[Dialogue] Universal Parenthood

[KroegerD@aol.com]

Published on Monday, November 22, 2004 by CommonDreams.org 
Going Nuclear: The Coming Wars with Iran and North Korea
Learning from Hiroshima and Nagasaki or the Loss of Historical Memory?

by David B. Willis and Walter W. Enloe
 
The news from Washington this past week had eerie echoes of the lead-up to 
the war in Iraq. Now that George Bush has been re-elected President what might 
we anticipate as future scenarios? If the doctrine of pre-emption is followed 
the next conflict is likely to go nuclear. 
One plausible scenario is that the Neocons will stop at nothing to bring the 
other members of the Axis of Evil to their knees. There has already been 
considerable talk along these lines following the election. The Neocons have said 
as much when they have called for imminent regime change in these countries in 
documents such as the Project for the New American Century. 
Syria might be the first step in this plan, accused of harboring the hidden 
WMDs of Saddam Hussein or insurgents from Iraq, for example. Cambodia or Laos 
all over again. An "incursion" and then a "popular uprising" will depose the 
Assad regime, which will then be shown to have colluded with Hezbollah and Iran 
in supporting "terrorism." War with Iran will follow and with it the breaking 
of the nuclear taboo. 
Other possible scripts could be triggered by preemptive strikes, the 
preeminent tool of the Neocons, on either Iranian or North Korean nuclear facilities. 
The consequences of these strikes would likely lead to the use of battlefield 
nuclear weapons as well. 
In any of the scenarios it is simply assumed that violence is the solution to 
any difficult problems the US encounters, yet there are simply not enough 
conventional forces or weapons to adequately wage war, if winning at all costs is 
the objective. This is despite the fact that Americans are spending $350-400 
billion a year on the greatest array of military power the world has ever 
seen. These resources are being spread around the globe to more than 700 bases 
being maintained by the American military. 
The figure for American defense spending is seven or eight times that of the 
next highest spenders, Russia and China, at $60 and $50 billion, respectively. 
The Axis of Evil comes in at less than a billion dollars total, but Americans 
are still scared. Perhaps what they should really be more scared of is the 
financial consequences. 
The US debt will climb to $7 trillion a year in 2004, five times the entire 
debt of the third world. Other countries, notably Japan and China, hold 
one-third of that debt. This is at a time, we might note, that the Harvard economist 
Jeffrey Sachs has proposed that the world's poverty could be eliminated with 
an investment of $150 billion. 
There is still the possibility of a peaceful rapprochement, but at this stage 
how likely will that be? Whichever of the scenarios prevails will depend on 
the will and direction of the next American government. What will these future 
scenes mean for the world if they do indeed turn nuclear? 
We need look only as far as Hiroshima and Nagasaki for the answers to this 
question. One of us grew up in Hiroshima in the 1960s, an American missionary 
child confronted, understandably, by neighboring children and even adults for 
the devastation that had been wrought by his countrymen. Later, as the principal 
of the Hiroshima International School and then in schools in Minnesota, he 
actively supported movements for world peace. 
Having brought some consciousness of our culpability in the woes of the last 
hundred years (and the past several years), we now need to invoke a healing 
image for the future. We might begin with what Jonathan Schell, in his brilliant 
book The Fate of The Earth, elaborated as the concept of universal 
parenthood. After the systematic destruction during the past century of innocent beings 
in Nanking, Guernica, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, My Lai, Israel, Gaza, 
Iraq, and now Fallujah, among others, including the World Trade Center, the very 
idea of human extinction makes all of us, whether we have children or not, 
parents of the next generation. 
First we need to remind ourselves of the messages of World War II holocausts, 
then by the past and present threats of nuclear extinction, and finally when 
human beings glimpsed a holistic image of the Earth as seen from the moon. At 
that time we saw a world increasing interdependent, complex, and changing: 
technologically, economically, culturally, ecologically. The sheer beauty of the 
living reality of Earth itself, devoid of political boundaries and cultural 
landscapes, conjures up a new sense of hope and urgency that acknowledges and 
yet transcends cultural, racial, religious, and civil differences. 
The image is one of the whole of humanity in interdependent relationship and 
intertwined with the whole of nature. It is a spiritual view of the world that 
radiates the interconnectedness of life. In this context Hiroshima's and 
Nagasaki's spirits remind us of the fragility of human and natural ecosystems and 
of the fact that the apocalyptic problems our planet faces, other than natural 
disasters and direct encounters with physical fragments of the universe, are 
specifically human problems. 
What also characterizes the past hundred years is a paradox of the human 
spirit and human conduct. Hope remains. Through an image of Earth as seen from the 
moon to planetary satellites, global communication, ecological and economic 
interdependencies, and through organizations like the United Nations and our 
fragile Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we have a greater sense of the 
interconnectedness of the world's people and places. 
In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, days before his 1968 assassination, 
"The world is more and more of a neighborhood. But is it any more of a 
brotherhood? If we don't learn to live together as brothers and sisters, we shall 
perish together as fools." 
David Blake Willis, Professor of Cultural Studies at Soai University, Osaka, 
Japan, has published research on globalization, transnational societies, and 
creolization. Walter Enloe is a Professor of Education at Hamline University, 
St. Paul, Minnesota, USA. He is a founding member of the 1000 Cranes peace 
project and the former headmaster of the Hiroshima International School. 


Dick Kroeger
65 Stubbs Bay Road
Maple Plain, MN 55359
952-476-6126