Bicycle bombs to Bollywood - immigration and identity

Kaushik Barua: ULFA brought a number of valid concerns into the national debate.. But they also lined up rows of non-Assamese speaking villagers and shot them in cold blood. They sent bicycles with bombs into markets every week, almost like a routine, for well over a decade. They would blow up a market, kill people while they were walking their dogs, invade New Year parties and slaughter guests..

My first act of vandalism was also my last. I painted four two-foot letters across a row of cars. ULFA. It was an act that I would refer to later to understand a lot of the people I see around me now. I was seven years old in the late 1980s and my hometown Guwahati in the state Assam, in the northeast corner of India, was awash with support for the banned insurgent outfit, ULFA: the ambitiously named United Liberation Front of Assam. We saw them as the Robin Hoods of our times: the ones who stood up for a minority ethnicity, the Assamese, against the monolith of the Indian state. They protested the step-sisterly treatment meted out by the Centre who took our tea and our oil and left us with barely anything: tea estates rolling across the hills and not a single decent job for any Assamese.

However there was another crucial strand to the resurgence of Assamese identity. This was not an identity built solely on opposition, but also on exclusion. Therefore, Assamese-speaking people were okay, the non-Assamese speaking tribes in the state had uncertain status, and the enemy in the region was clearly picked out: the Bangladeshi infiltrators. These were the mostly low-income refugees from across the border. The myth of a Bangladeshi invasion of Assam was built into Assamese victimhood. An uncaring centre looked away as we were being taken over by starving economic migrants from the south. A surprisingly articulate slogan was also attributed to them: “We took East Pakistan by partition, Bangladesh by revolution, now we’ll take Assam by migration”. Under these four letters, I had also painted “Bangladeshis, get out”.

So the marginalised in the Indian context, the Assamese, were also the oppressors of the further marginalised on our own territory. This other-ing of the Bangladeshi was built on the myths that all discrimination is built on. They had the long beards, unlike Assamese Muslims. They wore those ridiculous wraps, their lungis. They could not speak Assamese. In fact they couldn’t even speak Bengali like the true Bengalis, our Indian version. They stayed in dirty slums and reproduced like animals. They could have been the aliens from District 9; an alien species suddenly right in our faces.

The ULFA brought a number of valid concerns into the national debate. Issues of developing the north-east, improving infrastructure, agricultural productivity, institutions of higher education for the region were finally being discussed. The ULFA stayed in the woods or camped for months in the jungles of Burma; everyone had a cousin or a friend of a cousin who knew their commanders. They died valiant deaths in a shower of bullets when the police and army—which committed unspeakable atrocities under the guise of counter-terrorism—found their camps.

But they also lined up rows of non-Assamese speaking villagers and shot them in cold blood. They sent bicycles with bombs into markets every week, almost like a routine, for well over a decade. They would blow up a market, kill people while they were walking their dogs, invade New Year parties and slaughter guests in kneeling rows. The army would pick up any teenager, or group of teenagers, they could find. For most of the 1990s, teenage boys couldn’t meet in groups of more than three in the open, or they might be picked up as suspected insurgents. In most towns, all you could do in the evenings was play chess.

Among all this chaos, we didn’t forget the original enemy: the Bangladeshi (India had receded in public imagination as enemy number one, except the Indian state represented by repressive security forces). We even had a separate word for them,Mian, which didn’t apply to other Muslims or often to the Bangladeshi Hindus. I went to Delhi, like all my friends who had the grades and could afford university. About five years after I had first moved away, though visits back home were frequent through the year, I spent some time in a new rural settlement testing a poverty assessment questionnaire. I knew the young kids were all Bangladeshi settlers: there are ways of telling differences that could potentially make us all racists. But now, they were all dressed like I would have been as a child, they had adopted the same rituals, they spoke Assamese with the comfort of a native speaker, using metaphors and cultural references of the region more often than I would. I asked them where they were from, since I had to fill out the columns on my form. They all said Assam. And it was true...

Now my wife and I are settled in Rome. Most of the low-income street vendors are Bangladeshi. We often talk to them. Assamese and Bengali are similar languages and we can understand each other perfectly. We often get discounts or special offers in the grocery stores. Our entire supply of Bollywood movies is from a Bangladeshi store where the manager is more up-to-date on the latest movies than we are... People in Europe are quivering at the thought of being invaded by the north African and Asian hordes. The ones with the beards and the tall-minaret mosques. Meanwhile in Italy, some legislators are trying to restrict access to medical care for unregistered immigrants.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/openindia/kaushik-barua/bicycle-bombs-to-bollywood-immigration-and-identity

The Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955

"In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them."

Max Born

Percy W. Bridgman

Albert Einstein

Leopold Infeld

Frederic Joliot-Curie

Herman J. Muller

Linus Pauling

Cecil F. Powell

Joseph Rotblat

Bertrand Russell

Hideki Yukawa

IN the tragic situation which confronts humanity, we feel that scientists should assemble in conference to appraise the perils that have arisen as a result of the development of weapons of mass destruction, and to discuss a resolution in the spirit of the appended draft. We are speaking on this occasion, not as members of this or that nation, continent, or creed, but as human beings, members of the species Man, whose continued existence is in doubt. The world is full of conflicts; and, overshadowing all minor conflicts, the titanic struggle between Communism and anti-Communism.

Almost everybody who is politically conscious has strong feelings about one or more of these issues; but we want you, if you can, to set aside such feelings and consider yourselves only as members of a biological species which has had a remarkable history, and whose disappearance none of us can desire. We shall try to say no single word which should appeal to one group rather than to another. All, equally, are in peril, and, if the peril is understood, there is hope that they may collectively avert it.

