India: The lingering Ayodhya dispute is a conflict between history and faith | Garga Chatterjee

The Friday Times, Issue: 06 Dec 2013

Faithless debates
by Garga Chatterjee

The lingering Ayodhya dispute is a conflict between history and faith

Some debates do not die. They remain unresolved, as they are not debates unto themselves but venting spouts for other concerns and tendencies. The strengthening and weakening of the concerns affect the vigour with which the debate is carried out.

Gujarat's High Statue Politics Has Blessings of Hindu Priests: AFP photo in Outlook Magazine

India: Patel’s communalism — a documented record | Frontline, December 13, 2013

Frontline, 13 December 2013


The J.L. Kapur Report noted at page 162, volume 1: “According to the Times of India, dated February 18, 1948, Ex. 242, Mr.... »

A cabal of self-confessed Hindu nationalists, as distinct from Indian nationalists, consistently lauds Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel because it finds in him a soulmate. He is not praised by himself; significantly, he is always pitted against

Masters of manipulation | Frontline, December 13, 2013 Cover Story

The subtext of Narendra Modi’s counterfactual about a putative Vallabhbhai Patel prime ministerial stint is the Sangh Parivar’s assumption that the destiny of the Indian “nation” has always been, and continues to be, in the direction of a Hindu “rashtra”. By SUHIT K. SEN
http://www.frontline.in/cover-story/masters-of-manipulation/article5389192.ece?homepage=true

Narendra Modi, History and myth making

http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/jugglebandhi/entry/namo-s-mythology

NaMo's mythology

Jug Suraiya

12 November 2013, 10:17 PM IST

Can Narendra Modi legitimately lay claim to the political ideology of Sardar Patel, in whose honour he's erecting a huge, 2,500-crore statue made of pieces of iron collected from all over India as a symbol of national unity?

An impassioned countrywide

The Idea of India | Renuka Rajaratnam

http://www.thehindu.com/books/books-authors/the-idea-of-india/article5335299.ece


November 10, 2013

Updated: November 10, 2013 15:44 IST




The idea of India

RENUKA RAJARATNAM






The HinduSalman Rushdie. Photo: K. Bhagya Prakash


Our literary fiction of the 1980s and 1990s endorses the Nehruvian narrative of pluralism.


“Bad times,” mused Salman Rushdie in his Imaginary Homelands,
“

India: RSS, Madani, Laxmanpur Bathe by Kuldip Nayar

From: Mainstream Weekly, 9 November 2013

RSS, Madani, Laxmanpur Bathe

Kuldip Nayar

Fundamentalism is rearing its ugly head once again. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) has openly said that it would take part in politics. On the other hand, even the liberal Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind has talked about the Muslim vote. The impending parliamentary elections may be compelling the political parties.

Indigenous Modernities: Nationalism and Communalism in Colonial India | Giorgio S HANI

Ritsumeikan Annual Review of International Studies,

2005. ISSN 1347-8214. Vol.4, pp. 87-112


Indigenous Modernities: Nationalism and Communalism in Colonial India

by Giorgio S HANI

In this paper, it is argued that colonial policies facilitated the development of

ethnicized religious communities in South Asia and that, despite the secular

credentials of its leadership, ‘India’ could not help

Narendra Modi, a modern parallel of the ruthlessly ambitious Mughal emperor Aurangzeb | Harbans Mukhia

From: The Economic Times, 12 November, 2013

Narendra Modi, a modern parallel of the ruthlessly ambitious Mughal emperor Aurangzeb

By: Harbans Mukhia



Who could imagine that Aurangzeb and Narendra Modi would have some things in common? But life surprises.

To begin with, both are Gujaratis at least by birth. Aurangzeb was born in the town of Dahod, 200 km from Ahmedabad. Modi's birthplace is

India: The pompous pracharak Narenda modi seems to be deliberatly distorting historical facts (or is he following some RSS historian)

Watch: Modi gets his facts wrong again
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/videos/news/Watch-Modi-gets-his-facts-wrong-again/videoshow/25597583.cms

Now, Modi confuses freedom fighter with Jan Sangh founder
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/now-modi-confuses-freedom-fighter-with-jan-sangh-founder/433391-37-64.html?utm_source=ref_article

Book reveiw by V. Geetha: Atheists of Madras Edited by V. Arasu | Frontline

From: Frontline, Print edition : November 1, 2013

Books
Published: October 16, 2013 12:30 IST | Updated: October 18, 2013 11:46 IST

Atheists of Madras

Author: Edited by V. Arasu
Publisher: New Century Book House, 2012
Price: Rs. 3000 for the six volumes.

