To see Beirut and its port area with a huge mushroom cloud hanging above is a truly surreal sight. But what is not surreal in battered Lebanese capital?
A big part of the downtown looks flattened, thoroughly ruined.
One of my Japanese friends based in Beirut exclaimed:
“It looks like Hiroshima!”
It does.
Who is behind the carnage? What really happened? Nobody is claiming responsibility. Was it sabotage, a direct attack against Lebanon, or a politically motivated terrorist act?
What is certain is that the “earth moved.” One of the explosions, equivalent to a 4.5-magnitude earthquake, ruined everything in its proximity. Blasts were heard all the way across the sea in Cyprus, while some 20 kilometers away, window panels at Rafik Hariri International Airport, got shattered.
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For five years, I have been observing from my window and terrace this magnificent sight: tall, often snow-covered mountains, huge bay, and vast port area with cranes, tankers, and mighty container cargo ships.
Once there was a small fire in the port, and I could see each and every detail of it. But now, everything changed. Two explosions, one relatively small and one enormous, turned the entire port area of Beirut into a war zone, a target of carpet bombing. Or the aftermath of a nuclear explosion.
People running away, in horror. Women and children shouting, crying, clinging to each other. The number of casualties is still unknown. Preliminary reports speak of at least 73 persons killed, but there are most likely hundreds of those who lost their lives. There are those still buried under the rubble, burned beyond recognition. One entire fire brigade just ‘vanished.’ Red Cross reported at least 2.200 people injured. Soon after, the number shut up to 4,000. Several crew members on the UNIFIL vessel, which was docked in the Beirut port, injured. The horrible count goes up and up.
Lebanese medical system, mostly privatized and in terrible shape, cannot cope with the carnage.
Red smoke is levitating above the coast. What is it, really?
Speculations and preliminary analyses are the most alarming.
The Canadian Embassy began headcount of its staff. That fact has been confirmed.
What has been clearly a hoax is that the Embassy sent scientific/medical warnings, which are now circulating all over the social media, such as:
“It’s a dropped bomb with depleted uranium (red color). Tell all your loved ones to get away and don’t inhale. Try to go in the opposite direction of the wind.”
Truth is getting mixed with the fake news. Whether it was a bomb is a very legitimate question. But the Canadian Embassy definitely did not claim on its social media, that it was.
There is an “urgent message” from AUBMC (American University of Beirut Medical Center), the most prestigious medical facility in the Middle East. It even carries its logo at the top of the page. But when I contacted AUBMC, the staff strongly denied sending such messages:
“Everyone in Lebanon needs to stay indoor… From the look of the flame, the explosion looks nitric acid-based. PLEASE STAY INSIDE!!!”
There is a long message from AUB president, however, which begins with:
“Dear members of the AUB community, I hope you and your loved-ones are safe and starting to recover from the catastrophic explosion which occurred earlier this evening in the Port of Beirut. We already know of thousands of injured and more than 67 dead. Property has been destroyed over an area of many square kilometers, including at AUB and AUBMC. Our hearts and our prayers are with all those injured or lost in this awful tragedy. We must do all we can, and some measure beyond that, to care for those injured and heal the terrible unseen wounds this has created. The AUBMC Emergency Department, our medical faculty, nurses and staff are all responding to hundreds of trauma cases, including a number of serious and critical cases, with great skill and professionalism…”
Why are rumors being spread? Who is benefiting? What are the plans?
Each and every piece of information has to be now verified. Scrutinized. Double and triple checked.
Each piece of ‘fake news’ or outright fabrication may lead to yet another “explosion,’ to the worsening of the political violence. Lebanon is at the edge. And always when it is; when it feels this way, thousands of innocent people die. Everybody who has been living here, everyone who understands its history, knows that it is exactly this way here.
It is obvious that there are certain groups in the country, who are interested in spreading chaos in this long-suffering, deeply injured land.
But there are also very legitimate sources that believe that this is an attack by hostile foreign states.
Some trustworthy security sources that I approached are brief in their analyses, and their preliminary conclusions are chilling:
“Nuke hit ballistic missile warehouse. The red smoke is fuel.”
But I don’t know, yet; nobody knows.
The situation is incredibly confusing. Everybody is still in shock and mourning.
Some fingers are pointing at Israel. Israel denies its involvement and is offering help instead. Trump claims it was a bomb, but does not elaborate.
RT reported earlier on the day of the blasts:
“The secretary-general of Lebanon’s Christian Kataeb Party, or Phalange, Nizar Najarian, has been killed.”
Kataeb Party is an extremist, violent right-wing Christian party, which is in alliance with the pro-Saudi faction of former Prime Minister Saad Hariri.
Welcome to Lebanon-style political labyrinth!
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Meanwhile, Beirut inhabitants are frightened. Lebanon has been faced with enormous problems, for at least one entire year. From huge anti-establishment riots which began in 2019, to the outbreak of COVID-19 followed by lockdowns, severe economic crises, and financial collapse. Eventually, the controlled exchange rate between the Lebanese pound and the U.S. dollar got abandoned, and the local currency went nose-diving; it got sharply devalued. For some time, people could withdraw only a small amount of their savings from the local banks.
Political confrontations have always been pounding Lebanon, but recently they have been on the rise. The country is home to countless political and religious parties and movements, as well as shaky and temporary coalitions. What is on the surface does not necessarily correspond with what is forming the foundations.
