Message #94134

[Bianca]

Ignorance and fear

The nuclear-threat story the news agencies are now spinning about Iran would be a much harder sell were the American public aware of some very simple facts: such as which countries in the world have nukes already, how they got them and why they have been allowed to keep them. None of this is classified information. It is accessible to every American, and it is common knowledge among the educated classes across the globe. But for lack of this knowledge many among the US public are seriously considering Washington’s insane talk about an Iraq Redux in Iran. If knowledge is power, here is a case where the lack of it could mean unthinkable global catastrophe.

How ready would the man-on-the-street be to support Bush’s latest saber-rattling if he knew that Iran, Washington’s latest bogeyman, is a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty; whereas Israel, with its 200 nuclear warheads, is not? It is doubtful that very many Americans, obediently quaking in their boots right now about Iran, have given a moment’s thought to the fact that India, too, has refused to sign the treaty, has conducted tests with its nukes and used them to threaten its neighbors—all with Washington’s tacit permission, extended this summer in a round of nuclear deal-making backed up by ever-more-tortured White House explanations. The fact that Pakistan, also well-stocked with nukes but still the great good friend of Uncle Sam, is the main proliferator of these weapons to “rogue regimes” is so ironic, given all the hoopla about Iran, as to read as dark comedy.

The elephant-in-the-room in this whole scenario—the one fact that we never hear in media discussions of the matter, yet the one that fairly screams in the silence—is that the USA itself is, of course, the only power that has used the A-bomb (13); the one country whose nuclear arsenal dwarfs the combined arsenals of every other country in the world; and the one government whose leadership in nuclear disarmament—were it to choose that course—could actually make a difference in ending the arms race. Instead, American tax dollars are at the moment being spent on designs for a whole new generation of these lethal monsters, a program which the Democrats—who differ with the Bush regime only in strategy, not in geopolitical goals—have just signed off on this past August. It is a fact that lends credence to the idea that the only force that could stop this and the other ecocidal follies cooked up by our demented leaders would be an informed American public.

Which brings us back to the task at hand: reclaiming our Mercuries.

Were America a nation with a well-functioning collective Mercury, facts such as the examples in this essay—the news is filled with them every day—would inspire a virtual avalanche of dispassionate curiosity in each independent thinker. And where there was skepticism about any of this information—skepticism being the surest sign of a healthy Mercury—further self-informing would be avidly undertaken