We have to learn to think in a new way. We have to learn to ask ourselves, not what steps can be taken to give military victory to whatever group we prefer, for there no longer are such steps; the question we have to ask ourselves is: what steps can be taken to prevent a military contest of which the issue must be disastrous to all parties?

The general public, and even many men in positions of authority, have not realized what would be involved in a war with nuclear bombs. The general public still thinks in terms of the obliteration of cities. It is understood that the new bombs are more powerful than the old, and that, while one A-bomb could obliterate Hiroshima, one H-bomb could obliterate the largest cities, such as London, New York, and Moscow.

No doubt in an H-bomb war great cities would be obliterated. But this is one of the minor disasters that would have to be faced. If everybody in London, New York, and Moscow were exterminated, the world might, in the course of a few centuries, recover from the blow. But we now know, especially since the Bikini test, that nuclear bombs can gradually spread destruction over a very much wider area than had been supposed.

It is stated on very good authority that a bomb can now be manufactured which will be 2,500 times as powerful as that which destroyed Hiroshima. Such a bomb, if exploded near the ground or under water, sends radio-active particles into the upper air. They sink gradually and reach the surface of the earth in the form of a deadly dust or rain. It was this dust which infected the Japanese fishermen and their catch of fish. No one knows how widely such lethal radio-active particles might be diffused, but the best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race. It is feared that if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death, sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration.

Many warnings have been uttered by eminent men of science and by authorities in military strategy. None of them will say that the worst results are certain. What they do say is that these results are possible, and no one can be sure that they will not be realized. We have not yet found that the views of experts on this question depend in any degree upon their politics or prejudices. They depend only, so far as our researches have revealed, upon the extent of the particular expert's knowledge. We have found that the men who know most are the most gloomy.

Here, then, is the problem which we present to you, stark and dreadful and inescapable: Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war? People will not face this alternative because it is so difficult to abolish war.

The abolition of war will demand distasteful limitations of national sovereignty. But what perhaps impedes understanding of the situation more than anything else is that the term "mankind" feels vague and abstract. People scarcely realize in imagination that the danger is to themselves and their children and their grandchildren, and not only to a dimly apprehended humanity. They can scarcely bring themselves to grasp that they, individually, and those whom they love are in imminent danger of perishing agonizingly. And so they hope that perhaps war may be allowed to continue provided modern weapons are prohibited.

This hope is illusory. Whatever agreements not to use H-bombs had been reached in time of peace, they would no longer be considered binding in time of war, and both sides would set to work to manufacture H-bombs as soon as war broke out, for, if one side manufactured the bombs and the other did not, the side that manufactured them would inevitably be victorious.

Although an agreement to renounce nuclear weapons as part of a general reduction of armaments would not afford an ultimate solution, it would serve certain important purposes. First, any agreement between East and West is to the good in so far as it tends to diminish tension. Second, the abolition of thermo-nuclear weapons, if each side believed that the other had carried it out sincerely, would lessen the fear of a sudden attack in the style of Pearl Harbour, which at present keeps both sides in a state of nervous apprehension. We should, therefore, welcome such an agreement though only as a first step.

Most of us are not neutral in feeling, but, as human beings, we have to remember that, if the issues between East and West are to be decided in any manner that can give any possible satisfaction to anybody, whether Communist or anti-Communist, whether Asian or European or American, whether White or Black, then these issues must not be decided by war. We should wish this to be understood, both in the East and in the West.

There lies before us, if we choose, continual progress in happiness, knowledge, and wisdom. Shall we, instead, choose death, because we cannot forget our quarrels? We appeal as human beings to human beings: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest. If you can do so, the way lies open to a new Paradise; if you cannot, there lies before you the risk of universal death.

We invite this Congress, and through it the scientists of the world and the general public, to subscribe to the following resolution: "In view of the fact that in any future world war nuclear weapons will certainly be employed, and that such weapons threaten the continued existence of mankind, we urge the governments of the world to realize, and to acknowledge publicly, that their purpose cannot be furthered by a world war, and we urge them, consequently, to find peaceful means for the settlement of all matters of dispute between them."
http://www.pugwash.org/about/manifesto.htm
http://www.pugwash.org/about.htm
Hiroshima City Peace Appeal 2011
http://www.pcf.city.hiroshima.jp/declaration/English/2011/index.html
Nagasaki City Peace Declaration 2011
http://www1.city.nagasaki.nagasaki.jp/peace/english/appeal/
Mini Atomic bomb exhibit:
http://www1.city.nagasaki.nagasaki.jp/peace/english/minimini/index.html
Big Banks funding nuclear bombs
http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.in/2012/03/banks-in-front-line-of-nuclear-arms.html

Sri Lanka, thirty one years after: Burning of the Jaffna Public Library, May 1981

Destroying a Symbol: the checkered History of Sri Lanka’s Jaffna Public Library 
by Rebecca Knuth: 

Despite (or, in some cases, because of) modern revulsion for book burning, the destruction of libraries in the last century has continued unabated. My new book, Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction probes the dynamics of library destruction and devotes significant attention to the disturbing phenomenon of ethnic biblioclasm.. Seeing themselves as defenders of a beleaguered people, extremist groups (such as religious nationalists), execute book and library destruction as a high-stake, high-affect tactic in battles over clashing belief systems. With their own community sanctioning their actions, perpetrators operate with relative impunity. Extremism, however, breeds extremism. In Sri Lanka, the destruction (by the Sinhalese) of the Jaffna Public Library, the Tamil minority’s primary cultural institution, led to full-scale civil war. The shattered library served and still serves as a symbol of violation and ethnic violence..

