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I sit here in the silence of the awakening dawn’s stillness stunned by the realization that I exist. I wonder why. It is my birthday. The first rays of the rising sun bleed crimson over the eastern hills as I imagine my birth. The house and my family sleep.
Someday I will die and I wonder why. This is the mystery I have been contemplating since I was young. That and the fact that I was born in a time of war and that when my parents and sisters were celebrating my first birthday, my country’s esteemed civilian and military leaders celebrated another birth: the detonation of the first atomic bomb code-named Trinity.
Trinity has shadowed my life, while the other Trinity has enkindled my days.
Sick minds play sick word games as they inflict pain and death. They nicknamed this death bomb “the Gadget,” as if it were an innocent little toy. They took and blasphemed the Christian mystery of the Trinity as if they were mocking God, which they were. They thought they were gods.
Now they are all dead gods, their fates sealed in their tombs.
Where are they now?
Where are all their victims, the innocent dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Where are the just and the unjust?
Where are the living now, asleep or awake as Trinity’s progenitors in Washington, D.C. and the Pentagon prepare their doomsday machines for a rerun, the final first-strike run, the last lap in their race to annihilate all the living? Will they sing as they launch the missiles – “So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night?”
Joseph Biden, the second Roman Catholic president, while mocking the essence of Jesus’s message, pushes the world toward a nuclear holocaust, unlike JFK, the first Catholic president, who was assassinated by the CIA for pushing for the elimination of nuclear weapons and the end of the Cold War.
The wheel turns. We count the years. We wonder why.
Years ago I started my academic life by writing a thesis entitled “Dealing With Death or Death Dealing.” It was a study of the transformation of cultural symbol systems, death, and nuclear weapons. The last hundred years and more have brought a transformation and disintegration of the traditional religious symbol system – the sacred canopy – that once gave people comfort, meaning, and hope. Science, technology, and nuclear weapons have changed all that. Death has been socially relocated and we live under the nuclear umbrella, a sinister “safeguard” that is cold comfort. The ultimate power of death over all life has been transferred from God to men, those controlling the nuclear weapons. This subject has never left me. I suppose it has haunted me. It is not a jolly subject, but I think it has chosen me.
Was I born in a normal time? Is war time our normal time? It is. I was.
But to be born at a time and place when your country’s leaders were denouncing their German and Japanese enemies as savage war criminals while execrably emulating them and then outdoing them is something else again. With Operation Paperclip following World War II, the United States government secretly brought 1,600 or more Nazi war criminals into the U.S. to run our government’s military, intelligence, space, chemical, and biological warfare programs. We became Nazis. Lewis Mumford put it this way in The Pentagon of Power:
By the curious dialectic of history, Hitler’s enlargement and the refurbishment of the Nazi megamachine gave rise to the conditions for creating those counter-instruments that would conquer it and temporarily wreck it. In short, in the very act of dying the Nazis transmitted their disease to their American opponents; not only the methods of compulsive organization or physical destruction, but the moral corruption that made it feasible to employ those methods without stirring opposition.
There are always excuses for such moral corruption. When during WW II the U.S. firebombed almost all Japanese cities, Dresden and Cologne in Germany, and then dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killing hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians in gratuitously savage attacks, these were justified and even celebrated as necessary to defeat evil enemies. Just as Nazi war criminals were welcomed into the U.S. government under the aegis of Allen Dulles who became the longest running CIA director and the key to JFK’s assassination and coverup, the diabolic war crimes of the U.S. were swept away as acts of a moral nation fighting a good war. What has followed are decades of U.S. war crimes from Korea through Vietnam and Iraq, etc. A very long list.
The English dramatist Harold Pinter, in his Nobel Address, put it bluntly:
It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.
Nothing could be truer. When in 2014 the U.S. engineered the coup in Ukraine (coups being an American specialty), it allied itself with neo-Nazi forces to oppose Russia. This alliance should have shocked no one; it is the American way. Back in the 1980s when the U.S. was supporting death squads in Central America, Ronald Reagan told the world that “The Contras are the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.” Now the Ukrainian president Zelensky is feted as a great hero, Biden telling him in an Oval Office visit that “it’s an honor to be by your side.” Such alliances are not anomalies but the crude reality of U. S. history.
But let me return to “Trinity,” the ultimate weapon of mass destruction since I was reading a recent article about it.
