Re Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren't You?

["Dave Farber" <dave () farber net>]

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Hasan Diwan <hasan.diwan () gmail com>
Date: Sat, Jan 7, 2017 at 6:55 PM
Subject: Re: [IP] Re Bill Perry Is Terrified. Why Aren't You?
To: dave () farber net <dave () farber net>


[for IP, if you wish]

On 6 January 2017 at 16:25, Dave Farber <farber () gmail com> wrote:

What has changed so fundamentally that we're now re-enmeshed in this lunacy?


What has changed? Our experience has changed.

I just turned 37. One of my first memories was of the Berlin Wall falling
down. Nuclear weapons were never an immediate concern to me -- I was born
and raised in the UK. To me, the spectre of the use of nuclear weapons was
confined to history books, too frightening to fathom in my lifetime. Now,
America has a leader-in-waiting that won't rule out the use of nuclear
weapons on Europe[1]. I was raised on the left end of politics, by a father
who cut his teeth in the NUM, and a grandfather who knew Arthur Scargill,
so I've never been a big fan of successive US administrations (nor my own,
for that matter). The earliest march I remember going to was outside the
Iraqi embassy in London in 1990 to help my Palestinian/Lebanese mother
protest the first gulf war and implore then prime minister Thatcher to not
go in for fear that the soldiers would come home with green glows on their
skins. This is what my (then) 11-year old mind I thought would happen if
humans ingested nuclear material and lived to tell the tale.

Most of my peers did not have parents so well-versed in the Labour
struggle, or if they were, they'd lost hope in it,

Now, so many years later, having gone through college and university, and a
few economic cycles, I understand that politicians need a bogeyman to
motivate the public into enriching the national equivalent of the
Exchequer. Taxes are at an all-time low, so consumption (VAT, sales tax) is
the primary means of getting revenue. How do you motivate sales when no one
needs another $WHATEVER? This is the question governments on both sides of
the Atlantic have been struggling with.

1. http://www.politico.eu/article/donald-*trump*-wont-rule-out-using-*nukes*
-in-europe/



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