CUMHURIYET- Columnist Orhan Bursali comments on the prospect of a war in Iraq. A summary of his column is as follows:
Reality is glittering in all its purity. Everything is so bright. My eyes are dazzled; not by the flashing lights but by the shame for all we’ve seen and all we are to see, for all we’ve heard and will hear, for all we’ve learned from books, and for all our hopes and faith in a better future.
My eyes are burning as I see the great panegyrics on our triumphant civilization, the worship of the sublime human race in our books, and humanity’s masterpieces. I’m ashamed of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein, of having scaled the Himalayas and landed on the moon, of the discovery of the DNA helix, of groundbreaking inventions and discoveries of our times, of the theory of relativity, of our power and ability to create new forms of life...
I’m ashamed of all those grandiose thought systems that have guided our societies, of morals and ethical rules, of our living together in peace. I’m ashamed of Bertrand Russell, of Karl Marx and Karl Popper.
Picasso, Van Gogh, Mozart, Beethoven... They all can go to hell for all I care together with so-called noble emotions and the deepest resonances of humanity they created. Let all the museums and our entire cultural heritage be burned to the ground! Let all of those libraries stuffed with the creations of our human race go down in flames! God’s wrath onto those who destroyed Hitler!
An anchorman on TV, smiling happily, is saying that we are about to witness history take place, as the government has sent its war proposal to Parliament. He is inviting us to feel the inferno. We’re heading full throttle towards the end of the world. It’s as if we’ve sat down in a theater to witness the ultimate destruction of the universe some millions of years hence.
Are we witnessing history now? Oh, yes. Quite so. We are witnesses to our own destruction, the collapse of morality. We are being called on to get rid of all the burdens that our civilization has placed on us and become free as a bird.
A country on the operating table is being prepared for vivisection, being torn into its constituent pieces. Its heart, kidneys, brain, arteries and eyes, and its mountains, soil and oil, and its people, history and culture, and its past and future and all the other things it has will be parceled up soon. Who will get what? The number one murderer of the world, carrying the sharpest saber in his hand, is now planning his move. How many parts should it be divided into? Should there be a federal state or three distinct ‘statelets’? Everyone is light as a feather, they’re scribbling easily and with the utmost freedom. Morality is stuck at the bottom of the deepest well with tons of immorality lying on the top of it.
The behemoth will seize the richest oil fields of the world. And it will cover the costs of its greatest attack on humanity, morality and civilization with the money it reaps from these oil fields.
Hail to the democracy to be established in Iraq, hail to the human rights the Iraqi people will be given!
The brightness of the prism clouds everything. My eyes are dazzled; not by the flashing lights, but by the shame.
Now we can turn to real politics. Yes, where did we leave off last time?”
SOURCE: OFFICE OF THE PRIME MINISTER, DIRECTORATE GENERAL OF PRESS AND INFORMATION