For instance, Hezbollah, which is an arch-enemy of Israel and which is now on the U.S. terrorist list, has been actually the most effective social organization, providing de facto social security net for both Muslims and Christians. But it is also a determined and powerful force, always ready to defend Lebanon against the Israeli invasions, therefore constantly on someone’s ‘hit list.’
Extreme right-wing Christians could always swing either way; from antagonizing mistreated Palestinians and siding with Israel, to forming coalitions with Hezbollah. For an outsider, all this makes no sense. But, somehow, it does (often in a perverse way), at least for the Lebanese, and for those of us who have spent a long time in the country.
The explosions took place just a few days before the U.N. court of justice was going to read the verdict, in absentia, against four Hezbollah members, who were allegedly involved in the 2005 assassination of Rafik Hariri, former prime minister of Lebanon. Some believe there is a link, but I strongly disagree, knowing Hezbollah and its political goals. This attack is definitely not Hezbollah’s ‘style,’ nor would it be in the group’s interests.
Lebanon has always been a timebomb, with dozens of real terrorist organizations forming so-called ‘dormant cells’; all over the country, and naturally all over the city of Beirut. Their proximity to each other, their antagonistic nature, could lead to a catastrophe at any moment.
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Al Mayadeen, a left-leaning television channel which is close to both Hezbollah and South American TeleSur, reported in its Arabic service:
“Major General Abbas Ibrahim told Al-Mayadeen that it is possible that the explosion came from the highly explosive materials that had been confiscated some time ago, adding that course of investigations cannot be anticipated and when they are finished we will circulate confirmed information.
For his part, the Director-General of Customs announced that nitrate is the cause of the huge explosion in the port of Beirut.
As for the Minister of the Interior, Mohamed Fahmy, during his inspection of the Beirut port, he said, “Investigations must be awaited to find out the cause of the explosion.”
The latest by Al-Mayadeen restated that what exploded was “Ammonium Nitrate.” And Al-Mayadeen is closely connected to Hezbollah.
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Maki, a Japanese aid worker, based in Beirut, commented:
“Hope it’s not nuclear. This Mushroom shape of the smoke is very worrying.“
Rana, a Lebanese U.N. staff in Beirut, shared her thoughts:
“A lot of speculations are going around: an accident in the fireworks storage, an Israeli attack on Hezbollah or army weapons. Nothing is certain right now, except that there are tremendous damage and destruction.”
Before the explosions, apparently, there was a drone circling above the area of the disaster. The footage is clearly depicting its presence in the sky. People are demanding an explanation.
As no one is claiming responsibility, it appears that for at least some time, there will be many more questions than answers. But that is much better than rushed conclusions.
The tragedy is enormous. The entire country is in shock. Emotions are running high. One wrong move and this entire part of the world could go up in flames. Again.
Right now, the most important is to tend to thousands of wounded, bury the victims, and investigate thoroughly and coolheadedly.
This may be the most difficult, the most dangerous moment for Lebanon since the end of the civil war. No time for sectarianism. The country has to unite, grin its teeth, and stoically fight for its very survival.
Those of us who love and miss Lebanon, despite everything, will be supporting it, as much as we can.
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UPDATES:
The same day as this essay went to print, three heavy-lift Russian transport planes landed in Beirut, bringing an operation theatre, medical staff, medicine, and other equipment essential for saving lives.
President Trump retracted his statement that the explosion was caused by a missile.
President Emmanuel Macron of France arrived in Beirut, promising support, but raising fears that he may try to force Lebanon back to Western orbit. On 6 August, according to Reuters, he gave a speech in Beirut, declaring: “French aid would not go to “corrupt hands” and he would seek a new deal with political authorities, Reuters reports.”
In the latest update by RT: “The source of the explosion is believed to be almost 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate that was stored at a port warehouse. The blast has taken the lives of at least 135 people, while 5,000 have been injured.”
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Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Six of his latest books are “New Capital of Indonesia”, “China Belt and Road Initiative,” “China and Ecological Civilization” with John B. Cobb, Jr., “Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism,” a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo, and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and Latin America and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website, his Twitter and his Patreon.
Lebanon, the Switzerland of Middle-East and its capital Beirut-the Paris of Middle-East, a house to 2.4 million people 1 , out of 6.8 2 million in whole of Lebanon , are smothered by blasts on August 4, 2020, by 2750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate kept in a waterfront warehouse at a port in Beirut, killing 135 people, leaving more than 5000 injured and the whole city being reduced to a rubble, with an estimated loss of more than 5 billion USD 3 and more than 3,00,000 people rendered homeless 4. The number of deaths, injured and the loss is likely to rise. Lebanon, an Ex. French colony, is now smashed to shambles and will take decades and decades to rebuild. France President Emanuel Macron is the first head of the state to reach Beirut after the blasts. There is no electricity, no beds in hospitals which were already burdened by COVID-19 spread and now a general crisis for food is prevalent as Lebanon had already been under great duress of electricity outages and deepening economic crisis 5. Even the whatsapp had been made a paid-call 6.