On a small band of freethinkers of the old Madras province who provoked anxiety and dread in missionary and religious circles.

CPI pamphlet: Dhanwantri and PC Joshi on the 1947 Partition Killings and Communal Violence in Punjab

http://www.sacw.net/article5921.html

“Political Hinduism” & Material Culture in North India - Pika Ghosh's Review of In the Name of Krishna

From: Dissertation Reviews, May 28, 2013

“Political Hinduism” & Material Culture in North India

A review of In the Name of Krishna: The Cultural Landscape of a North Indian Pilgrimage Town, by Sugata Ray.

This study examines the consolidation of a ‘political Hinduism’ in British colonial India through the study of the material culture of the pilgrimage town of Brindaban (Vrindavan) in north

Colonial Cousins: Communalism and Nationalism in Modern India

From H-Net

Rakesh Batabyal. Communalism in Bengal: From Famine to Noakhali, 1943-1947. London: Thousand Oaks, 2005. 428 pp. $97.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7619-3335-9.

Reviewed by Anirudh Deshpande (Motilal Nehru College (E), University of Delhi)
Published on H-Asia (July, 2007)

Colonial Cousins: Communalism and Nationalism in Modern India

For readers unfamiliar with the terms in which modern

Ypsilanti Vampire May Day by PETER LINEBAUGH

Dracula
On May Day sometime in the 1890s, an ordinary Englishman boarded a train in Munich. His destination was a castle in Transylvania, a country wedged between the Danubian Provinces of Moldavia and Wallachia. It was a dark and stormy night when he arrived. “Do you not know that tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things of the world will have full sway?” asked the landlady of a nearby hotel, and she implored him to reverse his course. Other commoners then warned him it was a witch’s Sabbath. Heedless, he persisted to the castle where pure terror awaited him in the personage of a bloodsucking monster. Count Dracula was at once as smooth, polite, and persuasive as President Obama, and as terrifying, shape-shifting, and diabolical as George W. Bush. He was undead - a zombie, or a werewolf - and lived only as long as he was able to suck human blood.

As for the crisis of our own lives, in 2009 Matt Taibbi assigned blame to the banks, calling Goldman Sachs “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”1 Reverend Edward Pinkney of Benton Harbor, Michigan, referring to the Emergency Manager which was wrapped around the face of his city, said “he’s for the corporations that suck the life out of people.” Banks, insurance companies, and corporations belong to the total circuit of capitalism whence the sucking originates. When Alan Haber, the first president of SDS, spoke last winter at the Crazy Wisdom Book Shop and Tea Room in Ann Arbor about his experiences at Occupy Boston and Oc­cupy Wall Street, he concluded his remarks by reminding everybody that “Capital is dead labor, which vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”

As May Day 2012 approaches Ypsilanti, by all means let us tell stories of flowers and fertility rituals and of the ancient festivals on the commons; and let us, for sure, commemorate the great struggle for the eight-hour workday that reached a climax in Chicago at the Haymarket in May 1886, and gave birth to the holiday of workers around the planet, east and west, north and south. As the prospect of the appointment of an Emergency Manager (EM) looms over Ypsilanti—with powers to abrogate union contracts, close schools, sell public assets, expropriate municipal lands, and whose very word is law—we must also greet the day with the realistic gloom that comes from an uncertainty about health, roof, studies, and livelihood. The tooth is at our throat!

Our green parks are turned into toxic brownfields and our common lands have been laid waste as collateral for unspecified “development.” Our eight-hour work­day is lengthened by multiple part-time jobs, or by the time-consuming caretaking of elders without pensions or children without day care. Our lives now are in the grip of mysterious forces called securitization or financialization, to which we submit in dumbfounded helplessness, though the blush on our faces reminds us that these forces are but the bloodsuckers of old. Voltaire wrote that “stock jobbers, brokers, and men of business sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight … these true suckers live not in cemeteries but in very agreeable palaces.”..

Read more: http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/04/27/ypsilanti-vampire-may-day/

Family chronicles of Partition - Jamal Kidwai

"I went alone for a stroll to the nearby posh Liberty Market. I stopped at a juice shop and asked for mixed juice in Hindustani. Since there was no response from the shop owner, I asked again. He looked at me scornfully and said, ‘Agar itni Urdu jhaadni hai to Karachi mein jaake juice peo’ (If you have to talk in Urdu, then go have your juice in Karachi). That’s when I was first introduced to the term mohajir and realized the antagonism towards Urdu speaking migrants in Pakistan. I innocently told him that I was from Delhi. Suddenly the juice owner became apologetic, quickly made me a glass of juice and also refused to take any money.."

