WORLD IS FROM EAST COAST TO WEST COAST!
The Last Superpower
“Nuke them”, is the frequently used comment on social media that we read, off and on, whenever some writer talks about the “undesired stands” against the United States or NATO or the overall policies of the West as taken either by Iran, Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Pakistan or any other Asian or African country!
It was1988 when in an article of mine I quoted a senior Pakistani professor teaching at an American state university. The article was published in Pakistan’s most prestigious newspaper DAWN. When I asked the professor that do Americans have any soft corner in their hearts for Japanese, he outrightly replied, “They are not regretful a bit for what they did to Japs in 1945. But instead they are afraid of Japs’ inevitable encroachments on American markets world over. It is a serious matter for Americans. It concerns their bread and butter”.
After a lapse of 35 years, when last year I floated a question on Quora that, “Did President Harry Truman ever express any guilt for his authorization of nuking two cities resulting in the painful deaths of around two hundred thousand innocent civilians?” I received a plethora of replies from the nationals of the United States who not only lamented and questioned my ignorance about the “inevitability” of dropping nuclear bombs on two cities of Japan for stopping the Japan from continuing the war but almost all of them argued that had United States not nuked Japan then in that case she could had been left with no choice but to invade Japan which could mean deaths of millions of Japanese as well as American soldiers. Some responders showed their anger that how someone living in the United States can care about the lives of Japanese instead of thinking about the lives of Americans. Perhaps they meant that in case of an invasion – instead of using nuclear bombs – the lives of American soldier were also to be lost. One emotional reply was, “He did the right thing and he knew it. Get out of my country if you don’t like it”. Another one insisted that in order to save the lives of Americans it would not have mattered if the whole of Japan was decimated.
After reading the responses I realized the common and continuous failure – perhaps a conscious one – to distinguish between the lives of professional soldiers and innocent civilians, including children and women. I also acknowledged the preciousness of some lives over the lives of all other creatures who inhabit this planet. Another thought that came to my mind was that, throughout the history of mankind, all of those power intoxicated mighty maniacs and obsessionists having formidable fighting machines, like Alexander the Great, Chenghez Khan, Halaku Khan, Tamerlane and Adolph Hitler must had one or another justification to massacre the millions and millions of civilians, at different time periods.
This typical psyche of indifference to human life which evolved in America, especially after Second World War, became more and more visible in Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen and then Palestine when common people of the United States started justifying and condoning the indiscriminate killings of innocent citizens of other countries under the pretexts like collateral damage and inevitability to protect the national interests! It is rightly said that for Americans world starts from the East Coast and ends at the West Coast.
EPILOGUE
I feel myself compelled to hypothesize that the United States is the last superpower among all which have ever existed on this planet! None of the empires of the past, including Romans, Persians, Egyptians, Arabs, Turks, Mongols, Czars, British, French and others, had that much destructive power as possessed by the superpower of today. At the ultimate end of their global supremacy – being inevitable as have happened to be the final fate of all previous powers – the United States of America would rather prefer to detonate their arsenals! In the absence of any moral obligation to honor human life, on the globe, America has a temperament to destroy and annihilate, indiscriminately, without showing any remorse or regret!
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