking Colin Powell
Gavin Keeney
All Politics is Local? The Unbearable
Lightness of NGO's
Jeffrey St. Clair
A Hero
of Our Time:
Stephen Jay Gould
May 24, 2002
Edward Hammond
Documents Prove Pentagon Violated
Bioweapons Act
Mark Weisbrot
Bush
Administration Scandals:
Beginning of the End?
Feingold / Corzine
Halt Executions Nationwide
Bill Christison
Former
CIA Analyst:
Big Changes Needed in
US Intelligence Agencies
May 23, 2002
Dean Baker
Attack of the Clowns:
The Real Bush is Back
Susan Abulhawa
Israel
and South Africa:
Apartheid's Accidental Prophecy
Uri Avnery
Sharon the Great Reformer?
Behzad Yaghmaian
Travails
of a Middle Eastern Migrant: Accosted at the Border
May 22, 2002
Brian J. Foley
Dick Cheney's Obscenity
Gavin Keeney
Bete Noire
Enron & the Great Game
Fran Shor
Follow the Money
Bush, bin Laden & Carlyle
May 21, 2002
George Monbiot
Riddle
of the Spores:
The FBI and Anthrax
Yulie Khromchenko
Displaced Reality:
Impressions from Jenin
Bernard Weiner
Kenny
Boy to Bush:
"Welcome to the Club"
Ron Jacobs
Confusing the Face
of the Enemy
Gary Leupp
"War
on Terrorism" in Yemen
May 20, 2002
Rep. Ron Paul
Say No to Military Draft
Dave Marsh
Music Monopolies
Jordy Cummings
Israel, Jews and the Left
Francis Boyle
In Defense
of a Divestment
Campaign Against Israel
Christian Salmon
The Bulldozer War
Edward Said
Crisis for
American Jews
May 19, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Where's Twain's Protector Government
Now?
Norman Madarasz
Canada,
NAFTA and Kyoto
May 18, 2002
M.G. Piety
Economic Fiction:
From Here to Annuity?
Michael Colby
Bush Fiddled
While
New York Burned
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
June 2,
2002
WAR TALK
Summer Games With Nuclear Bombs
by Arundhati Roy
When India and Pakistan conducted their nuclear
tests in 1998, even those of us who condemned them, balked at
the hypocrisy of Western nuclear powers. Implicit in their denunciation
of the tests was the notion that Blacks cannot be trusted with
the Bomb. Now we are presented with the spectacle of our governments
competing to confirm that belief.
As diplomats' families and tourists disappear
from the subcontinent, western journalists arrive in Delhi in
droves. Many call me. "Why haven't you left the city?"
they ask. "Isn't  nuclear
war a real possibility? Isn't Delhi a prime target?"
If nuclear weapons exist, then nuclear
war is a real possibility. And Delhi is a prime target. It is.
But where shall we go? Is it possible
to go out and buy another life because this one's not panning
out?
If I go away, and everything and everyone
- every friend, every tree, every home, every dog, squirrel and
bird that I have known and loved - is incinerated, how shall
I live on? Who shall I love? And who will love me back? Which
society will welcome me and allow me to be the hooligan that
I am here, at home?
So we're all staying. We huddle together.
We realize how much we love each other. And we think, what a
shame it would be to die now. Life's normal only because the
macabre has become normal. While we wait for rain, for football,
for justice, the old generals and eager boy-anchors on TV talk
of first strike and secondstrike capabilities as though
they're discussing a family board game.
My friends and I discuss Prophecy,
the documentary about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The fireball. The dead bodies choking the river. The living stripped
of skin and hair. The singed, bald children, still alive, their
clothes burned into their bodies. The thick, black, toxic water.
The scorched, burning air. The cancers, implanted genetically,
a malignant letter to the unborn. We remember especially the
man who just melted into the steps of a building. We imagine
ourselves like that. As stains on staircases. I imagine future
generations of hushed schoolchildren pointing at my stainthat
was a writer. Not She or He. That.
I'm sorry if my thoughts are stray and
disconnected, not always worthy. Often ridiculous.
I think of a little mixed-breed dog I
know. Each of his toes is a different color. Will he become a
radioactive stain on a staircase too? My husband's writing a
book on trees. He has a section on how figs are pollinated. Each
fig only by its own specialized fig wasp. There are nearly a
thousand different species of fig wasps, each a precise, exquisite,
synchrony, the product of millions of years of evolution.
All the fig wasps will be nuked. Zzzz.
Ash. And my husband. And his book.