The Lebanese establishment has ordered an inquiry and there are oblique references towards Hezbollah, an armed Shiite group supported by Iran and Hezbollah is one of the ruling parties -alliance in Lebanon. The latest political conflict exacerbated after the murder of Lebanese Ex. PM Rafiq Hariri on Feb 14, 2005 in which fingers were pointed towards Syrian government of Bashshar Assad which the Lebanese accuse of interfering in their politics. Syria very soon after the murder had to vacate its army back after nearly 30 years of staying in Lebanon. Syrian regime is supported by Iran and Russia and is battling US and other insurgent groups fighting to oust Assad. The verdict of Hariri murder was due on August 7, 2020 and which now stands delayed. Hezbollah is engaged in a conflict with Israel and which Israel finds as anathema and both have been engaged into bloody conflicts. Lebanon is a country with Christians, Sunni and Shiite Muslims as coalition partners to government.
Beirut is in tatters and Israel has denied its involvement but US President Donald Trump has upheld that it was an attack, while during media briefing on August 4, 2020, of a scale that it was heard 200 kms in Cyprus 7. The scale of the blast is perhaps the heaviest ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed as the white mushroom cloud, which erupted at around 6 pm on August 4, 2020 will nonetheless remain permanently etched on public memory for the years to come. “How can you say accident if somebody left some terrible explosive-type devices and things around perhaps — perhaps it was that. Perhaps it was an attack,” Trump told reporters during a White House briefing. “I don’t think anybody can say right now. We’re looking into it very strongly right now. “But whether it was a bomb intentionally set off — it ended up being a bomb,” he said. “But no, I’ve heard it both ways. It could have been an accident and it could have also been something that was very offensive.” The White House chief of staff Mark Meadows defended the president, saying Trump only told reporters on August 4, 2020 what military officials had told him. “The president shared with the American people what he was briefed on, with 100% certainty I can tell you that. ” To buttress his point Trump on August 6, 2020 again reiterated that it was an attack. 8
But, why would ever Israel admit it? The two-pronged strategy is that Israel would deny and US resuscitate it to make Israel reign supreme in the region and bolster the prospects of the Greater-Israel with the much needed force. What happened in Beirut was in fact very much in the air, as it was also notably declared by Israel PM who on August 3, 2020 had tweeted “the matter with Lebanon is still in the air. We will hit anyone who tries to attack us and this principle applies to anyone who does attack us.” Notwithstanding the planning of Israel which led to this devastation and destruction of human lives, as it was on September 27,. 2018, when Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the UN general assembly laden with anti-Iran tirade, and during his speech of 40 min 23 sec, at 16 min 33 sec , he said, “ In Lebanon Iran has directed Hezbollah to build secret sites to convert an accurate projectiles into precious guided missiles, missiles that can target deep inside Israel with an accuracy of ten meters . Hezbollah, listen to this, Hezbollah is deliberately using the innocent people of Beirut ( who are now lying dead) as human shields , they have placed three of these missiles conversion sites along Beirut’s international airport. Then, he took a map, and pointed to it, saying, “Here is a picture that is worth a thousand missiles”. Netanyahu then showed a map where the three sites were shown purportedly to have stored missiles and it is the same sites which now been blown to smithereens. At 18 min 14 Sec he said. “ So I have a message for Hezbollah today Israel knows Israel also knows what you are doing, Israel knows where you are doing and Israel will not let you get away with it,” clapping followed. The video is available on You Tube 9 .
The recent political situation in Israel has been on the boil as it was only on August 2, 2020, some 60,000 protesters 10 had gathered outside the official residence of Netanyahu in Jerusalem demanding his resignation over corruption charges and it is expected that defense minister Benny Gants is likely to take over him, but now the Lebanon blasts have occurred, and hence, Israel public has been subjected to a diversionist tactic, and moreover, the hawk Benny Gantz too is engaged into a hot-pursuit, as it was he who on July 31, 2020, four days, before the blast, had ordered Israel army to attack Lebanese infrastructure as a clear new strategy of departure from the past, for Israel in its fight against Hezbollah had not attacked Lebanon, but Gantz’s order on July 31, 2020 ‘marked the first time Israel ha(d)s officially declared it will harm Lebanon even in response to an isolated-tactical attack’ 11. This preparation was quite underway as Israel had on July 21, 2020 killed five and wounded seven in an attack on Iranian ammunition depot in Syria. Those killed were said to be from Iran Quds Force 12 , apart from attacks on Iran’s nuclear Natanz on July 7, 2020 13 and also on Iran seven ships which were set ablaze on July 15, 2020 14 attributed to mystery fire.
What more worst time it could have been for Lebanon, as since October 2019, Lebanon had already lost 80% of its currency-value 15 and its foreign minister Nassif Hitti had resigned on August 2, 2020 citing the country as a ‘failed- state’ 16 and it was also very heavily down by the COVID-19 pandemic with its dire economic situation, no wonder, the nation is now to drown into further sectarian/civil-war leading to the collapse of the whole country. Israel on its part has gone into an apparent ‘sickening show of hypocrisy’ 17 as a published report in Haaretz on August 6, 2020 shows. Meanwhile, Richard Silverstein who writes a blog has openly declared Israel Bombed Beirut 18.
However, what is leading to this mystery fires ? Which technology is making it so capable that a fire can be ignited sitting thousands of kms away ? More than 20 warehouses in Najaf, Iraq have been set ablaze on August 6, 2020 19 and more than 100 shops have been gutted by fire in Ajman, Dubai on August 6, 2020 too 20. And, there has also been a mystery explosion in North Korea city bordering China on August 5, 2020 21 in which several people were killed. It may be here reiterated that Benny Gantz had on July 5, 2020 euphemistically said that “Not every incident that transpires in Iran necessarily has something to do with us” .22 Its very high time the mystery is unraveled.