The Jaffna Public Library began as the private collection of the scholar K.M. Chellapha, who began lending books from his home in 1933. In 1934, a committee set up a formal library, with Chellapha as secretary. Initially, 1000 books, newspapers, and journals were kept in a single room, but soon the collection was shifted into a building on Jaffna’s main street and was opened to subscribers. The library was so popular that a cross-section of prominent members of the community began raising
funds to build a permanent, modern building. A noted architect designed the new building, and prominent Indian librarian S.R. Ranganathan served as an advisor to ensure that the library was held to international standards. Educated members of the community donated books. The main building opened in 1959. The children’s section and an auditorium were added later. The collection became well known internationally and was popular with Sinhalese and Tamil intellectuals, as well as the general public. It became the major repository for all known literary source materials of the Tamil people. By 1981, it had almost 100,000 Tamil books and rare, old manuscripts and documents, some written on dried palm leaves and stored in fragrant sandalwood boxes.


Burnt shell of the post event library
Some books were literally irreplaceable: the Yalpanam Vaipavama, a history of Jaffna, was the only existing copy. The library held miniature editions of the Ramayana epic, yellowing collections of extinct Tamil-language newspapers, and microfilms of important documents and records of the Morning Star, a journal published by missionaries in the early twentieth century (“Civilization and Culture…” 2003). It held historical scrolls, works on herbal medicine, and the manuscripts of prominent intellectuals, writers, and dramatists.  Indeed, one could think of the Jaffna Library as a national library even though a Tamil nation had not yet come into being...

The Sinhalese claimed power in Sri Lanka on both demographic and ideological grounds. Their destiny as an ethnic group was inseparable from their religious beliefs. Though Buddhists are generally perceived as pacifists, the Sinhalese believed that their charge of preserving the “true” Theravada Buddhism justified violent measures. Post colonial antiWestern sentiments fueled Buddhist nationalist claims that the Sinhalese jatiya (race or nation) had been weakened by the influence of Christianity, modern lifestyles, and foreign commerce. Throughout the 1970s, ethnic conflict was aggravated by the breakdown of traditional norms and the population’s frustration with inflation and economic problems.

Authoritarian measures used to maintain control pitted the government not only against the Tamils but also against civil society, liberalism, and moderation in general. United National Party (UNP) politicians and merchants hired gangs of “thugs” (a term that was common parlance in Sri Lanka) and used state-owned buses to transport them to sites where they broke up political meetings and protests and harassed opposition parties, trade unions, workers, and public employees. The thugs threatened judges, artists, and writers. They beat up Sri Lanka’s best known dramatist Ediriweera Sarachchandra, who had satirized the decay of cultural values brought on by the government’s policies. No one was ever prosecuted or arrested for these attacks. Rather, paramilitaries and the police were empowered by legislation that outlawed “terrorism,” which was the word used to describe dissent in any form.

A renewed sense of national pride grew alongside of an opposition to pluralism. Buddhist nationalism was constructed in direct opposition to the Tamils who were viewed as as “parayo”--foreign inferiors who had to be controlled or cast out if catastrophic disorder was to be avoided. Buddhist extremists promoted the notion that Buddhism was under attack by the Hindu Tamils, who dominated the northern part of the country and the city of Jaffna. “Threat” was magnified by the existence of  millions of Tamils in nearby India. The Sinhalese propaganda recast the Sri Lankan Tamils as longstanding enemies and the Sinhalese as chronically having had to fend off Tamil invasions. The violence that erupted was cyclical: when the Tamils balked at Sinhalese-only and other discriminatory policies, whether through peaceful protests or isolated terrorism, the Sinhalese government and people responded in a “mood of savage paranoia”.

The Sinhalese targeted the Tamils in violent riots in 1956, 1958, and 1977. These riots were similar to pogroms in that they were semi-organized and instigated as a frenzied response to atrocity stories and rumors that spread quickly and elicited first horror and then retribution. Systematic discrimination plus mob violence in turn radicalized many Tamils. During the 1970s, a budding culture of resistance, expressed first through literature, became increasingly politicized. In 1973, at its 12th Convention, the major Tamil political party, the Federal Party, invoked the recognized principle of the right to self-determination and resolved that the Tamils were fully qualified to be regarded as a separate Nation by virtue of their language, culture, history, and territory. In the second half of the 1970s, civil disobedience by Tamils increased. Youth groups embraced terrorism as a method of self-defense and viewed themselves as engaging in a holy war against the Sinhalese state. They confronted the government with guerilla tactics and through murder and robbery. They were not well organized, but the desire for a separate state had moved from the “lunatic fringes” into the center of Tamil political calculations and events were building to a showdown.

Flashpoint arrived in Jaffna in 1981 during long-awaited elections in which Tamils hoped to redress a lack of political representation. The Sinhalese UNP party, however, was determined to control the results and sent a contingent of police, paramilitaries, and thugs to intimidate Tamil voters. On Sunday, May 31, the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) held a rally at which three Sinhalese policeman were shot, two fatally. That night the Sinhalese police and paramilitaries began a pogrom that lasted three days. The TULF headquarters was burned, as were the offices and press of the Tamil language newspaper. Statues of Tamil cultural and religious figures were defaced and demolished. A Hindu temple and over one hundred Tamil-owned shops and homes were looted and torched. Four Tamils were taken from their homes and killed. Late on the first night, eyewitnesses saw uniformed police and Sinhalese gang members set fire to the Jaffna Public Library. Two Sinhalese Cabinet members who watched it burn from the verandah of the nearby Jaffna Rest House claimed that it was “an ‘unfortunate incident,’ where a ‘few’ policeman ‘got drunk’ and went on a ‘looting spree,’ all on their own”.

