{"id":238301,"date":"2023-07-03T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-07-03T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=238301"},"modified":"2023-06-30T02:57:37","modified_gmt":"2023-06-30T01:57:37","slug":"sea-monsters-threaten-the-world-with-their-tridents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/07\/sea-monsters-threaten-the-world-with-their-tridents\/","title":{"rendered":"Sea Monsters Threaten the World with Their Tridents"},"content":{"rendered":"

27 Jun 2023 – <\/em>Sometimes you wake up from a dream to realize it is telling you to pay close attention to the depth of its message, especially when it is linked to what you have been thinking about for days.\u00a0 I have just come up from a dream in which I went down to the cellar of the house I grew up in because the basement light was on and the back cellar door had been opened by a mysterious man who stood outside.<\/p>\n

\n

I will spare you additional details or an interpretation, except to say that my daytime thoughts concerned the media spectacle surrounding the Titan submersible that imploded two miles down in the ocean\u2019s cellar while trying to give its passengers a view of the wreck of the Titanic, the \u201cunsinkable\u201d ship nicknamed \u201cthe Millionaire\u2019s Special.\u201d\u00a0 The ship that no one could sink except an ice cube in the drink that swallowed it.<\/p>\n

Cellar dreams are well-known as the place where we as individuals and societies can face the flickering shadows that we refuse to face in conscious life.\u00a0 Carl Jung called it \u201cthe shadow.\u201d\u00a0 Such shadows, when unacknowledged and repressed, have a tendency to autonomously surface and erupt, not only leading to personal self-destruction but that of whole societies.\u00a0 History is replete with examples.\u00a0 My dream\u2019s mysterious stranger had lit my way through some dark thoughts and opened the door to a possible escape.\u00a0 He got me thinking about what all of us tend to want to deny or avoid because its implications are so monstrous.<\/p>\n

The obsession with the alleged marvels of technology together with naming them after ancient Greek and Roman gods are fixations of elite technologues who have lost what Spengler called \u201cliving inner religiousness\u201d but wish to show they know the classical names even though they miss the meaning of these myths.\u00a0 Such myths tell the stories of things that never happened but always are.\u00a0 Appropriating the ancient names without irony \u2013 such as naming a boat Titanic or a submersible Titan \u2013 unveils the hubristic ignorance of people who have never descended to the underworld to learn its lessons.\u00a0 Relinquishing\u00a0 their sense of god-like power doesn\u2019t occur to them, nor does the shadow side of their Faustian dreams.<\/p>\n

They will never name some machine Nemesis, for that would expose the fact that they have exceeded the eternal limits with their maniacal technological extremism, and, to paraphrase Camus, dark Furies will swoop down to destroy them.<\/p>\n

Nietzsche termed the result nihilism.\u00a0 Once people have killed God, machines are a handy replacement in societies that worship the illusion of technique and are scared to death of death and the machines that they invented to administer it.<\/p>\n

The latter is not a matter fit to print since it must remain in the dark basement of the public\u2019s consciousness.\u00a0 If it were publicized, the game of nihilistic death-dealing would be exposed.\u00a0 Because power, money, and technology are the ruling deities today, the mass media revolve around publicizing their marvels in spectacular fashion, and when \u201caccidents\u201d occur, they never point out the myth of the machines, or what Lewis Mumford called \u201cThe Pentagon of Power.\u201d\u00a0 Tragedies occur, they tell us, but they are minor by-products of the marvels of technology.<\/p>\n

But if these media would take us down to see the truth beneath the oceans\u2019 surfaces, we would see not false monsters such as the Titanic or Moby Dick or cartoon fictions such as Disney\u2019s Monstro the whale, but the handiwork of thousands of mad Captain Ahabs who have attached the technologues \u201cgreatest\u201d invention \u2013 nuclear weapons \u2013 to nuclear-powered ballistic submarines.<\/p>\n

Trident submarines. First strike submarines, such as the USS Ohio.<\/strong><\/p>\n

These Trident subs live and breathe in the cellars of our minds where few dare descend.\u00a0 They are controlled by jackals in Washington and the Pentagon with polished faces in well-appointed offices with coffee machines and tasty snacks.\u00a0 Madmen.\u00a0 They hum through the deep waters ready to strike and destroy the world.\u00a0 Few hear them, almost none see them, most prefer not to know of them.<\/p>\n

But wait, what\u2019s the buzz, tell me what\u2019s happening: the Titan and the Titanic, wealthy voyeurs intent on getting a glance into the sepulchre of those long dead, while six hundred or so desperate migrants drown in the Mediterranean sea from which the ancient gods were born.\u00a0 These are the priorities of a society that worships the wealthy; a society of the spectacle that entertains and distracts while the end of the world cruises below consciousness.<\/p>\n