What would come out of probe by the Lebanese authorities is unclear but a news, that the ship lying abandoned since 2014 was owned by a Russian businessman Igor Grechushkin who has been identified as its owner living in Cyprus. 23 Has the blame game started? And, stories are also plentiful that Simpson cartoon has already foretold the Beirut Blasts 24!
The writer is a former UP State Information Commissioner. He is also a lawyer based in Lucknow,
References:
- https://worldpopulationreview.com/world-cities/beirut-population
- https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/lebanon-population/
- https://www.shafaaq.com/en/World/5-billion-dollars-loss-in-Beirut-blast
- https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/beirut-explosion-death-toll-latest-lebanon-port-homeless-victims-damage-a9656396.html
- https://english.alarabiya.net/en/features/2020/07/13/Left-in-the-dark-Lebanon-s-electricity-woes
- https://english.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2019/10/17/lebanon-mulls-on-charging-residents-for-whatsapp
- https://www.financialmirror.com/2020/08/04/massive-beirut-blasts-seen-in-cyprus-heard-in-nicosia/
- https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/us-officials-dispute-trumps-claim-beirut-attacked-72190863
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7ZPPaeMmmA
- https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/anti-netanyahu-protests-heat-peak-at-30000-report-637150
- https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/07/31/in-dramatic-policy-shift-israel-to-hold-lebanon-accountable-for-hezbollah-attack/
- https://www.israelhayom.com/2020/07/21/syria-5-killed-in-alleged-israeli-airstrikes-on-iranian-targets-in-daamascus/
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/05/world/middleeast/iran-Natanz-nuclear-damage.html
- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-53417227
- https://news.bitcoin.com/lebanon-financial-meltdown-currency-plunges-central-bank-imf-bailout/
- https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/08/lebanon-foreign-minister-quits-pm-lack-reformist-200803081938960.html
- https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israel-is-in-shock-in-a-sickening-show-of-hypocrisy-1.9050449
- https://www.richardsilverstein.com/2020/08/04/breaking-israel-bombed-beirut/
- https://en.mehrnews.com/news/161944/VIDEO-Blaze-in-Food-warehouse-in-Najaf
- https://www.thenational.ae/uae/ajman-fire-dozens-of-shops-destroyed-as-investigation-into-cause-of-blaze-is-under-way-1.1059789
- https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/north-korea-hyesan-explosion-1.5674866
- https://www.jpost.com/middle-east/gantz-not-everything-that-happens-in-iran-is-connected-to-us-633933
- https://www.businessinsider.in/thelife/news/the-ship-carrying-the-ammonium-nitrate-that-blew-up-in-beirut-was-abandoned-in-2014-by-a-russian-businessman-who-has-said-nothing-since-the-explosion/articleshow/77395734.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst
- Nostradamus Of Springfield: The Simpsons ‘Predicted’ The Beirut Blast & Resemblance Is Uncanny
When US President Harry S. Truman made the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, followed by another on Nagasaki a few days later, he was not acting as an agent untethered from history. In the wheels of his wearied mind lay the battered Marines who, despite being victorious, had received sanguinary lashings at Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
A fear grew, and US military sources speculated about, the slaughter that might follow an invasion of the Japanese homeland. They also pondered the future role of the Soviets, and wondered whether there were other means by which Japan’s involvement in the war might be terminated before Moscow got its hands on the battered remains of North East Asia.
Much is made about the moral dilemma Truman faced. He knew there was the nastiest of weapons at hand, born from the race to acquire it from Nazi Germany. But on a certain level, it was merely another weapon, one to use, a choice sample in the cabinet of lethal means and measures. By that stage of the war, killing civilians from the air, not to mention land, was banal and common place; enemy populations were to be experimented upon, burned, torched, gassed, shelled and eradicated in the program of total war.
By the time Truman made his decision, Japan had become a graveyard of strategic aerial bombing. General Curtis E. LeMay of the US Air Force prided himself on incinerating the enemy, and was encouraged by various study commissions advocating the use of incendiary bombs against Japan’s flammable urban architecture. He was realising the dreams of such figures as the pioneering US aviator and air power enthusiast Billy Mitchell, who fantasised in the 1920s about Japanese cities being “the greatest aerial targets the world has ever seen”. In 1941, US Army chief of staff George Marshall spread the word to journalists that the US would “set the paper cities of Japan on fire”. Civilians would not be spared.
Towards the end of the war, daylight precision bombing had fallen out of favour; LeMay preferred the use of Boeing B-29 Superfortresses, heavily laden with firebombs, to do the work. His pride of joy in conflagration was Tokyo. During the six-hour raid over the night of March 9 and 10, 1945, the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that 87,793 had perished, with 40,918 injuries.
There was little novel in LeMay’s blunt approach. Britain’s Air Force Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris fertilised the ground, and the air, for such an idea. He made it his mission to not only kill Germans but kill German civilians with a cool determination. He did so with a workmanlike conviction so disturbing it chilled the blood of many Britons. As he put it, “The cities of Germany, including their working populations, are literally the heart of Germany’s war potential.” It was his intention to, he explained to personnel, “in addition to the horrors of fire … to bring masonry crashing down on top of the Boche, to kill the Boche and to terrify the Boche”. The Teutonic enemy came, not so much in all shades, but one. Saturation bombing, regarded after the Second World War as generally ineffective, a ghastly failure to bring the population to its knees, received its blessing in Bomber Command.