National newspapers did not cover the event or the pogrom that accompanied it. Sinhalese politicians expressed no regrets and used subsequent parliamentary discussion to drive home the message sent by the library’s destruction: if the Tamils were unhappy, they should leave Sri Lanka and return to their homeland, India. The Tamils reacted to the loss of the building and collection with intense grief. Immediately afterwards, a journalist found a “heartbroken” local lecturer wandering through rooms thickly carpeted with half-burnt pages: He quoted him as saying “The Sinhalese were jealous of the library”. Twenty years later, the mayor of Jaffna, Nadarajah Raviraj, still grieved at the recollection of the flames he saw as a college student. For the Tamils, the devastated library became an icon of the “physical and imaginative violence” of Sinhalese extremists...

Read more: http://archive.ifla.org/IV/ifla72/papers/119-Knuth-en.pdf

Also see: Sri Lanka's historic Jaffna library 'vandalised' (November 2010):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-11668352
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffna_Library

A comment by Rohini Hensman: An excellent article, I like it very much. There are just two nuances where I would have put things differently. The author says that 'one could think of the Jaffna library as a national library, even though a Tamil nation had not yet come into being.' But I think it WAS a national library in a multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic Sri Lanka, and the loss of it was a loss for Sri Lankan culture as a whole. There is not the gulf between Sinhala and Tamil that has been created by nationalists on both sides. For example, of the major Tamil epics, several (I think five) are Buddhist ones, contrary to the usual view that all Buddhists are and always were Sinhala-speaking. Also I would not use 'the Sinhalese' in such a sweeping way ('the Sinhalese claimed power')- many Sinhalese did not see Sri Lanka as a Sinhalese nation!..

Books on the burning of books:
Rebecca Knuth (2003), Libricide: The Regime-Sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century. New York: Praeger.
Rebecca Knuth (2006), Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction. New York: Praeger.

America's deadly devotion to guns

There are around 90 guns for every 100 Americans yet, despite 85 fatal shootings a day, the mighty US gun lobby is as powerful as ever. It would be easy to ridicule the NRA. Billboards for its national convention all around St Louis promise "acres of guns and gear". In the exhibition hall they are giving two free guns, twice a day, to anyone wearing a sticker that says "Ambush", and they are selling semi-automatics in pink camouflage. One of the most powerful lobbying organisations in the country and deeply embedded in the Republican party, the NRA still calls itself the country's oldest civil rights organisation.

But America's relationship with guns is as deep and complex at home as it is perplexing abroad. The fact that most British police are not armed confounds even the most liberal here. And even though the nation is evenly split on whether there should be more gun control, every time there is a gun-related tragedy, whether it is the shootings in Arizona, Virgina Tech or any number of schools, the issue has been effectively removed from the electoral conversation. And at the centre of these apparent contradictions stands the NRA, once an organisation that represented the rights of hunters and sportsmen and now a major political player closely linked to the gun industry.

"All the domestic controversies of the Americans at first appear to a stranger to be incomprehensible or puerile," suggested the 19th-century French chronicler Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America. "And he is at a loss whether to pity a people who take such arrant trifles in good earnest or to envy that happiness which enables a community to discuss them."

But guns in America are no trifling matter. There are approximately 90 guns for every 100 people in the US (a rate almost 15 times higher than England and Wales). More than 85 people a day are killed with guns and more than twice that number are injured with them. Gun murders are the leading cause of death among African Americans under the age of 44. And the NRA is no joke. Claiming gun ownership as a civil liberty protected by the second amendment, it opposes virtually all gun control legislation. It claims more than 4 million members, has a budget of more than $300m and spent almost $3m last year – when there were no nationwide elections – on lobbying.

The second amendment to the US constitution reads: "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." There has long been a dispute about whether "the people" described refers to individuals or the individual states. But there is no disagreement about its broader intent, which is to provide the constitutional means to mount a military defence against a tyrannical government...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/16/americas-deadly-devotion-guns

Correspondence between Werner Heisenberg & Robert Jungk, author of "Brighter Than a Thousand Suns"

NB: Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (1956), by Robert Jungk, is the first published account of the Manhattan Project and the German atomic bomb project. It studied the making and dropping of the atomic bomb from the view of the atomic scientists. The book is largely based on personal interviews with the people who played a leading part in the construction and deployment of the bombs. Here are some exchanges he had with the famous German physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1956-57. 


An extract: Jan. 18th, 1957; 
Dear Dr. Jungk!
Many thanks for your letter, asking me to write in a little more detail about my Copenhagen conversations with Bohr during WWII. In my memory which may, of course, deceive me after such a long time, the conversation roughly unfolded the following way. My visit to Copenhagen took place in the fall of 1941; I seem to remember that it was about the end of October. At that time, as a result of our experiments with uranium and heavy water, we in our "Uranium Club" had come to the following conclusion: It will definitely be possible to build a reactor from uranium and heavy water which produces energy. In this reactor (based on a theoretical work by v. Weizsäcker) a decay product of 239-uranium will be produced which just like 235-Uranium is a suitable explosive in atomic bombs. We did not know a process for obtaining of 235-Uranium with the resources available under wartime conditions in Germany, in quantities worth mentioning. Even the production of nuclear explosives from reactors obviously could only be achieved by running huge reactors for years on end. Thus we were quite clear on the fact that the production of atomic bombs would be possible only with enormous technical resources.


