Mordechai Vanunu Reports and the Thomas Merton Connection

On Friday Israel’s Nuclear Whistle Blower Mordechai Vanunu wrote at Facebook

Sep. 10- Nine police men come to my home with a search warrant and arrest warrant, they took all my digitale stuff, computers, iPhone, memory stick, hard drive, camera, CDs, every thing, with all the passwords to all my internet activity. They are still holding all these thing.

Sep. 25- I am back in the Internet, after one-week house arrest, and 2 weeks no Internet, all this for giving a TV interview in Hebrew, more than a decade after completing an 18-year jail term

Also on September 10, this reporter notified Israel’s Police by way of emailing Mordechai Vanunu:

Subject: Vanunu gets 7 day’s House Arrest and

Journalism’s Role

In June 2005, during my first of 8 trips to both sides of The Wall in Palestine Israel I wrote:

These past fifteen days have changed me. I learned more in this short time through experience than from years of reading. I don’t know what I am going to do with this knowledge, and I don’t have a clue if You want me to do anything at all. The words of Thomas Merton keep coming to mind:

“Oh God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not necessarily mean that I actually am. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will always lead me by the right road, although I may know nothing about it, and I will not fear.”

At his speech before Congress on September 24, Pope Francis hailed a former president, a Protestant minister, a lay Catholic writer and reporter, and the deepest Christian thinker of the 20^th century: Thomas Merton a Trappist monk, poet, social critic and mystic who listened to Bob Dylan LP’s in his hermitage cell and wrote:

One of the many casualties of the culture of war is the imagination. People can no longer imagine a world without war or nuclear weapons or violence or poverty. They can’t even imagine it, because the culture has robbed us of our imaginations.

It is absolutely necessary to take a serious and articulate a stand on the question of nuclear war, and I mean against nuclear war. The passivity, the apparent indifference, the incoherence of so many Christians on this issue, and worse still the active belligerency of some religious spokesmen is rapidly becoming one of the most frightful scandals in the history of Christendom.

America scandalized the world when it crossed the line in its addiction to violence by targeting and vaporizing 130,000 human beings in Hiroshima and another 70,000 three days later in Nagasaki!

At 5:30 AM on July 16, 1945, the nuclear age began, when the first nuclear bomb was exploded by the federal government at the Trinity Test Site, at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Plutonium and other toxic and radioactive chemicals were dispersed for hundreds of miles and some areas are still contaminated.

The bomb exploded over the New Mexico desert, vaporizing a tower and turning the asphalt to green sand.  Seconds later a huge blast of heat scorched the desert.  No one could see the radiation generated by the explosion, but they all knew it was there. A half a mile away, the steel container called “Jumbo,” weighing over 200 tons was knocked over as the orange and yellow fireball stretched up and spread into a second column, that rose and flattened into a mushroom cloud; imprinting upon the human consciousness a symbol of violent power and destruction.

The father of the atomic bomb, Dr. Robert Oppenheimer chose to name this harrowing happening the “Trinity” test. In the moment that followed the atomic inferno, Oppenheimer recalled this sentence from the Bhagvad Gita:

“Now I have become death, the destroyer of the worlds.”

When Oppenheimer was asked for his thoughts regarding Sen. Robert Kennedy’s efforts to urge President Lyndon Johnson to initiate talks to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, he responded: “It’s 20 years too late. It should have been done the day after Trinity.”

But it was not and led to Little Boy, the uranium bomb, dropped on civilians in Hiroshima on August 6, and the encore was the plutonium weapon of mass destruction, Fat Man, which targeted the innocents of Nagasaki on August 9.

Today’s UN-Holy “Trinity” is a triune of radiological horrors: nuclear bombs, nuclear reactors, and conventional Uranium Weapons (such as Depleted Uranium or DU) that are used in military testing, training, and military combat.

 

“Those responsible for seven decades of both domestic and international radiological assault are our own government agencies: the Departments of Energy and Defense, and the NRC (some say it stands for the Nuclear Radiating Committee) along with a multitude of corporations involved in various aspects of manufacturing munitions of both nuclear and ‘conventional’ weapons varieties. Used in military combat, these radioactive munitions have been contaminating the Middle East and other nations wherever they are fired and tested.”

 

On 8 July 1996, the International Court of Justice issued the statement: “The destructive power of nuclear weapons cannot be contained in either space or time. They have the potential to destroy all civilization and the entire ecosystem of the planet.”

The ICJ also affirmed the “fundamental, cardinal and intransgressible” rule that “States must never make civilians the object of attack and must consequently never use weapons that are incapable of distinguishing between civilians and military targets.”

States have obligations. People have rights!

 

Anti-nuclear civil resistance is the right of every citizen of the world, for the nuclear threat attacks every core concept of human rights and “calls for urgent and universal action for its prevention. If it is a basic human right to be free of threat or violence, if the right to life is a basic human right, if the protection of children and future generations is a basic human duty, international law must unhesitatingly recognize that the right to non violent resistance activities for the prevention of such an international crime is basic to human dignity.” -Judge Weeramantry, “The Trident and International Law, Scotland’s Obligations” Feb. 3, 2009.

 

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy warned US: “Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by accident, or miscalculation, or by madness. The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us.”

Also in the 1960’s the comic strip Pogo nailed US: “We have seen the enemy and he is US!”

Shortly thereafter George Harrison blew the lid off:

Brainwashed by our leaders
Brainwashed in the open
And brainwashed behind the scenes
Brainwashed by Dow Jones
Nasdaq and secure loans
Brainwashed us from Brussels
Brainwashed us in Bonn
Brainwashed us in Washington
Westminster in London
Brainwashed by the military
Brainwashed under duress
Brainwashed by the media
You’re brainwashed by the press
Brainwashed to the bone
God God God
A voice cries in the wilderness
Someone turned out the spiritual light
God God God
Nothing’s worse than ignorance
Down on Bullshit Avenue
God God God
If we can only stop the rot
God God God
Wish that you’d brainwash us too

 

Thomas Merton concludes: “The duty of the Christian at this time is to do the one task God has imposed upon us in this world today. The task is to work for the total abolition of war. There can be no question that unless war is abolished; the world will remain constantly in a state of madness. The church [meaning all Christians] must lead the way on the road to the abolition of war. Peace is to be preached and nonviolence is to be explained and practiced.”

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