This entire process neutered the moral compass of its executioners. Killing civilians had ceased to be a problem of war, one of those afterthoughts which served to sanction mass murder. Britain’s chief of the air staff for a good deal of the war, Charles Portal, called it a “fallacy” that bombing Germany’s cities “was really intended to kill and frighten Germans and that we camouflaged this intention by the pretence that we would destroy industry. Any such idea is completely false. The loss of life, which amounted to some 600,000 killed, was purely incidental.” When 600,000 becomes an incidental matter, we are well on the way to celebrating the charnel houses of indiscriminate war.
When the issue of saturation bombing creased the legal minds behind the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials, an admission had to be made: all sides of the Second World War had made the air a realm of convenience in the killing of humanity, uniformed or not. To win was all that mattered. While the Nuremberg Charter left it open to criminalise German aerial tactics, the International Military Tribunal hedged. As chief of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring was singled out for air attacks on Poland and other states but the prosecutors refrained from pushing the point, likely reflecting the cold fact, as Matthew Lippmann puts it, “that both Germany and the Allies engaged in similar tactics.”
It is true that Germany and Japan gave a good pioneering go at indiscriminate aerial slaughter. But the Allied powers, marshalling never before seen fleets of murderous bombers, perfected the bloody harvest. The war had to be won, and, if needed, over the corpses of the hapless mother, defenceless child and frail grandparent. As the historian Charles S. Maier notes with characteristic sharpness, a tacit consensus prevailed after the Second World War that the ledger of brutality was all stacked on one side. German bombings during the Spanish Civil War, notably of Guernica; Warsaw, Rotterdam, London and Coventry during the world war that followed, were seen as “acts of wanton terror”. The Allied attacks on Italian, German and Japanese urban centres, in proportion and scale far more destructive, were seen as “legitimate military actions”.
Distinctions about civilian and non-civilian vanished in the atomic cloud. Hiroshima’s tale is the apotheosis of eliminating distinctions in war. It propagated such dangerous beliefs that nuclear wars might be won, sparing a handful of specialists and breeders in bunkers planning for the new post-apocalyptic dawn. It normalised, even as it constituted a warning, the act of annihilation itself.
Prior to the twin incinerations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the redoubtable nurse and writer Vera Brittain issued a warning that remains salient to those who wish to resort to waging death from the sky: “If the nations cannot agree, when peace returns, to refrain from the use of the bombing aeroplane as they have refrained from using poison gas, then mankind itself deserves to perish from the epidemic of moral insanity which today afflicts our civilisation.”
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com
SIGN UP FOR COUNTERCURRENTS DAILY NEWSLETTER
The Right Honourable Justin Trudeau Prime Minister of Canada
Office of the Prime Minister
80 Wellington Street
Dear Prime Minister Trudeau:
As a Hiroshima survivor, I was honoured to jointly accept the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017 on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. With the approaching 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th, I have written to all the heads of state across the world, asking them to ratify the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and I ask the same of our government.
After I married my husband, James Thurlow, and first moved to Canada in 1955, I often wondered what involvement Canada had in the development of the atom bombs that caused, by the end of 1945, the deaths of over 140,000 people in Hiroshima, 70,000 in Nagasaki and horrendous devastation and injuries that I personally witnessed as a thirteen-year old girl. It truly was hell on earth.
I hope you will be able to ask one of your assistants to examine the enclosed document, “Canada and the Atom Bomb” and to report on its contents to you.
The main points of the document are that Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom — as wartime allies during World War II — had not only completely integrated their production of conventional armaments. Canada was also a direct major participant in the Manhattan Project which developed the uranium and plutonium atom bombs dropped on Japan. This direct involvement operated at the highest Canadian political and governmental organizational level.
When Prime Minister Mackenzie King hosted President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Quebec City in August of 1943, and they signed the Quebec Agreement for the joint development of the atom bomb, the Agreement — in Mackenzie King’s words — “made Canada also a party to the development.”
For the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th, I am respectfully requesting that you acknowledge Canada’s involvement in and contributions to the two atomic bombings and issue a statement of regret on behalf of the Canadian Government for the immense deaths and suffering caused by the atom bombs that utterly destroyed two Japanese cities.
This direct Canadian Government involvement (described in the attached research document) consisted of the following:
—Mackenzie King’s most powerful minister, C.D. Howe, the Minister of Munitions and Supply, represented Canada on the Combined Policy Committee established to co- ordinate the joint efforts of the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada to develop the atom bomb.
—C.J. Mackenzie, President of the National Research Council of Canada, represented Canada on a technical subcommittee set up by the Combined Policy Committee to co- ordinate the work of scientists working on Canadian projects with their colleagues in the United States.
—The National Research Council of Canada designed and built nuclear reactors at its Montreal Laboratory and at Chalk River, Ontario, beginning in 1942 and 1944, and forwarded their scientific discoveries to the Manhattan Project.
—Eldorado Gold Mines Limited began supplying tons of uranium ore from its mine on Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories to British scientists as well as to American physicists investigating nuclear fission at Columbia University in New York in October of 1939.
—When Enrico Fermi succeeded in creating the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago on December 2, 1942, he used Canadian uranium from Eldorado.
—On the advice of C.J. Mackenzie and C.D. Howe, a secret Order in Council on July 15, 1942, allocated $4,900,000 [$75,500,000 in 2020 dollars] for the Canadian Government to buy sufficient Eldorado stock to have effective control of the company.