Kai Bird, the coauthor of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the book that inspired the new film Oppenheimer about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist credited as “the father of the atomic bomb” and the man who named the first atomic bomb Trinity, has written an Op Ed piece in The New York Times titled , “The Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” True in certain respects, this article is an example of how history can be slyly used to distort the present for political purposes. In typical NY Times fashion, Bird tells certain truths while concealing, distorting, and falsifying others.
I do not consider Oppenheimer a tragic figure, as does Bird. Complicated, yes; but he was essentially a hubristic scientist who lent his services to a demonic project, and afterwards, having let the cat out of the bag by creating the Bomb, guiltily urged the government that used it in massive war crimes to restrain itself in the future. Asking for such self-regulation is as absurd as asking the pharmaceutical or big tech industries to regulate themselves.
Bird rightly says that Oppenheimer did not regret his work inventing the atomic bomb, and he correctly points out the injustice of his being maligned and stripped of his security clearance in 1954 in a secret hearing by a vote of 2 to 1 of a security panel of The Atomic Energy Commission for having communist associations . “Celebrated in 1945 as the ‘father of the atomic bomb,’” Bird writes, “nine years later he would become the chief celebrity victim of the McCarthyite maelstrom.” A “victim,” I should add, who named names to save his own reputation.
But tucked within his article, Bird tells us: “Just look at what happened to our public health civil servants during the recent pandemic.” By which he means these officials like Anthony Fauci were maligned when they gave the public correct scientific information. This is absurd. Fauci – “attacks on me quite frankly are attacks on science” – and other government “civil servants” misinformed the public and lied over and over again, but Bird implies they too were tragic figures like Oppenheimer.
He writes:
We stand on the cusp of another technological revolution in which artificial intelligence will transform how we live and work, and yet we are not yet having the kind of informed civil discourse with its innovators that could help us to make wise policy decisions on its regulation. Our politicians need to listen more to technology innovators like Sam Altman and quantum physicists like Kip Thorne and Michio Kaku.
Here too he urges “us” to listen to the very people responsible for Artificial Intelligence, just as “we” should have listened to Oppenheimer after he brought us the atomic bomb. Implicit here is the belief that science just marches progressively on and there’s no stopping it, and when dangerous technologies emerge from scientists’ work, we should trust them to control them. Nowhere does Bird suggest that scientists have a moral obligation before the fact to not pursue a certain line of research because of its grave possible consequences. Maybe he has never read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, only written over two hundred years ago.
Finally, and most importantly, Bird begins his concluding paragraph with these words:
Today, Vladimir Putin’s not-so-veiled threats to deploy tactical nuclear weapons in the war in Ukraine are a stark reminder that we can never be complacent about living with nuclear weapons.
This is simply U.S. propaganda. The U.S. has provoked and fueled the war in Ukraine, broken all nuclear weapon treaties, surrounded Russia with military bases, stationed nuclear weapons in Europe, engaged in nuclear blackmail with its first strike policy and threats, etc. Putin has said in response that if – and only if – the very existence of the Russian state and land is threatened with extinction would the use of nuclear weapons be considered.
So Bird, in writing a piece about Oppenheimer’s “tragedy” and defending science, has also subtly defended a trinity of other matters: the government “science” on Covid, the transformative power coming from AI, and the U.S. propaganda about Russia and nuclear weapons. There is no mention of JFK’s call to abolish nuclear weapons. This is how the “paper of record” does its job.
I sit here now at the end of the day. Shadows are falling and I contemplate such trinities. I am stunned by the fact that we exist, but under a terrifying Shadow that many wish to ignore. Jung saw this shadow side as not just personal but social, and when it is ignored, the collective evils of modern societies can autonomously erupt.
Bird argues that nuclear weapons are the result of a scientific quest that is unstoppable. He writes that Oppenheimer “understood that you cannot stop curious human beings from discovering the physical world around them [and then making nuclear bombs or designer babies].”
This is the ideology of progress that brooks no opposition since it is declared inevitable. It is a philosophy that believes there should be no limits to human knowledge, which would include the knowledge of good and evil, but which can then be ignored since it and all thought and beliefs are considered a priori to be relative. The modern premise that everything is relative is of course a contradiction since it is an absolute statement. Many share this philosophy of despair disguised as progress as it has crept into everything today. It is tragic, for if people accept it, we are doomed to follow a Faustian pact with the devil and all hell will follow.
I think of Bob Dylan singing :
I just don’t see why I should even care
It’s not dark yet, but it’s gettin’ there
But I do care, and I wonder why. As night comes on, I sit here and wonder.
