Iron-domes are (also) made of words

 

The character Rodion Raskolnikov made an unforgettable observation in Fyodor Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment.’ It is a response to a question put to him by his sister Dunya: ‘Brother, brother, what are you saying? Why have you shed blood?’

Here’s the response:

'Which all men shed, he put in almost frantically, ‘which flows and has always flowed in streams, which is spilt like champagne, and for which men are crowned in the Capitol and are called afterwards benefactors of mankind.’
This was his justification for the murder of an unscrupulous pawnbroker, an old woman who hoards money and other valuables. Raskolnikov reasons that with the money thus obtained he could drag himself out of poverty and go on to perform great deeds. So, in essence, some crimes are justifiable if they pave the way for so-called higher goals of supposedly ‘better’ men.  

Sound familiar?  

Remember the scandalous and largely ignored narrative about Iraq (of Saddam Hussein) possessing ‘weapons of mass destruction’ (WMD) which manufactured an excuse for the invasion of that country? Well, sanctions on Iraq, it is estimated, caused approximately 2 million deaths, and according to UNICEF, resulted in the deaths of a half a million children under the age of five. Violent death count estimates, i.e. beginning with the 2003 invasion and the ensuing occupation and insurgency, and civil war, range from 600,000 to over 1 million.  

Note: the US Government and the countries that made up the cringe-worthy ‘Coalition of the Willing’ are yet to provide one shred of evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

The narrative created an excuse for butchery. The butchers went scot-free. Another such individual, a butcher by the same token, Barack Obama, was honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize, no less ‘for his "extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.’ The world cheered and thereby affirmed Raskolnikov’s observation.

People who are justifiably skeptical about today’s narrative regarding Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities may not remember that Obama brought it up way back in 2012.  

What of Iran’s nuclear capabilities though?

A few days ago the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi, said that ‘more than 400 kilograms of enriched uranium remains unaccounted for in Iran following Israeli and US airstrikes on key nuclear facilities.’

Now there are 59 countries with Uranium deposits. There are nine with nuclear weapons. Iran is not one of them. Grossi himself knows that Iran’s stockpile has only 60% purity whereas it should be 90% to build a nuclear weapon. He doesn’t know where this (at the moment) harmless (in nuclear-strike terms) stockpile is. He’s not worried about countries that do have strike-capability and have stocks to blow up the planet several times over. He doesn’t seem to be overly anxious about the fact that the sole clandestine nuclear weapons power in the Middle East is not Iran but Israel, a country that has steadfastly refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has never allowed UN safeguards on its facilities.

Israel, meanwhile has, in the name of dealing with a clearly non-existent existential threat, perpetrated the worst crimes against humanity in this century in terms of intensity. In Gaza. We need not go over the numbers. The world, at least those who purchase the Washington narrative, does not seem to mind.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone, especially since the world remembers Hitler and not King Leopold,
under whose watch at least 1-5 million people and probably in the region of 10 million were killed in what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The key word is narrative. The word. Then pen. It can be the staunchest comrade-at-arms of the sword.  The sword needs the pen, in the before, while and after of butchery. The pen or rather the keyboard these days, needs to re-dress tyrants as ‘benefactors-of-humankind.’

Raskolnikov, after the act, is wracked with remorse. He is forced to contend with guilt and horror at the consequences, both to himself and the world around him. The tyrants of the world have one advantage over Dostoevsky’s character. They are not burdened by remorse. They, in contrast, have the cover of self-righteousness which is tenaciously protected by bucks and guns. Sorry, drones. It’s an iron-dome of a different and more pernicious kind, one might say.  

Tyrants need the likes of Rafael Grossi. They are needed to construct Iron-Dome Narratives. 

[This article was published in the Daily News under the weekly column title ‘The Recurrent Thursday’]