—Eldorado signed exclusive contracts with the Manhattan Project in July and December of 1942 for 350 tons of uranium ore and later an additional 500 tons.
—The Canadian Government nationalized Eldorado Mining and Refining Limited in January of 1944 and converted the company into a Crown Corporation to secure Canadian uranium for the Manhattan Project. C.D. Howe stated that “government action in taking over the Eldorado Mining and Smelting Company was part of the atomic [bomb] development program.”
—Eldorado’s refinery in Port Hope, Ontario, was the only refinery in North America capable of refining the uranium ore from the Belgian Congo, the bulk of which (along with Canadian uranium) was used in the manufacture of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs.
—On the advice of C.D. Howe, The Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company in Trail, B.C. signed contracts with the Manhattan Project in November of 1942 to produce heavy water for nuclear reactors to produce plutonium.
—As General Leslie Groves, the military head of the Manhattan Project, wrote in his history Now It Can Be Told, “there were about a dozen Canadian scientists in the Project.”
When Prime Minister Mackenzie King was informed on August 6, 1945 that the atom bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima, he wrote in his diary “We now see what might have come to the British race had German scientists won the race [to develop the atom bomb]. It is fortunate that the use of the bomb should have been upon the Japanese rather than upon the white races of Europe.”
In August of 1998, a delegation from Deline, N.W.T., representing Dene hunters and trappers employed by Eldorado to carry the sacks of radioactive uranium ore on their backs for transport to the Eldorado refinery in Port Hope travelled to Hiroshima and expressed their regret for their unwitting role in the creation of the atom bomb. Many Dene had themselves died of cancer as a result of their exposure to uranium ore, leaving Deline a village of widows.
Surely, the Canadian Government should make its own acknowledgement of Canada’s contribution to the creation of the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Canadians have a right to know how our government participated in the Manhattan Project that developed the world’s first nuclear weapons.
Since 1988, when Prime Minister Brian Mulroney formally apologized in the House of Commons for the internment of Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War, the Canadian Government has acknowledged and apologized for a dozen historical wrongs. These included apologies to the First Nations for the Canadian residential school system that separated young children from their families and sought to deprive them of their languages and culture.
Prime Minister Mulroney apologized for the internment of Italians as “enemy aliens” during World War
Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized in the House for the Chinese head tax imposed on Chinese immigrants between 1885 and 1923.
You yourself have acknowledged and apologized in the House for the Komagata Maru incident in which a shipload of immigrants from India were prohibited from landing in Vancouver in 1914.
You also apologized in the House for Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s decision in 1939 to reject an asylum request from over 900 German Jews fleeing the Nazis on board the ship St. Louis, 254 of whom died in the Holocaust when they were forced to return to Germany.
You apologized once again in the House for past state-sanctioned discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and two-spirited people in Canada.
Eldorado erected a cement marker at the site of its Port Radium mine that read in capital letters, “This mine was reopened in 1942 to supply uranium for the Manhattan Project (the development of the atomic bomb).” But this awareness by Canadians of our country’s direct participation in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has all but disappeared from our collective consciousness.
Your father, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, courageously brought about the withdrawal of American nuclear weapons stationed in Canada. I was present at the UN General Assembly’s First Special Session on Disarmament on May 26, 1978 when, in a fresh approach to disarmament, he advocated a “strategy of suffocation” as a means of halting and reversing the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union.
“We are thus not only the first country in the world with the capacity to produce nuclear weapons that chose not to do so,” he stated, “we are also the first nuclear-armed country to have chosen to divest itself of nuclear arms.” I was profoundly impressed and thrilled by his speech to the UN Disarmament Session, so hopeful his courageous initiative would lead to a curbing of nuclear arms.
As the United States and Russia announce ever more dangerous nuclear weapons delivery systems and the modernization of their nuclear forces — and the U.S. contemplates resuming nuclear tests — new voices for nuclear disarmament are urgently needed.
You affirmed that Canada is back in international diplomacy. The approaching 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th and 9th would be the appropriate moment to acknowledge Canada’s critical role in the creation of nuclear weapons, express a statement of regret for the deaths and suffering they caused in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as announce that Canada will ratify the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Sincerely yours,
Setsuko Thurlow CM, MSW
The struggle against Covid-19 has often been compared to fighting a war. Much of this rhetoric is bombast, but the similarities between the struggle against the virus and against human enemies are real enough. War reporting and pandemic reporting likewise have much in common because, in both cases, journalists are dealing with and describing matters of life and death. Public interest is fueled by deep fears, often more intense during an epidemic because the whole population is at risk. In a war, aside from military occupation and area bombing, terror is at its height among those closest to the battlefield.
The nature of the dangers stemming from military violence and the outbreak of a deadly disease may appear very different. But looked at from the point of view of a government, they both pose an existential threat because failure in either crisis may provoke some version of regime change. People seldom forgive governments that get them involved in losing wars or that fail to cope adequately with a natural disaster like the coronavirus. The powers-that-be know that they must fight for their political lives, perhaps even their physical existence, claiming any success as their own and doing their best to escape blame for what has gone wrong.