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Great piece!
I also thought of the genetic manipulation of viruses and diseases, made more deadly and more viral, “because we can”. Never pausing to wonder, “if we should”. We only need ONE of these to escape a lab, one single time, and all of mankind could pay with their lives.
They claim to do it so they can better prepare for naturally occurring pandemics, but there is still zero proof that their so-called preparation, actually helps in anyway.
This, I now believe, goes back to the Tree of Knowledge and the Original Sin, as we now routinely dabble in knowledge that could end all of mankind, or permanently change God’s creation. It becomes crystal clear that knowledge IS the road to the abyss, and to Hell.
Man’s hubris, in his reach exceeding his grasp, will be his undoing, and the prophecy will then be fulfilled.
Once again, we come full circle.
If it is true Oppenheimer didn’t regret what he’d done then he’s no hero of Mankind.
Like Oppenheimer’s coreligionist Feynman, who was in charge of calculations for the Trinity bomb, and Einstein, who urged its development upon the President at the time, and likely even the secret committee that chose to drop ‘Fat Man’ (the “gadget” when packaged for use) upon Nagasaki, the largest concentration of christians in Asia, they were all unrepentant mass murderers.
And now the genocidal virus developed by Fauci, of the same Tribe, just as extreme, of the same hidden intentionality! They all get away with it because their coevals ignorantly ascribe their crimes to mere “hubris” or human waywardness and not to premeditation and focused genocide. Here is the true history of what they are doing and why:
https://www.academia.edu/76372363/To_Sevastopol_With_Love
Note that to read the article, simply SCROLL DOWN; no sign-in is necessary. Thanks.
excellent article, very good point, that these people see themselves as god but are completely deluded, as they fail to see god in all living creatures. myself, i see these creatures as demons, for imho demons are humans who’s misdeeds have devolved them into the hideous creatures we all know and loathe. as they approach death, you can see the panic and terror in their eyes, sensing what fate will befall them upon their demise. look into the eyes of george w. bush and see the terror, of thinking he will have to face the souls of the millions of people, he and the other zioneocons have murdered over their reign of terror. look at the primitive portraits he paints, of the young service members he sent to their early graves, as some type of attempt at penance. for what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and loses his own soul? this is why these billionaires want to download their consciousness into the metaverse, lol, they think they can avoid judgement by becoming cartoon characters.
as i approach the inevitable end of my life, i find myself looking forward to the experience of death, the ultimate mystery, which i view as a transformation of one form consciousness to the next.
https://www.atomicarchive.com/media/videos/oppenheimer.html
Yes! Genetic research is what popped into my head reading this. I even remember the day, way back in the 1980s, when the Reagan government lifted some restrictions on such research and promised scads of money to promote it. At the time I thought: Nothing good will come of this. And when Operation Covidius was launched, by first thought was: We are now reaping the bitter fruits of that research.
Fauci is of the same Tribe? Who knew?
Like the man sang, it’s a hard rain, a-gonna fall. It’s not hard to imagine such an adaptable but savagely aggressive primate species as ours going extinct by suicide. Doing the same thing over and over expecting different results is not only a working definition of insanity, but a summary of mankind’s brief and unfortunate presence on the planet.
In religion’s conception of the free will, the human soul longs for “a life without love of the world,” in the words of Plotinus, and thereby reaches out beyond its own limits and beyond time. In self-abnegation is a power stronger than any forces of the world.
Life, therefore, means struggling for a transformed future, for progress compared with which all that is present and all that has passed fades into a mere shadow and loses its importance. Know and believe that after this life we are to live forever–either in darkness or light. Choose rightly!
You’re right, you can see it in their eyes. I often wonder why others can’t see it. There are times their eyes are actually black as they utter their villainy. Eyes to see and ears to hear, I reckon.
‘Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds’—–not from the Gospel but from the Bhagavad Gita. The code name Oppie chose has nothing to do with the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, and everything to do with the Hindu Trinity.
Had there not been an atomic bomb there surely would have been another world war of the Communist bloc against the “Free World”. But thanks to the efforts of the the Rosenbergs, Fuchs and other Jews, atomic know how was transferred to the Soviet Union, and this created mutually assured destruction. Had there been wider nuclear proliferation all war would have ended; Viet Nam would never have been carpet bombed nor poisoned with dioxin had it had an atomic bomb and a fishing trawler.
The answer for world peace may be each high to average IQ country having its own nuclear umbrella.
