* Irish Campaign for *
Nuclear Disarmament
Feachtas um Dí-armáil Eithneach
http://indigo.ie/~goodwill/icnd.html P.O. Box 6327, Dublin
6, Ireland e-mail: irishcnd@ireland.com Telephone: 087-236 4312
Fax: 01-4977043
SPEECH BY DR. JOHN DE COURCY IRELAND,
PRESIDENT OF IRISH C.N.D., ON THE 57TH. ANNIVERSARY OF THE DROPPING
OF THE FIRST ATOMIC BOMB, HIROSHIMA.
MERRION SQUARE, DUBLIN, 6TH. AUGUST 2002
The year 2002 has so far been a very grim one for those (and I believe they are increasing if confused numbers) who see the total futility of going to war with another people in the age of nuclear long-range weapons, germ warfare and even worse.
Yet there are governments in growing numbers threatening other governments and busily spending their citizens' money that should be going in some cases to prevent real want and anyway for improving education and public health on more and more weapons to please the world's leading arms-manufacturers, the greatest criminals in modern society. We have India and Pakistan threatening to fight over Kashmir. We have actual wars going on at this moment in impoverished Africa where every person killed means one person fewer for the long-urgent reconstruction of the African economy. We have George Bush, an arrogant and ignorant clown at the head of the world's richest nation threatening like any vulgar bully to invade Iraq where children are still dying as the result of the 'civilised' West's Quiet War on 'barbarous' Arabs. Knowing that such a move would create crisis and hatreds (of which the world has too many already) throughout the Middle East. - But it would gratify North America's oil millionaires and other rich businessmen dependent on cheap oil. Bush in Washington and Blair in London are quite ready to show themselves to be obedient servants of the world's great oil magnates (each with his personal underground nuclear-proof mansion) in their determination to maintain the critical domination of all the world's economy that they got built for them by the last century's wars.
But the believers in war as an economic tool for change can be stopped if the ordinary, common-sense citizens of all nations would set about saving their own and their families lives by plaguing their public representatives to have the courage that personal ambitions, bribes and self-satisfaction prevent them doing, namely to insist, ceaselessly till they win their case, that NO government of the twenty-first century has any right whatever to go to war. The twenty-first century must be made by us, the people, the first century to avoid the disgrace of nations going to war.