[Sundaycommunity] The solar eclipse essay: Night for Day or Day for Night in the Heart of Darkness

[Arthur Blomme]

/*I believe that this is an excellent essay by Edward Curtin  to read 
into these times of war on the occasion of the upcoming solar eclipse.*/

/*Art
*/


      Night for Day or Day for Night in the Heart of Darkness

It is strange how today people revel in the darkness even while fearing 
it.  Sunsets are far more popular than sunrises, even while death is the 
great bogeyman and birth deserves cigars and champagne. Crowds regularly 
gather in the evenings, trying to freeze time, even as they celebrate 
the death of another day.  This is a twisted relationship we have; to 
day and night, life and death, darkness and light

We are such strange and paradoxical creatures.

And now the upcoming plunge into night for day with the solar eclipse is 
the next great big thing to see.

A plunge into the heart of darkness that is pertinent to the dark heart 
of U.S. foreign policy with its ruthless power, craven terror, and pride 
in killing.

It is uncanny how the darkness of social life today is reflected in the 
promotion of a natural event as if it were a must-see film that has just 
won the Academy Award.

As Joseph Conrad wrote in Heart of Darkness: “Like a running blaze on a 
plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.”

And we will die in a flicker if the dark-hearted leaders of this country 
continue to push against Russia in Ukraine for the nuclear war that they 
previewed in 1945 at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  It is understandable why 
in retrospect the great Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett’s first 
report from Hiroshima was so widely censored and why he was for many 
years portrayed as a communist dupe, even as twenty years later his 
honest reports from Vietnam were so important for those interested in 
the truth that the mainstream media blacked them out.  The exposure of 
America’s ongoing war crimes was for decades blamed on communist 
influence, just as today it is blamed on Russian propaganda.

But now it’s time for a flick to give us crocodile tears from the father 
of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, with that must-see Academy 
Award winning film, Oppenheimer.

A biopic of one man with all his complicated and twisted personality and 
scientific brilliance is a far cry from Wilfred Burchett’s article, The 
Atomic Plague: “I write this as a warning to the world.”  But then the 
Academy Awards’ ongoing support for Ukraine in its U.S. proxy war 
against Russia – a war rooted in the 2014 U.S. engineered coup and 
NATO’s encircling of Russia – is just the opposite: a provocation that 
makes nuclear war much more likely.  It’s a sick celebrity game.

The creation of the atomic bomb and its use on the Japanese was demonic 
– pure evil.  Robert Oppenheimer was not a tragic figure as portrayed in 
the New York times article titled: American Prometheus: The Triumph and 
Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

As I wrote in “Trinity’s Shadow,” he was “complicated, yes; but he was 
essentially a hubristic scientist who lent his services to a demonic 
project, and afterwards, having let the cat out of the bag by creating 
the Bomb, guiltily urged the government that used it in massive war 
crimes to restrain itself in the future.”

Asking for such self-regulation is as absurd as asking the 
pharmaceutical and big tech industries, or the CIA, to regulate 
themselves.  Anyone who would give the name “Trinity” to the site where 
the first bomb was exploded had a twisted mind.

Oppenheimer, which *excludes *scenes from the devastation in Hiroshima 
and Nagasaki but includes one wherein scientists rapturously celebrate 
with flag waving the exploding of the bomb over Hiroshima, recently 
opened in Japan.

The New York Times published a piece about the opening that contains 
various Japanese reactions, including one from Yujin Yaguchi, a 
professor at the University of Tokyo, that accurately raises a 
fundamental issue: the film “celebrates a group of white male scientists 
who really enjoyed their privilege and their love of political power.

We should focus more on why such a rather one-sided story of white men 
continues to attract such attention and adulation in the U.S. and what 
it says about the current politics and the larger politics of memory in 
the U.S (and elsewhere).”

Exactly. The issue is political, not aesthetic.  Why it is good to see 
some flickering images and not others? Why is night for day and the 
blocking out of the sun by an eclipse so good but the reminder that we 
are on the edge of a nuclear eclipse because of the policies of our 
dark-hearted leaders is not?

*We live in very dark times.* There is no need to watch the sun being 
extinguished and day turn to night in the heart of an immense darkness. 
Kurtz’s dying words as recalled by Marlowe at the end of The Heart of 
Darkness – ‘The horror! The horror!’ are not words we want to utter as 
we realize we too have gone mad in our souls because we looked the wrong 
way as the nukes were in their flight.

*Chase the light! *
As Oliver Stone writes in his memoir, “One of the first basic lessons in 
filming is chasing the light. Without it, you have nothing. . . .”
*It’s true in life as well. We live in the flicker.*

So if we are to celebrate the dawn of a new day on earth, paradoxical 
and contradictory as it might sound, we do need to look into the 
darkness – the heart of the darkest and demonic crimes committed by our 
heartless leaders – Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the genocide in Gaza, the 
escalating and expanding war in the Middle East, and the U.S proxy war 
against Russia in Ukraine, to name a few.

And if the contemplation of the eclipse of the sun disturbs you enough 
to impel you to do so, a quick peek won’t hurt.

/*Edward Curtin*is a prominent author, researcher and sociologist based 
in Western Massachusetts.//He is a Research Associate of the Centre for 
Research on Globalization (CRG)/
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