A dear friend, who's an activist in the
anti-dam movement in the Narmada valley, is on indefinite hunger
strike. Today is the fourteenth day of her fast. She and the
others fasting with her are weakening quickly. They're protesting
because the MP government is bulldozing schools, clear-felling
forests, uprooting hand-pumps, forcing people from their villages
to make way for the Man dam. The people have nowhere to go. And
so, the hunger-strike.
What an act of faith and hope! How brave
it is to believe that in today's world, reasoned, closely argued,
non-violent protest will register, will matter. But will it?
To governments that are comfortable with the notion of a wasted
world, what's a wasted valley?
The threshold of horror has been ratcheted
up so high that nothing short of genocide or the prospect of
nuclear war merits mention. Peaceful resistance is treated with
contempt. Terrorism's the real thing. The underlying principle
of the War Against Terror, the very notion that war is an acceptable
solution to terrorism, has ensured that terrorists in the subcontinent
now have the power to trigger a nuclear war.
Displacement, dispossession, starvation,
poverty, disease - these are now just the funnies, the comic-strip
items. Our Home minister says that Amartya Sen has it all wrong
- the key to India's development is not education and health
but defense (and don't forget the kickbacks, O Best Beloved).
Perhaps what he really meant was that
war is the key to distracting the world's attention from fascism
and genocide. To avoid dealing with any single issue of real
governance that urgently needs to be addressed.
For the governments of India and Pakistan,
Kashmir is not a problem, it's their perennial and spectacularly
successful solution. Kashmir is the rabbit they pull out
of their hats every time they need a rabbit. Unfortunately, it's
a radioactive rabbit now, and it's careening out of control.
No doubt there is Pakistan sponsored
cross-border terrorism in Kashmir. But there's other kids of
terror in the valley. There's the inchoate nexus between jehadi
militants, ex-militants, foreign mercenaries, local mercenaries,
underworld Mafiosi, security forces, arms dealers and criminalized
politicians and officials on both sides of the border. There's
also rigged elections, daily humiliation, "disappearances"
and staged "encounters."
And now the cry has gone up in the heartland:
India is a Hindu country. Muslims can be murdered under the benign
gaze of the state. Mass murderers will not be brought to justice.
Indeed, they will stand for elections. Is India to be a Hindu
nation in the heartland and a secular one around the edges?
Meanwhile the International Coalition
Against Terror makes war and preaches restraint. While India
and Pakistan bay for each other's blood the Coalition is quietly
laying gas pipelines, selling us weapons and pushing through
their business deals. (Buy now pay later). Britain, for example,
is busy arming both sides. Tony Blair's "peace" mission
a few months ago was actually a business trip to discuss a one
billion pound deal (and don't forget the kickbacks, O Best Beloved)
to sell Hawk fighter-bombers to India. Roughly, for the price
of a single Hawk bomber, the government could provide
one and a half million people with clean drinking water for life.
"Why isn't there a peace movement?"
western journalists ask me ingenuously. How can there be a peace
movement when, for most people in India, peace means a daily
battle: for food, for water, for shelter, for dignity? War, on
the other hand, is something professional soldiers fight far
away on the border. And nuclear war - well that's completely
outside the realm of most people's comprehension. No one knows
what a nuclear bomb is. No one cares to explain. As the Home
minister said, education is not a pressing priority. Part of
me feels grateful that most people here don't have any notion
of the horrors of nuclear war. Why should they, on top of everything
else they go through, have to suffer the terror of anticipating
a nuclear holocaust? And yet, it is this ignorance that makes
nuclear weapons so much more dangerous here. It is this ignorance,
that makes "deterrence" seem like a terrible joke.
The last question every visiting journalist
always asks me is: Are you writing another book? That question
mocks me. Another book? Right now? When it looks as though
all the music, the art, the architecture, the literature - the
whole of human civilization means nothing to the fiends who run
the world - what kind of book should I write?
It's not just the one million soldiers
on the border who are living on hair-trigger alert. It's all
of us. That's what nuclear bombs do. Whether they're used or
not, they violate everything that is humane. They alter the meaning
of life itself.
Why do we tolerate them? Why do we tolerate
these men who use nuclear weapons to blackmail the entire human
race?
Arundhati Roy
of India is the author of Power
Politics, the Booker Prize-winning novel The
God of Small Things and The
Cost of Living.She is a leading anti-war and anti-corporate
globalization activist. This commentary was first broadcast on
Radio 4's Today program in the UK.
|