So we knew that in principle atomic bombs could be built, although we estimated the necessary technical effort to be even rather larger than in the end it turned out to have been. This situation seemed to us to be an especially favorable precondition as it enabled the physicists to influence further developments. For, had the production of atomic bombs been impossible, the problem would not have arisen at all; but had it been easy, then the physicists definitely could not have prevented their production. The actual givens of the situation, however, gave the physicists at that moment in time a decisive amount of influence over the subsequent events, since they had good arguments for their administrations - atomic bombs probably would not come into play in the course of the war, or else that using every conceivable effort it might yet be possible to bring them into play.


That both kinds of arguments were factually fully justified was shown by the subsequent development; for, in fact, the Americans could not employ the atomic bomb against Germany any more. In this situation we believed that a talk with Bohr might be of value. This talk then took place on an evening walk in the city district near Ny-Carlsberg. Because I knew that Bohr was under surveillance by German political operatives and that statements Bohr made about me would most likely be reported back to Germany, I tried to keep the conversation at a level of allusions that would not immediately endanger my life. The conversation probably started by me asking somewhat casually whether it were justifiable that physicists were devoting themselves to the Uranium problem right now during times of war, when one had to at least consider the possibility that progress in this field might lead to very grave consequences for war technology.


Bohr immediately grasped the meaning of this question as I gathered from his somewhat startled reaction. He answered, as far as I can remember, with a counter-question "Do you really believe one can utilize Uranium fission for the construction of weapons?" I may have replied "I know that this is possible in principle, but a terrific technical effort might be necessary, which one can hope, will not be realized anymore in this war." Bohr was apparently so shocked by this answer that he assumed I was trying to tell him Germany had made great progress towards manufacturing atomic weapons. In my subsequent attempt to correct this false impression I must not have wholly succeeded in winning Bohr's trust, especially because I only dared to speak in very cautious allusions ( which definitely was a mistake on my part) out of fear that later on a particular choice of words could be held against me. I then asked Bohr once more whether, in view of the obvious moral concerns, it might be possible to get all physicists to agree not to attempt work on atomic bombs, since they could only be produced with a huge technical effort anyhow.


But Bohr thought it would be hopeless to exert influence on the actions in the individual countries, and that it was, so to speak, the natural course in this world that the physicists were working in their countries on the production of weapons. For an explanation of this answer one has to include the following complication which, although it was not talked about as far as I can remember, but of which I was conscious, and which may also have been on Bohr's mind, consciously or unconsciously. The prospect of producing atomic bombs while at war was at the time immeasurably greater on the American side than on the German, due to the whole prior history. Since 1933 Germany had lost a number of excellent German physicists through emigration, the laboratories at universities were ancient and poor due to neglect by the government, the gifted young people often were pushed into other professions. In the United States, however, many university institutes since 1932 had been given completely new and modern equipment, and been switched over to nuclear physics. Larger and smaller cyclotrons had been started up in various places, many capable physicists had immigrated and the interest in nuclear physics even on the part of the public was very great.


Our proposition that the physicists on both sides should not advance the production of atomic bombs, was thus indirectly, if one wants to exaggerate the point, a proposition in favor of Hitler. The instinctive human position "As a decent human being one cannot make atomic weapons" thus coincided with an advantage for Germany. How far this was influencing Bohr, I cannot know of course. Everything I am writing here is in a sense an after the fact analysis of a very complicated psychological situation, where it is unlikely that every point can be accurate. - I myself was very unhappy over this conversation. The talk was then resumed a few weeks or months later by Jensen, but was equally unsuccessful. Even now, as I am writing this conversation down, I have no good feeling, since the wording of the various statements can certainly not be accurate anymore, and it would require all the fine nuances to accurately recount the actual content of the conversation in its psychological shading.. Read more: http://werner-heisenberg.unh.edu/Jungk.htm


Also see: “Copenhagen” Play Portrays Bohr and Heisenberg. It is not often that a play comes along that is based on solid research in the history of science. It is even rarer that such a play becomes a considerable public success, while at the same time receiving high acclaim from historians of science and scientists alike. Michael Frayn’s play “Copenhagen,” based on the uncertainties surrounding the 1941 meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in German-occupied Copenhagen, is such a play. It has already played for nearly two years in London, has been extremely well received in several other European cities, and recently opened in New York City. The play has been published as a book in England and is forthcoming in the US. The book includes a “Postscript” in which Frayn explains why he wrote the play along with a competent discussion of some of the main historical issues involved. The Postscript shows that Frayn is not satisfied with showing the play, he also encourages discussion of it:

http://www.aip.org/history/newsletter/spring2000/copenhagen.htm

Annihilation as world religion

Estimated Global Military Spending Since Jan 1, 2012: $368,630,653,693
(That's three hundred and sixty-eight billion dollars plus in 14 weeks, and counting..)
Estimated costs to provide the following-
Shelter for every human being: $21,000,000,000
Eliminate ALL Starvation and Malnourishment: $19,000,000,000
Clean Safe Water for every human being: $10,000,000,000
Eliminate ALL Nuclear Weapons: $7,000,000,000
Eliminate ALL Landmines: $4,000,000,000
Eliminate ALL Illiteracy: $5,000,000,000
Relief for Refugees everywhere: $5,000,000,000
Stabilize Human Population Growth: $10,500,000,000
Prevent Soil Erosion Globally: $24,000,000,000
http://www.ppu.org.uk/indexStuff/indexmilex.html

