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Editorial
Volume 1 | Issue 4 | February 2007| 















Editorial
 

(One)
To have made Saddam Hossein a martyr is going to prove the gravest ever mistake any US President has committed. Their mistakes always outweigh their good deeds. Saddam Hossein was not an angel; he committed crimes; any ruler of his stature would have done. Angela Davis was imprisoned for crimes committed on her, not for crimes committed by her. It was done by the US govt. Mohammed Ali ( Casius Clay) was denied his freedom several times; Malcolm X was assassinated not when he committed crimes, but when he became moderate and took a middle path. Martin Luther King was assassinated in the United States of America. The assassin killed Gandhi after touching his feet. So crimes are to be punished; but who will punish whom? This is a very dangerous question these days. Milosevic was in prison; he was imprisoned by foreigners. His country is as civilized or more civilized than the countries that imprisoned him. It has the traditions of the Hellenic civilizations. President Noriega has been imprisoned on the ground that he trafficked in drugs. But, just think who imprisoned him and why? Where is he now? Where are the millions of Wampanoags and Cherokees and the multitudinous Indian tribals of America? They were all killed in cold blood. And who would punish whom? Benjamin Franklin did know very well that he was successor to the killers of the American tribes. Abraham Lincoln knew so, Thomas Jefferson knew so. Emerson knew so and Whitman knew so. Did anyone mention the crime? Who would punish whom? It is high time the US regretted this wholesale killing. It is high time the Latin American and North American Rulers that hailed from the west in not so distant a past regretted these killings. And has any one of them uttered a word in grief over the souls that roam about in the dark and void? No, No, No.
Just think, how many American Presidents would have been hanged or in imprisoned had the number of people killed by each is the criterion for punishment? Who killed thousands at one stretch in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Who helped Pinochet to kill in cold blood innocent people who were suspected to be political opponents? Who are the persons that run the Al-Garib and Gondonamo prisons? And now who will punish whom?

And who ran the wicked Goree island prisons to encamp the Negroe slaves in order to mollify them by physical torture? The whites and their successors seem to glee in sadism of unheard sort. But we know most whites are not of this caliber. Among them are great men and women. Among them are great peace lovers and fighters for freedom.
And now who has punished Hossein? The arch-angels of demoniac tendencies called him names and have put an end to his life. History would certainly record this judicial murder, a great blunder; because this would not stop bloods shed in Iraq and elsewhere, but only perpetrate it.


The world seems to be going some what railed and derailed. It is a paradox indeed. Rail is really the law of history. That is why Gordon Childe equated history with a train installing its own rails. George Bush &co seems to be some what disturbed by the developments in the USA and the American continent. A number of countries in the American continent have turned left or near left. The victory of Lulu in Brazil and Sandinistas under Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua is a good indicator of where America is heading to. With Chavez, Morales, and Michaela Bachelet at the helm of governments in their respective countries and even countries like Uruguay turning left, peace should have been the best choice for the USA. Naturally peace lovers the world over must have been mollified. But aggressors never learn lessons. They always augment tension. A tension free world would have contributed greatly to prosperity. Peace is the pre-condition for progress. Progress, of course, is material growth in different dimensions- economic, technological and what not! In spite of greed and war, mankind has achieved so much. Without war, human attainments would have been greater. It is also spiritual growth by way of culture and arts, thought and meditation, painting and poetry, and, of course, cinema and drama. These have also developed to a very great extent.
There is a tendency to equate class struggle with aggressive imperialist wars. Never. Class struggle is a natural law. Systems will have to change, and this change is not physical annihilation and robbing of material wealth and destruction of history and culture and heritage. Class struggle is the operation of the dialectics of nature. Imperialist aggression is the operation of the anti-human forces to annihilate a part of humanity. We do not deny that certain attempts to speed up this operation were erroneous; but it does not mean that class struggle can be stopped.