My First Pandemic
I first experienced a pandemic in the summer of 1956 when, at the age of six, I caught polio in Cork, Ireland. The epidemic there began soon after virologist Jonas Salk developed a vaccine for it in the United States, but before it was available in Europe. Polio epidemics were at their height in the first half of the twentieth century and, in a number of respects, closely resembled the Covid-19 experience: many people caught the disease but only a minority were permanently disabled by or died of it. In contrast with Covid-19, however, it was young children, not the old, who were most at risk. The terror caused by poliomyelitis, to use its full name, was even higher than during the present epidemic exactly because it targeted the very young and its victims did not generally disappear into the cemetery but were highly visible on crutches and in wheelchairs, or prone in iron lungs.
Parents were mystified by the source of the illness because it was spread by great numbers of asymptomatic carriers who did not know they had it. The worst outbreaks were in the better-off parts of modern cities like Boston, Chicago, Copenhagen, Melbourne, New York, and Stockholm. People living there enjoyed a good supply of clean water and had effective sewage disposal, but did not realize that all of this robbed them of their natural immunity to the polio virus. The pattern in Cork was the same: most of the sick came from the more affluent parts of the city, while people living in the slums were largely unaffected. Everywhere, there was a frantic search to identify those, like foreign immigrants, who might be responsible for spreading the disease. In the New York epidemic of 1916, even animals were suspected of doing so and 72,000 cats and 8,000 dogs were hunted down and killed.
The illness weakened my legs permanently and I have a severe limp so, even reporting in dangerous circumstances in the Middle East, I could only walk, not run. I was very conscious of my disabilities from the first, but did not think much about how I had acquired them or the epidemic itself until perhaps four decades later. It was the 1990s and I was then visiting ill-supplied hospitals in Iraq as that country’s health system was collapsing under the weight of U.N. sanctions. As a child, I had once been a patient in an almost equally grim hospital in Ireland and it occurred to me then, as I saw children in those desperate circumstances in Iraq, that I ought to know more about what had happened to me. At that time, my ignorance was remarkably complete. I did not even know the year when the polio epidemic had happened in Ireland, nor could I say if it was caused by a virus or a bacterium.
So I read up on the outbreak in newspapers of the time and Irish Health Ministry files, while interviewing surviving doctors, nurses, and patients. Kathleen O’Callaghan, a doctor at St. Finbarr’s hospital, where I had been brought from my home when first diagnosed, said that people in the city were so frightened “they would cross the road rather than walk past the walls of the fever hospital.” My father recalled that the police had to deliver food to infected homes because no one else would go near them. A Red Cross nurse, Maureen O’Sullivan, who drove an ambulance at the time, told me that, even after the epidemic was over, people would quail at the sight of her ambulance, claiming “the polio is back again” and dragging their children into their houses or they might even fall to their knees to pray.
The local authorities in a poor little city like Cork where I grew up understood better than national governments today that fear is a main feature of epidemics. They tried then to steer public opinion between panic and complacency by keeping control of the news of the outbreak. When British newspapers like the Times reported that polio was rampant in Cork, they called this typical British slander and exaggeration. But their efforts to suppress the news never worked as well as they hoped. Instead, they dented their own credibility by trying to play down what was happening. In that pre-television era, the main source of information in my hometown was the Cork Examiner, which, after the first polio infections were announced at the beginning of July 1956, accurately reported on the number of cases, but systematically underrated their seriousness.
Headlines about polio like “Panic Reaction Without Justification” and “Outbreak Not Yet Dangerous” regularly ran below the fold on its front page. Above it were the screaming ones about the Suez Crisis and the Hungarian uprising of that year. In the end, this treatment only served to spread alarm in Cork where many people were convinced that the death toll was much higher than the officially announced one and that bodies were being secretly carried out of the hospitals at night.
My father said that, in the end, a delegation of local businessmen, the owners of the biggest shops, approached the owners of the Cork Examiner, threatening to withdraw their advertising unless it stopped reporting the epidemic. I was dubious about this story, but when I checked the newspaper files many years later, I found that he was correct and the paper had almost entirely stopped reporting on the epidemic just as sick children were pouring into St. Finbarr’s hospital.
The Misreporting of Wars and Epidemics
By the time I started to research a book about the Cork polio epidemic that would be titled Broken Boy, I had been reporting wars for 25 years, starting with the Northern Irish Troubles in the 1970s, then the Lebanese civil war, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the war that followed Washington’s post-9/11 takeover of Afghanistan, and the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. After publication of the book, I went on covering these endless conflicts for the British paper the Independent as well as new conflicts sparked in 2011 by the Arab Spring in Libya, Syria, and Yemen.
As the coronavirus pandemic began this January, I was finishing a book (just published), War in the Age of Trump: The Defeat of Isis, the Fall of the Kurds, the Confrontation with Iran. Almost immediately, I noticed strong parallels between the Covid-19 pandemic and the polio epidemic 64 years earlier. Pervasive fear was perhaps the common factor, though little grasped by governments of this moment. Boris Johnson’s in Great Britain, where I was living, was typical in believing that people had to be frightened into lockdown, when, in fact, so many were already terrified and needed to be reassured.
I also noticed ominous similarities between the ways in which epidemics and wars are misreported. Those in positions of responsibility — Donald Trump represents an extreme version of this — invariably claim victories and successes even as they fail and suffer defeats. The words of the Confederate general “Stonewall” Jackson came to mind. On surveying ground that had only recently been a battlefield, he asked an aide: “Did you ever think, sir, what an opportunity a battlefield affords liars?”