Peace Pledge Union: http://www.ppu.org.uk/indexa.html

Rise in international arms transfers is driven by Asian demand, says SIPRI: India was the world’s largest recipient of arms, accounting for 10 per cent of global arms imports. The four next largest recipients of arms in 2007–2011 were South Korea (6 per cent of arms transfers), Pakistan (5 per cent), China (5 per cent) and Singapore (4 per cent). ‘Major Asian importing states are seeking to develop their own arms industries and decrease their reliance on external sources of supply,’ said Pieter Wezeman, senior researcher with the SIPRI Arms Transfers Programme. ‘A large share of arms deliveries is due to licensed production.’ China shifts from imports to exports: China, which was the largest recipient of arms exports in 2002–2006, fell to fourth place in 2007–11. The decline in the volume of Chinese imports coincides with the improvements in China’s arms industry and rising arms exports. Between 2002–2006 and 2007–11, the volume of Chinese arms exports increased by 95 per cent. China now ranks as the sixth largest supplier of arms in the world, narrowly trailing the United Kingdom. ‘While the volume of China’s arms exports is increasing, this is largely a result of Pakistan importing more arms from China’, said Paul Holtom, director of the SIPRI Arms Transfers Programme. ‘China has not yet achieved a major breakthrough in any other significant market...
http://www.sipri.org/media/pressreleases/rise-in-international-arms-transfers-is-driven-by-asian-demand-says-sipri
Also see: China's presence grows in murky world of arms trading


And: The global financing of nuclear weapons:

Albert Camus: 'Neither Victims nor Executioners'

"What with the general fear of a war now being prepared by all nations and the specific fear of murderous ideologies, who can deny that we live in a state of terror? We live in terror because persuasion is no longer possible; because man has been wholly submerged in History.."


"Our twentieth century is the century of fear... To come to terms, one must understand what fear means: what it implies and what it rejects. It implies and rejects the same fact: a world where murder is legitimate, and where human life is considered trifling. This is the great political question of our times, and before dealing with other issues, one must take a position on it..."


"Let us, then, admit that our refusal to legitimise murder forces us to reconsider our whole idea of Utopia. This much seems clear: Utopia is whatever is in contradiction with reality. From this standpoint, it would be completely Utopian to wish that men should no longer kill each other. That would be absolute Utopia. But a much sounder Utopia is that which insists that murder be no longer legitimised. Indeed, the Marxian and the capitalist ideologies, both based on the idea of progress, both certain that the application of their principles must inevitably bring about a harmonious society, are Utopian to a much greater degree..."



Albert Camus: 1913-1960
NB: Although Camus fought during the Second World War in the Resistance and would not have considered himself a pacifist, all his writing displays a concern with the problem of killing - suicide and murder, different aspects of the same 'encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe'. In his essays, novels and plays he grappled with the problem of the individual caught in history's illogical web, and it was man and humanity that he affirmed. The world had seen enough of men and women dying for causes; it was time to live for one. 'Neither Victims nor Executioners' appeared serially in the autumn of 1946 in Combat, the daily newspaper of the Resistance.


Neither Victims nor Executioners:
The seventeenth century was the century of mathematics, the eighteenth that of the physical sciences, and the nineteenth that of biology. Our twentieth century is the century of fear. I will be told that fear is not a science. But science must be somewhat involved since its latest theoretical advances have brought it to the point of negating itself while its perfected technology threatens the globe itself with destruction. Moreover, although fear itself cannot be considered a science, it is certainly a technique. The most striking feature of the world we live in is that most of its inhabitants - with the exception of pietists of various kinds - are cut off from the future. Life has no validity unless it can project itself toward the future, can ripen and progress. Living against a wall is a dog's life. True - and the men of my generation, those who are going into the factories and the colleges, have lived and are living more and more like dogs.


This is not the first time, of course, that men have confronted a future materially closed to them. But hitherto they have been able to transcend the dilemma by words, by protests, by appealing to other values which lent them hope. Today no one speaks any more (except those who repeat themselves) because history seems to be in the grip of blind and deaf forces which will heed neither cries of warning, nor advice, nor entreaties. The years we have just gone through have killed something in us. And that something is simply the old confidence man had in himself, which led him to believe that he could always elicit human reactions from another man if he spoke to him in the language of a common humanity. We have seen men lie, degrade, kill, deport, torture - and each time it was not possible to persuade them not to do these things because they were sure of themselves and because one cannot appeal to an abstraction, i.e. the representative of an ideology.


Mankind's dialogue has just come to an end. And naturally a man with whom one cannot reason is a man to be feared. The result is that - besides those who have not spoken out because they thought it useless - a vast conspiracy of silence has spread all about us, a conspiracy accepted by those who are frightened and who rationalise their fears in order to hide them from themselves, a conspiracy fostered by those whose interest it is to do so. 'You shouldn't talk about the Russian culture purge - it helps reaction.' 'Don't mention the Anglo-American support of Franco - it encourages communism.' Fear is certainly a technique.


What with the general fear of a war now being prepared by all nations and the specific fear of murderous ideologies, who can deny that we live in a state of terror? We live in terror because persuasion is no longer possible; because man has been wholly submerged in History; because he can no longer tap that part of his nature, as real as the historical part, which he recaptures in contemplating the beauty of nature and of human faces; because we live in a world of abstractions, of bureaus and machines, of absolute ideas and of crude messianism. We suffocate among people who think they are absolutely right, whether in their machines or in their ideas. And for all who can live only in an atmosphere of human dialogue and sociability, this silence is the end of the world. To emerge from this terror, we must be able to reflect and to act accordingly. But an atmosphere of terror hardly encourages reflection. I believe, however, that instead of simply blaming everything on this fear, we should consider it as one of the basic factors in the situation, and try to do something about it. No task is more important...


