Daniel Ellsberg — A Profound Voice Against the Doomsday Machine
Daniel Ellsberg has done just that; an avalanche of interviews and webinars
have followed his announcement. And now the RootsAction Education Fund has
teamed up with the Ellsberg Initiative for Peace and Democracy to
co-sponsor
Daniel Ellsberg Week
, April 24-30, to celebrate his life’s work and “to honor peacemaking and
whistleblowing.”
Known as the insider who blew the whistle on U.S. government lying about
the Vietnam War, Ellsberg’s high level military planning experience began
earlier. Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner during the 1950s and ’60s. For
decades he has put himself on the line to oppose those evil plans; writing,
speaking, standing up and sitting-in against the threat of nuclear
annihilation. Ellsberg has been hauled off to jail for civil disobedience
against war over 80 times. Here he offers chilling clarity about “the
nuclear war planners, of which I was one, who have written plans to kill
billions of people,” calling it “a conspiracy to commit omnicide, near
omnicide, the death of everyone.” He asks us, “Can humanity survive the
nuclear era? We don't know. I choose to act as if we have a chance.”
This quote is from one of several eye-opening podcasts being released this
week (which I directed in partnership with the RootsAction Education Fund),
enabling people to hear Ellsberg directly. In these half dozen
two-to-three-minute animated musings, Daniel Ellsberg offers up a succinct
analysis of the calamity posed by nuclear weapons and a possible way to
reduce their risk.
You can watch and listen here.
When Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers in 1971, Henry Kissinger
(then President Nixon’s national security advisor) called him “the most
dangerous man in America.” But those closely held secrets of the war in
Vietnam were less explosive than the nuclear secrets that Ellsberg held in
his safe. Then a top strategist for the Defense Department, he had been
party to plans for a nuclear holocaust. After being buried for safekeeping,
those documents disappeared in a hurricane that literally blew away his
secrets, but that didn’t dampen Ellsberg’s desire to share what he knew.
At 92, with mind sharp as ever, Ellsberg remains an undisputed expert on
“national security.” In this unusual
illustrated podcast
, he shares his unvarnished thoughts about the threat of nuclear
annihilation and how it might be defused.
Can we simply ignore the reality of the world’s largest nuclear arsenals on
hair-trigger alert -- amid escalation of a new cold war with heightened
nuclear dangers? Indeed, the U.S. just enacted its biggest military budget
in history, with unprecedented investment in weapons of mass destruction
and their deployment.
We ignore this impending disaster and its impassioned opponent, Daniel
Ellsberg, at our own peril.
Here’s a chance to honor him by
listening
and heeding his words.
See additional video here
__________________________________
Judith Ehrlich co-directed and produced “The Most Dangerous Man in America,
Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers,” which was nominated for an Oscar
and Emmy and won the Peabody Award. Her recent film, “The Boys Who Said
NO!” features Daniel Ellsberg, Joan Baez and a cast of war resisters who
chose prison over killing in the Vietnam War. Ehrlich is currently in
production on “The Mouse that Roared,” a film on the
evolution of the Internet poetically explored through Icelandic
MP/“poetician,” single mother, defender of whistleblowers and Internet
pioneer, Birgitta Jónsdóttir. To watch the Oscar-nominated film on Daniel
Ellsberg, please go to:
www.mostdangerousman.org
. To host a screening of “The Boys Who Said NO!” see here, and to read
Ellsberg's 2017 gripping expose “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a
Nuclear War Planner” see:
https://www.ellsberg.net
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