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

[Dwyer Sullivan]

Thank you Art for reminding us of somed darkness that not everyone wants to
see. Peace, Dwyer

On Sun, Apr 7, 2024 at 12:40 PM Arthur Blomme via Sundaycommunity <
sundaycommunity at lists.integralshift.ca> wrote:

> *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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-- 
Act Justly, Love Tenderly, Walk Humbly With Your God
    - Micah 6:8
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