Read the full essay: http://www.ppu.org.uk/e_publications/camus1.html

Review of Albert Camus's Algerian Chronicles// PDF of his famous essay, Reflections on the Guillotine

A Final Warning by George Orwell

'In our world their will be no emotions except fear, rage and triumph: the sex instinct will be eradicated we shall abolish the orgasm, there will be no loyalty except to the party.. but always there will be the intoxication of power always at every moment there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless…, If you want to imagine the future; imagine a boot stepping on a human face forever. The moral of this story is.. don’t let it happen.' Eric Arthur Blair, (George Orwell) was born in Motihari, Bihar, on 25 June 1903, and died in London on 21 January 1950

Diego Garcia: the Chagos Islands 40 years on remain a black mark on Britain

By 1973, the entire indigenous population of the Chagos Islands was forcibly deported to Mauritius, to make way for a US military base. This month marks the fortieth anniversary of an outrage committed under wraps by the British, still fighting to prevent the return of the Chagossians. 

Thirty years ago today, Argentina invaded the Falklands (Malvinas) Islands, sparking a 74-day war with Britain. While less in the headlines, this month also marks the 40th anniversary of the establishment of the US military base on Diego Garcia, the largest island of the British Indian Ocean Territories comprising the Chagos Archipelago. At the time of each event, the islands had settled populations of British subjects numbering around 2,000 each. It is salutary to mark the anniversary of the first by setting out the background of the second.

Diego Garcia is the largest island of the Chagos Archipelago situated about 5,000 nautical miles from London in the Indian Ocean. Until 1966 the archepelago was part of the self-governing British colony of Mauritius, when it was purchased for the princely sum of £3 million as part of the Mauritian independence settlement. The terms of the purchase allow for return to Mauritian sovereignty 'when the islands are no longer needed for defence purposes' Historically, there are many documented sightings by Western navigators (notably Spanish and Portuguese) dating back to the 1500's, together with various transient settlements as early as the late 18th century. Diego Garcia became a British colony following the Napoleonic wars, as part of the treaty of Paris in 1814. By the 1960's the population could claim continuous settlement dating back to at least the mid-nineteenth century (the same kind of time span as the Falkland Islanders), most notably - and convincingly - from inscriptions on their ancestral tombstones.

The eviction of the Chagossians: At the height of the Cold War the search was on for a US military base location capable of facilitating control of the main Indian Ocean shipping lanes and the approaches to the Persian and Arabian Gulfs. In 1961, by arrangement with the UK Foreign Office, this search brought Rear Admiral Grantham of the US Navy to Diego Garcia to survey its suitability. The visit was the precursor to a series of secret, jointly planned events and agreements that would, by 1973, see the entire indigenous population of the Islands dispossessed and forcibly deported to Mauritius over 1,000 miles away. John Pilger described the attitude of British officialdom throughout the period as one of "imperious brutality and contempt" for the Chagossians, a description amply evidenced in his award winning 2004 documentary "Stealing a Nation" and in official documents subsequently released by the UK and US governments.

Terms for a US lease on the prospective military base area were negotiated and agreed at $1 per year. They required the islands to be 'swept and sanitised' so as to be handed over uninhabited. In return, the UK was to receive continued support for its so-called 'independent nuclear deterrent' and a £14 million discount on the supply of its submarine launched Polaris ICBM system. As part of its 1968 UN mandated independence demands and in ignorance of the US/UK negotiations, Mauritius agreed to sell the archipelago to the UK. It became the new 'British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT).

The deal was thus completed and the torment of the Chagossians began.

From then onward, the Islanders were subject to what amounted to officially sanctioned psychological warfare... Read more: 

http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/peter-presland/chagos-islands-40-years-on-remain-black-mark-on-britain


Also see: https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Falklands_and_Chagos_-_A_Tale_of_Two_Islands#cite_note-19 


and Paradise cleansed
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2004/oct/02/foreignpolicy.comment
There are times when one tragedy, one crime tells us how a whole system works behind its democratic facade and helps us to understand how much of the world is run for the benefit of the powerful and how governments lie: John Pilger

Turkish Prime Minister Warns Attack On Iran Would Be 'Disastrous'

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan warned over the weekend that an Israeli strike on Iran would have "disastrous" consequences for the Middle East, likely sparking a regional war, Turkish newspapers reported on Sunday. Turkey is a major U.S. ally in the region and Erdogan indicated that he had expressed his concerns to President Barack Obama. Erdogan was quoted by the Turkish daily Hurriyet as warning against the "disastrous" outcome of a possible Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear facilities, saying: "The entire region would be devastated if Israel strikes Iran." Erdogan also criticized the international community for keeping mum on Israel's alleged nuclear weapons, while threatening Iran over what he said was a peaceful nuclear program., "Israel has between 250 to 300 nuclear warheads. Nobody is discussing that," Erdogan said, adding: "Iran says they would not produce nuclear weapons. They are saying that they would produce a specific amount of enriched uranium rods and stop after that."


Turkey is set to host a new round of diplomatic talks between Iran and a group of world powers -- the U.S., France, Britain, China, Russia, and Germany -- beginning on April 13. On Monday, Russia's foreign minister also strongly warned against a military attack on Iran, saying that a pre-emptive strike would violate international law. Sergey Lavrov said on a visit to Armenia that an attack on Iran would destabilize the region.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/02/iran-attack-turkey-erdogan_n_1397331.html

Former Iran negotiator says nuclear deal possible.

