Reply #78: A Nation of the DEAD: 100 million KILLED in the twentieth century

[diamond14]

I often feel that today's political discussion are really about WAR vs. Peace for America....not about Iraq or Afganistan...or Vietnam (which is VERY important to the discussion of WAR vs. Peace)...in the past few years, because of big screen movies, like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, D-day doesn't look so glorious anymore....and Vietnam is still simmering between GLORIOUS war and a complete failure...and Iraq/Afganistan looking real bad while I fear that bush* will use a nuclear bomb, and maybe several, if he is re-selected.....


Gil Eliot wrote TWENTIETH CENTURY BOOK OF THE DEAD, 1972 published by Charles Scribners Sons.

in that landmark document, Eliot looked at the evolution of WAR and population size, and the real increases in the numbers of humans on earth since 1914, coupled with the gigantic mega-increases in KILLING each other...to the point where we have arrive at TOTAL DEATH, creating a giant "Nation of the DEAD", 100 million people in the twentieth century....(with bush* on the fast-track for the twenty first century...)...

-snips-

"The world has evolved from big guns, small arms in combat, small arms in massacre, aerial bombs, ghettos, camps, sieges, occupations, dislocations, famine, blockades. Behind the weapons Eliot encountered a phenomenon more basic and more malign: the war machine evolving over the decades into a total war machine and intermittently to create areas of TOTAL DEATH: Verdun, Leningrad, Auschwitz, Hiroshima."

"The most compact, efficient, inexpensive, inexorable mechanisms of TOTAL DEATH are nuclear weapons (side note: bush* names these... Weapons of Mass Destruction). Since 1945, they have therefore come to dominate the field. "The lesson we should learn from all this", I.I.Rabi remarks, "and the frightening thing which we did learn in the course of the war (WWII) was...how easy it is to kill people when you turn your mind to it. When you turn the resources of modern science to the problem of KILLING people, you realize how vulnerable they really are."

"The change from a total-war machine capable of gouging out pockets of total death in a living landscape to a total-death machine capable of burning and blasting and poisoning and chilling the human world is Oppenheimers turn of the screw. The moral significance is inescapable. If morality refers to relations between individuals, or between the individual and society, then there can be no more fundamental moral issue than the continuing survival of individuals and societies. The scale of man-made death is the central moral as well as material fact of our time."

Eliott explains how we got to this point, refering to World WAR ONE...."The one thing that stands out overall is that at no time, before, during, or after the war, was there a living organic structure in society with sufficient strength to resist the new man-made and machine-made creation: organized death. The necessity now is to begin to dismantle the death machine. The energies rich and intelligent peoples have squandered on the elaboration of death need to be turned to the elaboration of life."

......................

....I believe it's up to us...and hopefully, pro-PEACE John Kerry can lead us, where Bill Clinton began...to dismantle the death-machine, before the blow-back KILLS us all....