THE tragedy of the Partition can be revisited from many prisms. The most common is the brutal violence and displacement that shaped the formation of India and Pakistan. In this article I will not address that aspect; instead I want to try and sketch an anecdotal history by dwelling on incidents in my family which, in their own manner, invoke the tragedy of the Partition. These incidents, sometimes comic and at other times tragic, show how the Partition created new and largely artificial identities relating to notions of citizenship, culture, kinship, family and politics. It also shows how our understanding of these concepts became expressive, on the one hand, of a kind of common sense and, on the other, left these same concepts unresolved and unexamined.

Unlike thousands of Hindu and Muslim refugees who were forced to migrate at the time of the Partition, my family members, who belonged to the Barabanki district of the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, migrated to Pakistan voluntarily. Many of them went to the newly created Pakistan in the early 1950s because they thought there would be better opportunities of employment. They were also convinced that borders would remain soft and fluid and they would be able to carry on their connection with India through regular visits to their homeland. Several of them continued to move back and forth between Lucknow/Barabanki and Lahore/Karachi. But then came the 1971 war and things changed dramatically between the two nations. It became increasingly difficult to get visas and permission to visit India.

Through my childhood and as a teenager till the late 1980s, I went for the summer holidays to our native village in Barabanki where we were joined by Pakistani cousins. Though visas were difficult, their parents made sure that they visited our village at least once every two years. Unlike our parents and our uncles and aunts from Pakistan, my cousins and I were from a generation that was born and bought up after the Partition. In other words, we were in many ways first generation Indians and Pakistanis. We as children were also influenced by the nationalist jingoism that was a contribution of the 1971 war, in which India defeated Pakistan; cricket matches added colour to this (in those days an India win was rare).

As children we would invariably be divided into Pakistani and Hindustani groups. We would have long arguments about who would win the next war, whether Imran Khan was a better all-round cricketer than Kapil Dev; we would even divide ourselves into Indian and Pakistani teams when it came to playing cards, scrabble, cricket or antakshari. These competitions and arguments brought small but interesting victories. Like once when in the course of an argument, a Pakistani cousin pulled out a tube of Colgate toothpaste, a far slicker plastic tube than our usual Indian toothpaste which came in tin tubes and was easily rusted. He was taunting us about the quality of the toothpaste tube which, of course, proved how backward India was compared to Pakistan. At this point one of us from the Indian team noticed that ‘their’ tube had a mark ‘Made in India’. Nothing gave us more joy than that and the Pakistani team was not only defeated but was left embarrassed for the rest of the holidays. (Material wealth and consumer goods was one area where Pakistan, with its imported goods from the US, was far more ‘developed’ than India and it gave us great pleasure to puncture that aspiration.)

Ironically, the antakshari competition was always won by the Pakistani team, because they were more in tune with the old and latest film songs than us Indians. But then Hindi cinema was never considered specifically ‘Indian’. That was one shared heritage of which all of us were proud of. All year round, the Indian team would religiously collect old issues of Stardust and Filmfare for the Pakistani cousins. The other such shared heritage were the mangoes of Barabanki. The Pakistani cousins would proudly boast to us how they successfully convinced their friends back home in Pakistan that the best mangoes on earth came from Barabanki...

Read more: http://www.india-seminar.com/2012/632/632_jamal_kidwai.htm

In search of Sa'adat Hasan Manto

Every time young Sa'adat came down to Paproudi for his vacation, Ujagar Singh knew exactly what needed to be done. In the small, quiet village in Punjab's Samrala tehsil the friends had their own ritual. Grab some makki ki roti and sarson ka saag and meet at their regular hangout - the common well in fellow villager Kartar Singh's fields. Or as they fondly put it, "Kartaarey da khoo" . That was where they would bathe, eat and while away time playing football. Ujagar Singh admits his memory is rusty. He is, after all, close to a 100 years old. But when he talks about the little things he does remember, his heavily lined face further creases into a smile. "He (Manto) really liked playing football. He would get one himself. For all the years he was here, I never heard him utter a single swear word." His disjointed memories of the time he spent with his childhood friend are frequently punctuated with "Bahut hi changa banda si (he was a very fine man)."

As young kids playing in the wheat fields that surround Paproudi even today, Ujagar Singh says he never imagined his playmate Sa'adat Hasan Manto would some day become one of the greatest short story writers the Indian sub-continent had ever seen. Being unlettered, he has never read Manto. But he knows Manto was written about in the papers. He remembers nothing of the time when the writer was charged with obscenity and tried in court for six of his stories. "Maybe something like that happened. I don't know," Ujagar Singh says, the words tripping over each other as they come out of his mouth in a near-incomprehensible mumble.

