Friends,
We plan to have the first anti-nuclear organizing meeting
later this month. Details are being worked out. Stayed tuned.
Kagiso,
Max
The Man Who Stood Up to Armageddon
TMS PEACE JOURNALISM,
4 September 2017
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service
30 Aug 2017
– Suddenly it’s possible — indeed, all too easy — to imagine one
man starting a nuclear war. What’s a little harder to imagine is one human
being stopping such a war.
For all time.
The person who came closest to this may have been Tony de Brum, former foreign minister of the Marshall
Islands, who died last week of cancer at age 72.
He grew up in the South Pacific island chain when it was under
“administrative control” of the U.S. government, which meant it was a waste
zone absolutely without political or social significance (from the American
point of view), and therefore a perfect spot to test nuclear weapons. Between
1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 67 such tests — the equivalent of
1.6 Hiroshima blasts every day for 12 years — and for much of the time
thereafter ignored and/or lied about the consequences.
As a boy, de Brum was unavoidably a witness to some of these
tests, including the one known as Castle Bravo, a 15-megaton blast conducted on
Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954. He and his family lived about 200 miles away, on
Likiep Atoll. He was nine years old.
He later described it thus:
“No sound, just a flash and then a force, the shock wave . . .
as if you were under a glass bowl and someone poured blood over it. Everything
turned red: sky, the ocean, the fish, my grandfather’s net.
“People in Rongelap nowadays claim they saw the sun rising from
the West. I saw the sun rising from the middle of the sky. . . . We lived in
thatch houses at that time, my grandfather and I had our own thatch house and
every gecko and animal that lived in the thatch fell dead not more than a
couple of days after. The military came in, sent boats ashore to run us through
Geiger counters and other stuff; everybody in the village was required to go
through that.”
The Rongelap Atoll was inundated with radioactive fallout from
Castle Bravo and rendered uninhabitable. “The Marshall Islands’ close encounter
with the bomb did not end with the detonations themselves,” de Brum said more
than half a century later, in his 2012 Distinguished Peace Leadership
Award acceptance speech. “In recent years, documents released by
the United States government have uncovered even more horrific aspects of this
burden borne by the Marshallese people in the name of international peace and
security.”
These included the
natives’ deliberately premature resettlement on contaminated islands and the
cold-blooded observation of their reaction to nuclear radiation, not to mention
U.S. denial and avoidance, for as long as possible, of any responsibility for
what it did.
In 2014, Foreign Minister de Brum was the driving force behind
something extraordinary. The Marshall Islands, which had gained independence in
1986, filed a lawsuit, both in in the International Court of Justice and U.S.
federal court, against the nine nations that possess nuclear weapons, demanding
that they start living up to the terms of Article VI of the 1970 Treaty on the
Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, which includes these words:
“Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue
negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the
nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty
on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international
control.”
Right now, Planet Earth could not be more divided on this
matter. Some of the world’s nine nuclear powers, including the United States,
have signed this treaty, and others have not, or have withdrawn from it (e.g.,
North Korea), but none of them has the slightest interest in recognizing it or
pursuing nuclear disarmament. For instance, all of them, plus their allies,
boycotted a recent U.N. debate that led to the passage of the Treaty on the
Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which calls for immediate nuclear disarmament.
One hundred twenty-two nations — most of the world — voted for it. But the nuke
nations couldn’t even endure the discussion.
This is the world de Brum and the Marshall Islands stood up to
in 2014 — aligned with the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, an NGO that provided
legal help to pursue the lawsuit, but otherwise alone in the world, without
international support.
“Absent the courage of Tony, the lawsuits would not have
happened,” David Krieger, president of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, told
me. “Tony was unequaled in being willing to challenge nuclear weapon states for
their failure to fulfill their legal obligations.”
And no, the lawsuits didn’t succeed. They were dismissed, eventually, on something other than their
actual merits. The U.S. 9th District Court of Appeals, for instance, eventually
declared that Article VI of the Non-Proliferation Treaty was
“non-self-executing and therefore not judicially enforceable,” which sounds
like legal jargon for: “Sorry, folks, as far as we know, nukes are above the
law.”
But as Krieger noted, referring to the recent U.N. vote calling
for nuclear disarmament, de Brum’s unprecedented audacity — pushing the U.S.
and international court systems to hold the nuclear-armed nations of the world
accountable — may have served as “a role model for courage. There might have
been other countries in the U.N. who saw the courage he exhibited and decided
it was time to stand up.”
We do not yet have nuclear disarmament, but because of Tony de
Brum, an international movement for this is gaining political traction.
Perhaps he stands as a symbol of the anti-Trump: a sane and
courageous human being who has seen the sky turn red and felt the shockwaves of
Armageddon, and who has spent a lifetime trying to force the world’s most
powerful nations to reverse the course of mutually assured destruction.
____________________________________
Robert C. Koehler is an
award-winning, Chicago-based peace journalist and nationally syndicated writer.
His book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound(Xenos Press) is still
available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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