It is in this context, this editorial, once again, deplores George Bush for his attempt to enhance the US military strength in Iraq. Earlier we had condemned the proliferation of hostilities by the US and its satellites in different parts of the world. We again do that; we also condemn the escalation of war by the imperialists, by hook or by crook, in many parts of the world.

We are not for nuclear weapons; for that matter, we are of the view that nuclear tests and utilization of nuclear energy should be stopped once and for all. However, the US that has heaped nuclear weapons that could destroy the whole world for a number of times sermonizes to the world of the danger of the nuclear armaments! It is an irony. US should disarm itself in the nuclear sphere. Only then it gets the moral force to ask others to do that. Without moral force any advice becomes invalid. Not even a worm should be attacked for a cause for which its slayer is not standing for; US is doing that; it is always imposing its dictates, not imparting its moral force.


(Two)
India is getting a slice of nuclear power, she thinks. My poor country, my beloved India. She is entangled in the tentacles of Imperialist octopus. She will get nothing, but bones! But a dog that tries to go back to the days when it was a wolf, bones would suffice. Are we all going primitive and savage again? Are we going to kill and get killed again? The Indian program of nuclear activity is known in the name of the Buddha. What a catastrophe of language! The cataclysmic coinage of a nomenclature! We should be ashamed, certainly. India could very well have done without a treaty with the United States. India could continue its own natural foreign policy. But alas, wisdom is a thing arriving only when it is too late. See the change in Govt of India attitude towards the decree to kill Saddam Hossein; in the first instance it was a justification of the judgment to kill him; the foreign affairs minister was saying that the judgment to kill Saddam would be accepted by the world and Iraq with cordiality. Now the Govt of India stance has changed to a request not to kill him. Where had this wisdom gone?

(Three)
I feel the ezine, so far, has been liked by its readers. It has been rich in poems and articles. The fourth issue also does have thorns and flowers. I fear my forthright views have cost me many friends. I am sorry for them. How could I dilute my opinions for the sake of a few men or women who indulged in self-deceit? I could not. I hope the world developments would open their eyes. I make this appeal because I have loved and liked them all. I have seen a beautiful poem on (rather against) war by Joop Bersee in www.kritya.in. I would have liked this poem to be in my ezine; I am sad I could not have it. It is a powerful work of poetry with a well-dimensioned vision.
This issue has a lot of poems in it. This time the editor’s choice has two poems: one from Dawn Zapletal and the other from Mariam Ala Amjadi; they represent two generations; but astonishingly , both have great poetic appeal in their very simple way of coining and joining words. A writer in Malayalam had once asked: “After all what is literature but a pack of synonyms?” I do not subscribe to the view. But we must admit that words and their combination constitute literature. And the poems I have added in this issue represent some of the best combinations of words. The specialty in this issue is an interview by Farideh Hasan Zadeh with Annie Finch; the interview part also has the views on poetry by Mariam Ala Amjadi in an interview with the same interviewer.

(Four)
I am writing this on the Christmas occasion. The man who said that it is as difficult for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven as it is for the camel to enter through the eye of a needle was born in the winter of a year about two thousand years ago. The man who professed the fatherhood of God and brother hood of man still lives with us. He stood for peace and equality and love. He was a loving God. We have only frowning gods around us. Like the grandma of Maxim Gorky, we always wish to have loving gods in and around us. And a new year is in the offing. Let us dream again a world of peace and harmony, where the lion and goat stay together in the same stable, a world where the US and Korea or Syria or Iran could stay together in peace and love, a world where Israel and Palestine could embrace in amity and joy. Children would laugh in splendour and their laughter would be splashes of streams where human love is flowing. I do remember the cruel photographs I had to publish in the last issue on the atrocities on children of Lebanon. I despise them. I hope the world would not have to view such photographs again!

And now the fourth issue of www.thanalonline.com is in your hands.

With love, with a merry Christmas greeting

And with happy New Year greetings,

Yours sincerely,

C.P.Aboobacker, Editor


 
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