An end to a nearly decade-long nuclear standoff between Iran and major world powers will be possible if the United States and its European allies recognize Tehran's right to enrich uranium, a former Iranian negotiator said in an editorial.

"Talks between Iran and the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council plus Germany (P5+1), scheduled for next month, provide the best opportunity to break the nine-year deadlock over Iran's nuclear program," Hossein Mousavian, Iran's former chief nuclear negotiator, wrote in an editorial in the Boston Globe. Mousavian, now a visiting scholar at Princeton University in New Jersey, had been seen as a moderate when in the Iranian government. Although he is not currently a policymaker, such public presentations of Iranian thinking is rare. Iran says its nuclear program is peaceful and rejects U.S. and European allegations that it is secretly amassing the capability to produce atomic weapons. Iran has rejected Security Council demands that it halt enrichment and other sensitive nuclear work, saying it has a sovereign right to atomic energy.

Book Review: A Concentration Camp Diary

David Koker’s fate was in many ways no different from that of the nearly 6 million other Jews who died in the Holocaust. The eldest son of an Amsterdam jeweler, he was arrested by Dutch police in February 1943 and transported to Vught, a concentration camp built by the Nazis in the southern Netherlands. After being shuffled between other camps, he died on the way to Dachau in early 1945, where he was buried in a mass grave at the age of 23.

Before he died, however, Koker authored what may be the most extraordinary diary ever written inside a concentration camp. “In my opinion, it’s considerably more interesting than Anne Frank’s diary,” said Michiel Horn, a historian and the book’s translator. At the Edge of the Abyss: A Concentration Camp Diary, 1943-1944, was first published in Dutch in 1977 as Diary Written in Vught. Despite immediately being recognized as a classic in the Netherlands, it has never seen publication in English, until now.

David Koker
Part of what makes At the Edge of the Abyss so astonishing is that it survived at all. As the historian Robert Jan van Pelt writes in the book’s introduction, “While the number of postwar memoirs written by Holocaust survivors is enormous, and the number of diaries and notebooks written during the Holocaust by Jews while they were at home, or in a ghetto, or in hiding is substantial, the number of testimonies that were written in the inner circles of hell, in the German concentration camps, and that survived the war is small.” Those few that do exist are often fragmentary, and nearly all lack Koker’s extraordinary powers of observation and analysis.

Koker began his diary on Feb. 12, 1943, the day after he was arrested along with his parents and his younger brother. A published poet and budding intellectual at the time of his capture, he insisted on diarizing for nearly an entire year. As the teacher of the many children interned in Vught, he ingratiated himself with the chief camp clerk and his wife, which provided him with a relatively privileged position. In addition to keeping a diary, he was also able to write and receive letters, some of which are excerpted in the book.

In January of 1944, one of the civilian employees of a corporation that operated a workshop in Vught smuggled Koker’s diary out of the camp and gave it to his best friend, Karel van het Reve, who then gave it to David’s younger brother Max, who survived Auschwitz and received it upon his return to Amsterdam after the war. It was passed on to the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, where an employee transcribed it.

Max was reluctant to publish the diary for fear of its impact on his mother, who also survived Auschwitz but never emotionally recovered from the death of her husband and son. Still, David’s former high-school teacher, Prof. Jacob Presser, saw its value and quoted from it extensively in his history of the Holocaust in the Netherlands, published in 1965. Finally, Reve, who had become a famous Dutch intellectual by the mid-1960s, published the diary with just a few notes and an introduction.

Diary Written in Vught was instantly appraised as being of enormous value. “A single book can earn a writer a permanent place in literature, but to do that it has to be exceptional,” one critic wrote. “I do not think that, after reading the book, anyone will dispute that Diary Written in Vught fulfills that condition.” A popular Dutch public television show focused an episode on David, following Max, Karel, and others as they visited Vught, with readings from the diaries interspersed throughout. The book went through two printings within its first year of publication, appeared in magazine format for high-school students in 1985, and in an expanded edition with an epilogue by Max, in 1993. Determined to see an English translation of the book, Max approached a contact at the Anne Frank House, who put him in touch with Jan van Pelt, who in turn approached Northwestern University Press.

Three things mark At the Edge of the Abyss as an utterly distinctive and unique work of Holocaust literature that must be read now that an English-language translation exists. First, the insider account of a camp; second, Koker’s literary and analytic abilities; and third, the only first-person report of an encounter between a Jew and Heinrich Himmler, head Nazi and overseer of all the camps. On Feb. 4, 1944, Koker records that on the previous day he had looked directly at the man responsible for the Final Solution. The haunting entry reads as follows:

"A slight, insignificant-looking little man, with a rather good-humored face. High peaked cap, mustache, and small spectacles. I think: If you wanted to trace back all the misery and horror to just one person, it would have to be him. Around him a lot of fellows with weary faces. Very big, heavily dressed men, they swerve along whichever way he turns, like a swarm of flies, changing places among themselves (they don’t stand still for a moment) and moving like a single whole. It makes a fatally alarming impression. They look everywhere without finding anything to focus on."

What makes this passage remarkable is not just the fact of the encounter but Koker’s careful, emotionally attuned attention to detail. Koker notices not just Himmler but the deference of his supplicants. He observes with nonchalance, as if he were encountering not a genocidal murderer—and the person who keeps Koker in a concentration camp—but an ordinary man on the street.

Read more: http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/95282/life-inside-the-camps/?all=1


See also: http://www.kamparchieven.nl/en/participants-/netherlands-institute-for-war-documentation-niod