Anniversary of the First Use of Nuclear Weapons on People

        Today is the 65^th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, a time when peace movement people especially commemorate a massive deliberate killing of innocents. Staunch pro-lifers such as Mark Crutcher of Life Dynamics have asserted that this indiscriminate massive killing was a precursor to the rationale for the onslaught of abortion; he was approvingly quoting Bishop Fulton Sheen. (If anyone can find that exact quotation, please send it with source into weekly@consistent-life.org.) Currently, even many influential conservatives have noted the foolishness of nuclear weapons – former U.S. Republican Secretaries of State George Shultz, William Perry, and Henry Kissinger, along with hawkish Senator Sam Nunn wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal (January 4, 2007; Page A15) called “A World Free of Nuclear Weapons” on national security reasoning. Meanwhile, a recent book entitled Confronting the Bomb: A Short History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement by Lawrence W. Wittner makes a well-documented case that the anti-nuclear movement did in fact have a major impact on turning nuclear weapons from merely the best weapon in the arsenal to ones that were taboo to use. Stories of success offer lessons for all movements against any kind of violence.

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Letter to the Editor                                    

Washington Post, Sunday, August 1, 2010

        It was the revealing of the truth about the Vietnam War through dramatic media coverage and the release of the Pentagon Papers, the Vietnam equivalent to the WikiLeaks document release, that turned Americans against that war in the 1960s and '70s and eventually forced the political leadership to stop it. The media have not covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as they did Vietnam, and that surely is a factor in the failure to have the same sort of popular movement against these wars.

        But now we have electronic media. The release of documents and videos online helps Americans know more about the wars they are funding, and in which their relatives and friends are dying. Those doing the leaking are patriots breaking open the democratic process. They are tearing down the official walls blocking the truth from the citizenry. America owes them deep gratitude for the risks they take to let the people know what is done in their name.

William Samuel, Silver Spring

The writer is president of the anti-violence nonprofit group Consistent Life.

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Delving Deeper – Books

        In this short book, The Liberal Case Against Abortion, long-time CL activist, Hindu and animal rights advocate Vasu Murti makes a case against abortion using quotations from a wide array of historical and current liberals.

 

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Quotation of the Week

Nicholas D. Kristof

“Another Pill That Could Cause a Revolution”

New York Times Op-Ed, July 31, 2010

        “Could the decades-long global impasse over abortion worldwide be overcome — by little white pills costing less than $1 each? . . . Five-sixths of abortions take place in developing countries, where poor sterilization and training often make the procedure dangerous. . . . ‘I feel like people must have felt when they discovered the nuclear bomb,’ says Dr. Beverly Winikoff, president of Gynuity Health Projects . . .  ‘This technology is world-shaking.’”

 [Thanks to CL Advisory Board member Jen Roth for her keen eye in seeing this and sending it in. We remind subscribers to send in possible news items and quotations to weekly@consistent-life.org]