Happy Nuke Year

And so we begin a fresh new spin around the sun. Happy Nuke Year. 'Cos that's where the future (and its possible mushroom end) lies.

This is how it begins: first a trickle, then the flood.

Just a while ago, when the Iraq war was but a bitty embryo of an invasion plan, there was talk among memebers of the U.S. department of war of the need for a nuclear startup. The buzz was all very Rumsfeldian, of intelligent nukes that could seek out a highly specific target and smithereen the mother with a minimum of collateral calamity. There's been little (open) talk lately (also little Donald Rumsfeld, thankfully) of that; but I expect one/more of the empire's covert cabals is at work there.

Now, Tony Blair, that wide-mouthed peacemaker, wants to reignite the sunsetted empire's nuclear program. Then, of course, there's North Korea and Iran, friends of the capitalist patriot A.Q. Khan of Pakistan, that old friend of America's, whose new friend India waved the checkered flag for its despised neighbor to join its own despised neighbor's "I got a bomb, too" club.

But what starts as a dribble, could turn into a Gangetic overflow, spreading outward into virulent damnation.

The U.S., once vehemently opposed to India's nuclear aspirations, is now its benefactor. India is beside itself with joy for the attention and the acknowledgement of its purported global importance. But it forgets that the West couldn't give a rat's ass about any local disaster potential. Let's hark back to the Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal, India, in 1984. Safety regulations were criminally flouted, a chemical catastrophe ensued. Scores of people died, many more were maimed, generations of deformed children born in the disaster's wake paid (and continue to pay) the price. The legal outcome? A payoff, a pat on the back, criminals retired - some to their hometowns in India; fatter, richer ones to their estates in America. "Case closed," said the Indian courts, as did the American courts, and the repercussions were left for society's meekest to endure as they were swept under the rug.

But what's that got to do with nukes? Let a tiny story, which appeared in the regional language of a local newspaper translated and uploaded for the English-language readers, make the connection. Uranium tailings spilled into a lake in northern India. The creatures inhabiting the lake began to die. Locals noticed and alerted the authorities; little, if any, was done.

It's small, sounds relatively harmless - it did happen far away in some remote village in a distant country, after all. But let it stand as a portent of what's to come. India is a country where for a few bucks the authorities will turn a blind eye to the grimmest transgressions. In the past, the West (and the East) could look away - it was too far away to affect them. It's a different world today. These isolated incidents stand in danger of becoming a hail of frogs across the world.

India's nuclear ambitions should not encouraged or supported. Nor should those of any other country. The immediate strategic interests of any nation - subversive or bellicose - are not worth the consequences they threaten to wreak.

Mahmoud Ahm-a-in-denial

If you couldn't make it to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Holocaust-hoax party in Tehran this week, fear not, the Web is flooded with a veritable fast-breaking feast of reports on that stellar gathering of fools. A BBC reporter I recently heard on WNYC acutely observed that the same Iranian demagogue who claimed to be merely providing a platform for free speech and independent thinking will not offer the same privilege to his own people, particularly when it comes to the policies of Mahmoud and his mullah masters. It was ironic, though, that the Yank-baiting nation rolled out the red carpet for an American white supremacist Ku Klux Klanner, even if he was a jolly participant in the anti-Jew spewfest. The irony is not that he's American, but that the same good ol' boy would be happy to stand at the loose end of a noose, ready to lynch any Mahmoud lookalike who had the nerve to think he could be a part of the American dream—he is a white supremacist, after all.

But American psychos and German crackpots (and other assorted foreign nincompoops, not to mention homegrown ones, like the virulently anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jews of Iran) aside, the event threw up all kinds of crazy ideas, and not all of them were revisionist theories. As it turns out—or maybe I'm just late in the game to discover this—Holocaust denial is a crime punishable by imprisonment in some "progressive" European nations, such as Germany and Austria. Now I'm not saying that proclaiming that massacre as a fiction is any kind of reasonable argument—hell, it's not even a sane one. But jailing someone for expressing it is not that different from throwing someone in the slammer for asserting that it did take place. That's what Turkey wanted to do with the writer Orhan Pamuk for publicly discussing the Armenian genocide allegedly exacted by the state of Turkey. Free speech is a double-edged sword, sure, and there's a razor-fine line between "free" and "irresponsible." But there's also a danger in overcompensating for one's own guilt by overcurbing others' expressions, as crazy as those expressions can get.