GR echo: Conflict in Kashmir could vaporise millions, but the world's 'moral leaders' are looking away

[Doug Millison]

Wage peace, not war

Conflict in Kashmir could vaporise millions, but the world's 'moral
leaders' are looking away

George Monbiot
Tuesday June 4, 2002
The Guardian


[...] In waging war, Bush and Blair were tumid with moral leadership and
purpose. In waging peace, they display only vapidity and irresolution.
Deputies are dispatched on half-hearted missions to ask the two governments
to negotiate, but no one is proposing the measures necessary to prevent
what could become the most lethal conflict since the second world war. The
"moral imperatives" so often invoked during the bombing of Afghanistan turn
out to be nothing more than old-fashioned power politics. Now, with few
clearly formulated domestic interests at stake, the new world order's moral
leaders are looking the other way.

Even if Britain, the US and the other western powers had no prior
involvement in this conflict, our moral duty to help develop an effective
international response would be unquestionable. But we are up to our necks
in it. The subcontinent's dispute is our dispute, and to turn away from it
could constitute the greatest collective dereliction since the failure of
both the German people and the allied powers to intervene in the Holocaust.
[...]

read it all --an essay that explores an issue with GR reverberations -- in
the paper Pynchon said he trusts post-9/11:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/kashmir/Story/0,2763,727109,00.html


Sorry, folks, but reading Pynchon in a vacuum, untainted by reference to
current affairs, seems -- to me -- foolish, given how hard Pynchon appears
to work to connect his text to the world we inhabit. That's only my
personal opinion, of course.