This has certainly been true of wars, but no less so, it seemed to me, of epidemics, as President Trump was indeed soon to demonstrate (over and over and over again). At least in retrospect, disinformation campaigns in wars tend to get bad press and be the subject of much finger wagging. But think about it a moment: it stands to reason that people trying to kill each other will not hesitate to lie about each other as well. While the glib saying that “truth is the first casualty of war” has often proven a dangerous escape hatch for poor reporting or unthinking acceptance of a self-serving version of battlefield realities (spoon-fed by the powers-that-be to a credulous media), it could equally be said that truth is the first casualty of pandemics. The inevitable chaos that follows in the wake of the swift spread of a deadly disease and the desperation of those in power to avoid being held responsible for the soaring loss of life lead in the same direction.
There is, of course, nothing inevitable about the suppression of truth when it comes to wars, epidemics, or anything else for that matter. Journalists, individually and collectively, will always be engaged in a struggle with propagandists and PR men, one in which victory for either side is never inevitable.
Unfortunately, wars and epidemics are melodramatic events and melodrama militates against real understanding. “If it bleeds, it leads” is true of news priorities when it comes to an intensive care unit in Texas or a missile strike in Afghanistan. Such scenes are shocking but do not necessarily tell us much about what is actually going on.
The recent history of war reporting is not encouraging. Journalists will always have to fight propagandists working for the powers-that-be. Sadly, I have had the depressing feeling since Washington’s first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991 that the propagandists are increasingly winning the news battle and that accurate journalism, actual eyewitness reporting, is in retreat.
Disappearing News
By its nature, reporting wars is always going to be difficult and dangerous work, but it has become more so in these years. Coverage of Washington’s Afghan and Iraqi wars was often inadequate, but not as bad as the more recent reporting from war-torn Libya and Syria or its near total absence from the disaster that is Yemen. This lack fostered misconceptions even when it came to fundamental questions like who is actually fighting whom, for what reasons, and just who are the real prospective winners and losers.
Of course, there is little new about propaganda, controlling the news, or spreading “false facts.” Ancient Egyptian pharaohs inscribed self-glorifying and mendacious accounts of their battles on monuments, now thousands of years old, in which their defeats are lauded as heroic victories. What is new about war reporting in recent decades is the far greater sophistication and resources that governments can deploy in shaping the news. With opponents like longtime Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein, demonization was never too difficult a task because he was a genuinely demonic autocrat.
Yet the most influential news story about the Iraqi invasion of neighboring Kuwait in 1990 and the U.S.-led counter-invasion proved to be a fake. This was a report that, in August 1990, invading Iraqi soldiers had tipped babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital and left them to die on the floor. A Kuwaiti girl reported to have been working as a volunteer in the hospital swore before a U.S. congressional committee that she had witnessed that very atrocity. Her story was hugely influential in mobilizing international support for the war effort of the administration of President George H.W. Bush and the U.S. allies he teamed up with.
In reality it proved purely fictional. The supposed hospital volunteer turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington. Several journalists and human rights specialists expressed skepticism at the time, but their voices were drowned out by the outrage the tale provoked. It was a classic example of a successful propaganda coup: instantly newsworthy, not easy to disprove, and when it was — long after the war — it had already had the necessary impact, creating support for the U.S.-led coalition going to war with Iraq.
In a similar fashion, I reported on the American war in Afghanistan in 2001-2002 at a time when coverage in the international media had left the impression that the Taliban had been decisively defeated by the U.S. military and its Afghan allies. Television showed dramatic shots of bombs and missiles exploding on the Taliban front lines and Northern Alliance opposition forces advancing unopposed to “liberate” the Afghan capital, Kabul.
When, however, I followed the Taliban retreating south to Kandahar Province, it became clear to me that they were not by any normal definition a beaten force, that their units were simply under orders to disperse and go home. Their leaders had clearly grasped that they were over-matched and that it would be better to wait until conditions changed in their favor, something that had distinctly happened by 2006, when they went back to war in a big way. They then continued to fight in a determined fashion to the present day. By 2009, it was already dangerous to drive beyond the southernmost police station in Kabul due to the risk that Taliban patrols might create pop-up checkpoints anywhere along the road.
None of the wars I covered then have ever really ended. What has happened, however, is that they have largely ended up receding, if not disappearing, from the news agenda. I suspect that, if a successful vaccine for Covid-19 isn’t found and used globally, something of the same sort could happen with the coronavirus pandemic as well. Given the way news about it now dominates, even overwhelms, the present news agenda, this may seem unlikely, but there are precedents. In 1918, with World War I in progress, governments dealt with what came to be called the Spanish Flu by simply suppressing information about it. Spain, as a non-combatant in that war, did not censor the news of the outbreak in the same fashion and so the disease was most unfairly named “the Spanish Flu,” though it probably began in the United States.
The polio epidemic in Cork supposedly ended abruptly in mid-September 1956 when the local press stopped reporting on it, but that was at least two weeks before many children like me caught it. In a similar fashion, right now, wars in the Middle East and north Africa like the ongoing disasters in Libya and Syria that once got significant coverage now barely get a mention much of the time.
In the years to come, the same thing could happen to the coronavirus.
Patrick Cockburn is a Middle East correspondent for the Independent of London and the author of six books on the Middle East, the latest of which is War in the Age of Trump: The Defeat of Isis, the Fall of the Kurds, the Confrontation with Iran (Verso).
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Copyright 2020 Patrick Cockburn
Originally published in TomDispatch
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