All those esteemed smart people lent themselves to the project of creating civilization ending weapons in return for a paycheck and whatever prestige might accrue to them. They’re all culpable, an example of the banality of evil. The lesser people who then acquired these weapons, the politicians and other war-hawks, are not wise enough to handle this power that’s at their disposal. Instead, the US has threatened the world with nuclear weapons ever since it tested them in Japan, always waving it in the background as it bombed and invaded various countries. Once a country gets one others have to attain their own as a deterrent. Now there’s been a lot of nuclear saber rattling because of the Ukraine. The small people, braindead idiots like Brandon, can threaten and risk the lives of millions, or perhaps billions, of unwilling people because of their unquenchable greed and delusions that the US can rule the world. We’re all being held hostage and there’s nothing we can do about it.
” as they approach death, you can see the panic and terror in their eyes, sensing what fate will befall them upon their demise. look into the eyes of george w. bush and see the terror, of thinking he will have to face the souls of the millions of people, he and the other zioneocons have murdered over their reign of terror.”
Really? Is that what happens? Where is it said that you have to die to live in Hell?
Alexander the Great, did dying young push him into hell of infamy? Everybody loves an empire and most still marvel at their grandeur and accomplishments even today and forever. Most of our wonders today came from those accomplishments, way back when. Hell doesn’t seem to be for them but for all us and you right here, right now.
There is no going back and there is no turning around. Even if we stopped everything now would China, North Korea, Israel, Ukraine etc… give it all up? We tout what a wonder nuclear power is but there is a price for it, it’s all destructive. But there’s no stopping, if it’s not nuclear power it will be some other destructive accomplishment going right back to the stone age.
But we did ban such work. Scientists complained and the Obama administration banned such work. The problem is that Fauci proved to be one of the most evil people in this century and arranged indirect funding for the work to continue in China! The results have killed millions of people yet Facui remains free.
To take one’s knowledge & talent & build a killing machine, well this is no hero but an evil monster of a man.
No tyrant in history has ever been dumb!
Oppenheimer, for the record. came to the Politically Correct view 20 years later in his interview with Mike Wallace in 1965. With “heroes” like this it’s no big surprise the West is at the edge of oblivion.
Video Link
Oppenheimer the Jew had “communist associations”??
this Jew was a public member of the CPUSA during the 1930’s.
at the onset of the Manhatten Project this Jew
resigned from the public CPUSA…and joined a secret CP cell.
while probably not an active Soviet agent, this Jew
protected Fuchs and all the other A-bomb spies
during their tenure at Los Alamos. On all this and more see:
Greg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb – The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (NY, 2002)
did i say that’s what happens, nervous nellie? i said that that was they were “thinking”, and that is what will drive them straight into the heart of hell, of their own creation. as i have always said, hell is for the believers.
Kai Bird is Sky Turd.
As with all discoveries, knowledge can be used for evil or good. Genetic research has the potential to provide great things for humanity.
Interesting take, thanks.
IQs seem to be going down…
Thanks. I’ll check that out.
Coldfusion’s take on Oppenheimer (the guy, not the movie) is majestic. Both better and worse than we thought he was:
Video Link
“This is the mystery I have been contemplating since I was young. That and the fact that I was born in a time of war…”
You’re not alone: there aren’t many people in America now (legally) who were not born in a time of war. Anyone born between 1939-45 (WW2), 1950-53 (Korea), 1959-75 (Viet Nam), 1976-89 (Condor), 1990-91 (Iraq I), 1945-91 (Cold War), 2003-11 (Iraq War II), 2001-21 (Afghanistan), 2022-present (Ukraine); all have to wrestle with those same two ‘existential’ conundrums & probably always will. Provided they too care.
thanks franz, for the informative perspective, of this amazingly complex person. much appreciated.
Not surprisingly, this article seems to have disappeared from the front page at Unz Review a/o July 23, 2023 at 1925Z, and I had to use Ron’s search feature to find it.
Typical Right wingers are big fans of nukes, both the weapons and the power plants.
Similarly, Yahoo News had a front page story on July 21 titled something like “When the U.S. Nuked Itself,” but it’s long gone from Yahoo’s front page by July 23, and I had to use Google to find it, now with a more innocuous headline.
I see the original article was from the New York Times, and concludes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/20/science/trinity-nuclear-test-atomic-bomb-oppenheimer.html
Of course, the nuclear power industry has been downplaying and trying to obscure the deadly fallout from nuclear power and nuclear weapons right from the get go.