The United States alone has fourteen such submarines armed with Trident missiles constantly prowling the ocean depths, while the British have four.\u00a0 Named for the three-pronged weapon of the Greek and Roman sea gods, Poseidon and Neptune respectively, these submarine-launched ballistic missiles, manufactured by Lockheed Martin (\u201cWe deliver innovative solutions to the world\u2019s toughest challenges\u201d), can destroy the world in a flash. Destroy it many times over. A final solution.<\/p>\n

While the United States has abrogated all treaties that offered some protection from their use and has declared their right of first use<\/strong>, it has consistently pushed toward a nuclear confrontation with Russia and China.\u00a0 Today \u2013 2023 June \u2013 we stand on the precipice of nuclear annihilation as never before.<\/p>\n

A single Trident submarine has 20 Trident missiles, each carrying 12 independently targeted warheads for a total of 240 warheads, with each warhead approximately 40 times more destructive than the Hiroshima bomb.\u00a0 Fourteen submarines times 240 equals 3,360 nuclear warheads times 40 equals 134,400 Hiroshimas<\/strong>.\u00a0 Such are the lessons of mathematics in absurd times.<\/p>\n

James W. Douglass, the author of the renown JFK and the Unspeakable<\/em> and a longtime activist against the Tridents at Ground Zero Center for Non-Violent Action outside the Bangor Submarine Base in Washington state, put it this way in 2015 when asked about Robert Aldridge, the heroic Lockheed Trident missile designer who resigned his position in an act of conscience and became an inspirational force for the campaign against the Tridents and nuclear weapons:<\/p>\n

Question: \u201cWhat did the Nuremberg attorneys say about war crimes that had such a deep impact on Robert Aldridge?\u201d<\/p>\n

Douglass: \u201cThey said that first-strike weapons and weapons that directly target a civilian population were war crimes in violation of the Nuremberg principles. Those Nuremberg principles, which are the foundations of international law, are violated by both by electronic warfare \u2013 which is why we poured blood on the files for electronic warfare [at the base] \u2013 and also by the Trident missile system, which is what Robert Aldridge was building.\u201d<\/p>\n

Robert Aldridge<\/a> saw his shadow side.\u00a0 He went to the cellar of his darkest dreams. He refused to turn away.\u00a0 He became an inspiration for James and Shelley Douglass and so many others.\u00a0 He was a man in and of the system, who saw the truth of his complicity in radical evil and underwent a metanoia.\u00a0 It is possible.<\/p>\n

If those missiles are ever launched from the monsters that carry them through the hidden recesses of the world\u2019s oceans, there will never be another Nuremberg Trial to judge the guilty, for the innocent and the guilty will all be dead.<\/p>\n

We will have failed to shed light on our darkest shadows.<\/p>\n

Writing in another context that pertains to today\u2019s high-flying nuclear madmen whose mythic Greek forbear Icarus would not listen, the poet W. H. Auden put it this way in \u201cMus\u00e9e des Beaux Arts\u201d:<\/p>\n

About suffering they were never wrong,<\/em>
\nThe Old Masters: how well they understood<\/em>
\nIts human position; how it takes place<\/em>
\nWhile someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along<\/em><\/p>\n

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting<\/em>
\nFor the miraculous birth, there always must be<\/em>
\nChildren who did not specially want it to happen, skating<\/em>
\nOn a pond at the edge of the wood:<\/em>
\nThey never forgot<\/em>
\nThat even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course<\/em>
\nAnyhow in a corner, some untidy spot<\/em>
\nWhere the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer\u2019s horse<\/em>
\nScratches its innocent behind on a tree.<\/em><\/p>\n

In Brueghel\u2019s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away<\/em>
\nQuite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may<\/em>
\nHave heard the splash, the forsaken cry,<\/em>
\nBut for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone<\/em>
\nAs it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green<\/em>
\nWater; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen<\/em>
\nSomething amazing, a boy falling out of the sky<\/em>
\nHad somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We turn away at our peril.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Edward Curtin, Ph.D. <\/span><\/em>is a widely published author and a member of the <\/em><\/span><\/i>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/em> His new book is <\/span><\/i>Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies<\/span><\/a><\/span> \u2013 His website: <\/span><\/i>Behind the Curtain<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/span> – email: <\/span><\/i>edcurtinjr@gmail.com<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 edwardcurtin.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The obsession with the alleged marvels of technology and naming them after ancient Greek and Roman gods are fixations of elite technologues who have lost what Spengler called \u201cliving inner religiousness\u201d but wish to show they know the classical names even though they miss the meaning of these myths.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":89352,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[461],"class_list":["post-238301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238301"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":238303,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238301\/revisions\/238303"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}