We must not allow messengers of sanity to be silenced by threats of ‘might is right’ brigade
DR MUNJED Farid Al Qutob writes from London (Irish
Independent, Letters, June 24) to lament that “we have not learned the lessons of war – the world has never changed since the dreadful conflicts of WWI and II”.
Indeed, it seems the only thing that changes is the elaboration of our technologies of mass murder and the sophistication of our PR-agenda delivery systems to induce the naive to sacrifice themselves, and the selected enemies of the warmongers on all sides; and increasingly the innocent civilian populations who have become the collateral damage in the logistical calculus of the bean-counters of our war econometrics.
Dr Al Qutob calls for “collective co-ordination” to combat this collective lunacy and I, for one, suspect he is spot on, even as the current crop of armchair-general geniuses surrounding that paragon of wisdom in the Oval Office strain their leashes for yet more lucrative “war, war” against Venezuela and Iran in their drive for “full spectrum dominance”.
Totalitarianism by any other name is as malodorous to democracy as the strains suppressed by the earlier global wars of the 20th century, which history recognises as the collisions of megalomaniac empires intent on their own unilateralist diktat of who’s might is more right.
One thing is sure; as long as we allow the messengers of sanity, whether Assange, Snowden, Manning, Khashoggi or our own Maurice McCabe be silenced by intimidation or other weaponised means, and refrain from standing collectively for a system run on other premises than that of the military muscle-men and their embedded bullyboys, the slide towards return to the primordial mushroom soup (with radio-activated condiments) will continue to accelerate.
We could start by returning to our once-honoured stance of strict neutrality in more than lip-service mode; and put a ban on all military traffic through our air, sea or land territories, and reduction of our investments in technologies known to be driven by the mercenary war industries who blind-eye all human consequences to their greed for profiteering.
A lead will not be given by those states who have a history of finding war beneficial; something most Irish people, whatever our contributions to foreign empire-building, seem to still acknowledge.
Any change will have to be initiated by an informed and mobilised public; it will not be trickling down from our “betters”.