<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<title>Night for Day or Day for Night in the Heart of Darkness</title>
</head>
<body>
<p><em><strong>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.</strong></em></p>
<p><em><strong>Art<br>
</strong></em></p>
<h3>Night for Day or Day for Night in the Heart of Darkness<br>
</h3>
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<br>
<p>We are such strange and paradoxical creatures.<br>
<br>
And now the upcoming plunge into night for day with the solar
eclipse is the next great big thing to see. <br>
</p>
<p>A plunge into the heart of darkness that is <font size="4">pertinent
</font>to the dark heart of U.S. foreign policy with its ruthless
power, craven terror, and pride in killing. <br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.”<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Oppenheimer, which <b><font size="4">excludes </font></b>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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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).”<br>
<br>
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?<br>
</p>
<p><b>We live in very dark times.</b> 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.</p>
<p><b>Chase the light! </b><br>
As Oliver Stone writes in his memoir, “One of the first basic
lessons in filming is chasing the light. Without it, you have
nothing. . . .”<br>
<b>It’s true in life as well. We live in the flicker.</b><br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.</p>
<p><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: italic; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-weight: 400; font-stretch: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: inherit; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(201, 196, 189); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(24, 26, 27); text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial;"><strong
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: 700; font-stretch: inherit; font-size: inherit; line-height: inherit; font-family: inherit; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; vertical-align: baseline;">Edward
Curtin<span> </span></strong>is a prominent author, researcher
and sociologist based in Western Massachusetts.<span> </span></em><em
style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-style: italic; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-numeric: inherit; font-variant-east-asian: inherit; font-variant-alternates: inherit; font-variant-position: inherit; font-weight: 400; font-stretch: inherit; font-size: 15px; line-height: inherit; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-optical-sizing: inherit; font-kerning: inherit; font-feature-settings: inherit; font-variation-settings: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(201, 196, 189); letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; white-space: normal; background-color: rgb(24, 26, 27); text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial;">He
is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on
Globalization (CRG)</em></p>
</body>
</html>