In its absence, Ujagar Singh's memory mirrors that of Samrala. There is a vague sense of acknowledgement that a writer of renown once belonged to these parts. But it's easy to find vignettes of rustic Punjab in Manto's stories like 'Thanda Gosht' (Cold Meat). Gurbhajan Singh Gill, president of the Punjabi Sahit Akademi, calls Manto a "real son of the soil" . Manto's characters worked to shock and turn societal stereotypes on their heads. For example, Mozel, the Jewish woman who accepts, spurns and then dies for her Sikh admirer. Or Babu Gopi Nath, who does all he can to get a young prostituted woman married off to a rich man. Manto's accounts of the riots and violence that followed Partition are chilling yet remarkably sensitive at the same time. 'Khol Do' is one stand-out example that immediately comes to mind. 'Toba Tek Singh' , perhaps his most famous story, is a telling commentary on the madness of Partition.

Manto's treatment of sex and sexuality was something that earned him the ire of the British government as well as the rulers of Pakistan, where he had migrated to in the late 1940s. His openness and direct approach to the subject was taken for obscenity and perversion then. Today, though, he finds place even in the Delhi University syllabus, regarded as a man ahead of his times. Manto, however, did not stay in his village of birth for long. He studied in Amritsar and later moved to Bombay for work. But had Manto been around, he'd be happy to see that finally, after all these years, a small group of people are putting all their might to revive the writer in Samrala and neighbouring Ludhiana.

On May 13, two days after Manto's birth centenary , the Punjabi Lekhak Manch and the Punjabi Sahit Akademi have scheduled a seminar in Samrala , inviting the writer's three daughters from Pakistan. The Ludhiana chapter of Punjab University will also stage a play based on one of his short stories. In Malerkotla, a village about 40 km away from Samrala, an Urdu bi-monthly magazine 'Nazariya' plans to bring out a special issue dedicated to Manto. Advocate Daljeet Singh Shahi, who works in the Samrala civil court and is also president of the Punjabi Lekhak Manch, proudly points out that it's the same court where Manto's father served as subjudge years ago. A Punjabi short-story writer himself , Shahi is unhappy at the lack of recognition for Manto in Punjab today. "I feel people have forgotten him. There is very little interest in literature here," he says. Talking about the centenary celebration plans, he turns to two people waiting in his office and politely explains to them who exactly it is that is being discussed. The men have never heard the name Manto before.

http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2012-04-29/special-report/31475556_1_toba-tek-singh-partition-obscenity

See also: Saadat Hassan Manto and the partition of India —Ishtiaq Ahmed
This year marks the centenary of one of the most remarkable Urdu short-story writers of the Indian subcontinent: Saadat Hassan Manto (May 11, 1912-January 18, 1955). His contemporary, Krishan Chander (1914-1977), himself a literary icon who some critics have described as the “the imam of the Urdu short-story” graciously wrote in his obituary on Manto that indeed he was the greatest short-story writer of his generation...I will end by narrating one of my other favourites. In his, ‘Siyah Hashiye’ (Black Borders), Manto depicts an excited pro-Pakistan mob that attacks the statue on the Lahore Mall Road of the great Hindu philanthropist of Punjab, Sir Ganga Ram. One of them blackens its face with tar. Another collects old shoes, strung into a garland, and is about to put it around the statue’s neck, when the police shows up and begins firing. The man who is about to put the garland of shoes around the statue’s neck is injured. He is sent to the Sir Ganga Ram Hospital for treatment.. (The writer is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University. He is also Honorary Senior Fellow of the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.)

Book Review: Victor Serge; Memoirs of a Revolutionary

Victor Serge is one of the great men of the 20th century - and one of its great writers too. He was an anarchist, an agitator, a revolutionary, an exile, a historian of his times, as well as a brilliant novelist, and in Memoirs of a Revolutionary he devotes all his passion and genius to describing this extraordinary -and exemplary- career. Serge tells of his upbringing among exiles and conspirators, of his involvement with the notorious Bonnot Gang and his years in prison, of his role in the Russian Revolution, and of the Revolution’s collapse into despotism and terror. Expelled from the Soviet Union, Serge went to Paris, where he evaded the KGB and the Nazis before fleeing to Mexico. Memoirs of a Revolutionary recounts a thrilling life on the front lines of history and includes vivid portraits not only of Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin but of countless other figures who struggled to remake the world.


