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In December 2002, finishing the introduction to his as-yet-unpublished book
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, Jonathan Schell wrote that the twentieth century was the era in which violence outgrew the war system that had once housed it and became "dysfunctional as a political instrument. Increasingly, it destroys the ends for which it is employed, killing the user as well as his victim. It has become the path to hell on earth and the end of the earth. This is the lesson of the Somme and Verdun, of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, of Vorkuta and Kolyma; and it is the lesson, beyond a shadow of a doubt, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
More than a decade later, that remains a crucial, if barely noticed, lesson of our moment. Jonathan Schell
died this March, but he left behind a legacy of reporting and thinking -- from
The Real War and
The Fate of the Earth to
The Unconquerable World -- about just how, as the power to destroy ratcheted up, war left its traditional boundaries, and what that has meant for us (as well as, potentially, for worlds to come). In
The Unconquerable World, published just before the Bush invasion of Iraq, he went in search of other paths of change, including the nonviolent one, and in doing so he
essentially imagined the Arab Spring and caught the essence of both the horrors and possibilities available to us in hard-headed ways that were both prophetic and moving.
Today, partly in honor of his memory (and my memory of him) and partly because I believe his sense of how our world worked then and still works was so acute, this website offers a selection from that book. Consider it a grim walk down post-9/11 Memory Lane, a moment when Washington chose force as its path to... well, we now know (as Schell foresaw then) that it was indeed a path to hell. -
Tom
Comment: As readers of SOTT.NET know, there was more behind the fateful day of 9/11 than an unwildly band of terrorists with boxcutters. 9/11 paved the way for the future human genocide committed by Western forces, led by the US, and the very act that started the wheels in motion needs to be understood in this light. There are many signs that Mossad was behind 9/11 and that Israel soon took advantage of the 'war on terror' tactics reveals once again their fingerprints of deception, the way they 'do war'.
The so called 'war on terror' opened new doors of misperception and pathological infection of the popular mind that fomented a war on people rather than opposing military forces. Since 9/11 America has engaged in, funded and otherwise supported the mass murder against the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Palestine, and Ukraine. It's said these are wars, but the slaughter of people and the destruction of whole societies who have no real military force to defend themselves is not war.