Meditation 2008:3 from the Capri Philosophical Park.
Everybody knows that election campaigns are some sort of game in which you have to raise your bid all the time. In a trigger-happy plutocratic democracy you have to do so even in a rather extreme measure. Also for the past 100 years mankind has engaged in one game, more important than all others - that for power by killing your enemies. That game has now reached the present election campaign of the United States of America. A clear champion is appearing among all the bids.Most people think about the Hiroshima bomb as one of the worst murders that ever took place. Killing a few hundred thousand people with one single bomb was, indeed, a rather frightening example of where the – possibly biologically blind - arms race may take us.The five most murderous events of the past 100 years are estimated to be:The Bolshevik civil war, before Stalin took over, which killed over 8 million people.The First World War, which killed about 15 million.
The Soviet tyranny under Stalin, which killed about 20 million.Mao Zedong’s tyranny over China, which killed some 40 million, andThe Second World War, which killed some 55 million human beings.With these figures in mind, having devoted a big part of my life to the study of warfare, I jumped out of my chair when in one of the biggest and most reliable financial newspapers of the world, Il Sole 24 Ore, on April 23rd I read a headline saying that Hillary Clinton was raising her voice: “Annienteremo l’Iran se attaccherà Israele”. The statement was made on the 22nd. I couldn’t believe in it, so I checked it on Reuters. A day later I also found it, somewhat hidden, in The International Herald Tribune and a few days later in The Guardian Weekly.All this persuaded me to believe that the lady aspiring to become the President of the USA really had said what the headline reported: “We will annihilate Iran if it attacks Israel”. Iran has a population of almost 70 million people. The words that the presidential candidate used, as reported, were “totally obliterate”. How does such a total annihilation of the Iranian population fit into the global game of killing during the last 100 years?
Figures on the toll in Hiroshima are much discussed. A high figure is 300,000 killrd by one bomb. Hillary promised to kill at least 200 times as many. The Bolshevik revolution killed less than one eighth of what Hillary is prepared to do, the First World War one quarter of it, Stalin’s dictatorship one third, while Mao came closer to Hillary and the Second World War, including six million Jews murdered in the most barbarian part of it, came almost up to Hillary’s standard.
In fact, if Hillary would “totally obliterate” over 60 million Iranian men, women and children, she would in one strike kill ten times more than Hitler killed Jews and more than all those who died in mankind’s so far biggest biological tragedy, the Second World War.Nobody believed Hitler would commit those brutal crimes when he started to talk about them. Can we avoid thinking that Hillary might do what she now has threatened to do, a Holocaust ten times bigger than Hitler’s? And how would you yourself react if you were an Iranian, exposed to such a threat?
For me, in my nightmares about future human horrors, Hillary will never appear under any other name than Killary.
Capri in June 2008
Gunnar
Adler-Karlssonwww.philosophicalpark.org
adler.karlsson@capri.it
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