Peter Sedgwick’s fine translation of Memoirs of a Revolutionary was abridged when first published in 1963. This is the first edition in English to present the entirety of Serge’s book.

More on Victor Serge (1890–1947): He was born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich to Russian anti-Tsarist exiles, impoverished intellectuals living “by chance” in Brussels. A precocious anarchist firebrand, young Victor was sentenced to five years in a French penitentiary in 1912. Expelled to Spain in 1917, he participated in an anarcho-syndicalist uprising before leaving to join the Revolution in Russia. Detained for more than a year in a French concentration camp, Serge arrived in St. Petersburg early in 1919 and joined the Bolsheviks, serving in the press services of the Communist International. An outspoken critic of Stalin, Serge was expelled from the Party and arrested in 1929. Nonetheless, he managed to complete three novels (Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, and Conquered City) and a history (Year One of the Russian Revolution), published in Paris. Arrested again in Russia and deported to Central Asia in 1933, he was allowed to leave the USSR in 1936 after international protests by militants and prominent writers like André Gide and Romain Rolland. Using his insider’s knowledge, Serge published a stream of impassioned, documented exposés of Stalin’s Moscow show trials and of machinations in Spain, which went largely unheeded. Stateless, penniless, hounded by Stalinist agents, Serge lived in precarious exile in Brussels, Paris, Vichy France, and Mexico City, where he died in 1947. His classic Memoirs of a Revolutionary and his great last novels, Unforgiving Years and The Case of Comrade Tulayev (both available as NYRB Classics), were written “for the desk drawer” and published posthumously.
http://www.nybooks.com/books/imprints/classics/memoirs-of-a-revolutionary/

British Muslim leader faces war crimes charges in Bangladesh

One of Britain's most important Muslim leaders is to be charged with war crimes, investigators and officials have told The Sunday Telegraph: Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin, director of Muslim spiritual care provision in the NHS, a trustee of the major British charity Muslim Aid and a central figure in setting up the Muslim Council of Britain, fiercely denies any involvement in a number of abductions and "disappearances" during Bangladesh's independence struggle in the 1970s. He says the claims are "politically-motivated" and false. However, Mohammad Abdul Hannan Khan, the chief investigator for the country's International Crimes Tribunal, said: "There is prima facie evidence of Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin being involved in a series of killings of intellectuals. "We have made substantial progress in the case against him. There is no chance that he will not be indicted and prosecuted. We expect charges in June." Mr Mueen-Uddin could face the death penalty if convicted.


Bangladesh's Law and Justice Minister, Shafique Ahmed, said: "He was an instrument of killing intellectuals. He will be charged, for sure." For 25 years after independence from Britain, the country now known as Bangladesh was part of Pakistan, even though the two halves were a thousand miles apart with India between them. In 1971, Bangla resentment at the "colonial" nature of Pakistani rule broke out into a full-scale revolt. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were massacred by Pakistani troops. Mr Mueen-Uddin, then a journalist on the Purbodesh newspaper in Dhaka, was a member of a fundamentalist party, Jamaat-e-Islami, which supported Pakistan in the war. In the closing days, as it became clear that Pakistan had lost, he is accused of being part of a collaborationist Bangla militia, the Al-Badr Brigade, which rounded up, tortured and killed prominent citizens to deprive the new state of its intellectual and cultural elite.

The sister-in-law of one such victim, Dolly Chaudhury, claims to have identified Mr Mueen-Uddin as one of three men who abducted her husband, Mufazzal Haider Chaudhury, a prominent scholar of Bengali literature, on the night of 14 December 1971. "I was able to identify one [of the abductors], Mueen-Uddin," she said in video testimony, seen by The Sunday Telegraph, which will form part of the prosecution case. "He was wearing a scarf but my husband pulled it down as he was taken away. When he was a student, he often used to go to my brother in law's house. My husband, my sister-in-law, my brother-in-law, we all recognised that man." Professor Chaudhury was never seen again.

Also among the as yet untested testimony is the widow of another victim, who claims that Mr Mueen-Uddin was in the group that abducted her husband, Sirajuddin Hussain, another journalist, from their home on the night of 10 December 1971. "There was no doubt that he was the person involved in my husband's abduction and killing," said Noorjahan Seraji. One of the other members of the group, who was caught soon afterwards, allegedly gave Mr Mueen-Uddin's name in his confession. Another reporter on Purbodesh, Ghulam Mostafa, also disappeared...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/bangladesh/9204831/Leading-British-Muslim-leader-faces-war-crimes-charges-in-Bangladesh.html

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