Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Alex's avatar

I watched a 1959 movie the other night. "On the beach" starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. It's kind of a romantic-apocalyptic movie. The plot is that there was a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere. Everybody died, either from the exchange or from the background radiation, which could kill you in a few days. Peck is the captain of a U.S. submarine and goes to Australia, which is temporarily safe because the northern and southern hemispheres are somewhat isolated from each other. Gardner is in Australia and Peck and Gardner have a fling for a couple of months before the radiation finally gets them too. Peck had a line from the movie saying that they never really understood how the war happened....... From Wikipedia: Researcher Andrew Bartlett noted: "The American government complained of Kramer's On the Beach (1959) that it inaccurately presented the threat of extinction from nuclear war because there were not then enough weapons to cause extinction." I would guess there are now though. So is that progress?

Expand full comment
mikjall's avatar

"Where are today’s Shoups among the U.S. military brass? Where are the leaders who are against genocidal nuclear war and who are willing to speak out against it? Where are the leaders who reject a new cold war with China and Russia? Where are the leaders with the courage to advocate for peace whenever possible in place of more and more war?"

Where indeed? I'm not sure that Eisenhower belongs on your, or anyone's list, of leaders principled and courageous enough to resist the pressure to threaten, attack, and bully the world through the medium of global militarism. World leaders are not the statesmen they used to be, and in fact they never were, with perhaps very scant exception. But now there is a lock on being able to choose such people as premiers and "lawmakers" (as they are laughingly called). You can't name one that isn't bought and paid for, and you can hardly name one that isn't embarrassingly stupid (that is to say, utterly lacking in phronesis). The voters in the Western version of "democracy" have no chance—and perhaps, in the end, no will, and certainly no skill—to rid themselves of rule by venial, and evil, morons. So that what they get, whether or not happily or under protest. I would say that the quality of "leadership" is at zero, except for the fact that it continues to decline. Can you imagine that in the UK they swapped out the idiot Boris Johnson for . . . Liz Truss. This is, by the way, not a left-right issue. As Mr. Astore has just recently pointed out there is no "left" in the US. And what to "left" and "right" mean today, anyway? But I digress. There are any number of sane people around who would like not to destroy the world and think that the world could be, and should be, a lovelier and more peaceful place than it is—people who (with great effort and sometimes at great cost) speak out. In general, none of those people are really classifiable as being "left" or "right", even though they are are rhetorically classified (and "smeared") as such. But the voices of those people have no effect on the loci of power or mastery of the world. Our "leaders" are devoid of phronsesis, but they are long on low cunning, vanity, greed, hate, ambition, and aggressiveness, and have, in concert, shaped a system that locks out from any position of leadership any individual that is not of their ilk. Principled, sane "mavericks" are not tolerated. So, Mr. Astore, the kind of people that you are looking for are around, but you'll never find them in the Halls of Power, and I think that there is nothing that we can do about it. Chomsky talks about "movements", but the public is inert; ain't gonna happen, so let's go have a beer.

Expand full comment
26 more comments...

No posts