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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 12/25/10

Life is no Fun in the Time of The Cove

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Message Mark Sashine
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cove_%28film%29

Many years ago I watched the movie Ordinary Fascism in Russia and I was 13 years old. They do not show such documentaries here to the impressionable children. The self- esteem of a teenager can suffer an irreparable damage when confronted with the simple fact that in the Nazi Germany the graduate of the SS school had to kill a kitten by his own bare hands. That graduate waould have been of about 20 or so; what a role model. They all had "Gott Mitt Unst' on their belts which meant " God is with us'. So God was with them when they killed those kittens. That's what they said. Now our President Obama says God is with us when we send drones to kill people every day. Every day! Some bastard presses a button and people die; he then picks his kids at school. Twenty years ago we called that terrorism. Now we call that policy. But we do not show that. They did.

So an impressionable boy of 13 watched a documentary where they showed a mass grave of about 1000 people: men, women, children. Russian medical experts conducted an investigation and came to the conclusion that all those people were killed point- blank, execution- style by one shot from a pistol into the head. ALL of them. I guess it was a training session. A group of SS- graduates was on a field trip. They were offered some fun. Even in the most fast way you need maybe a day to do all that: to bring 1000 people to the place, to force them to dig their graves, to undress them one-by -"one, to bring in the SS, get the ammo ready, then- shoot, then move a corpse aside- bring the second one, then the third-and so on and so on. I guess they made photos, maybe brought in the bulldozer to cover the grave, then they had a good drink and maybe danced with some froilians.. I am sure that was a memorable event. I am sure some of them, those who survived the war would love to share those reminiscences with their impressionable grandchildren. But now instead of that they vote for drones.

I remember the nightmares. I always had a good imagination and it brought me scenes where I was one of those 1000. Or 100000. Or 1000000. Or a million. Or 6 million. Or 50 million. All killed execution- style, point- blank. But in all those nightmares I never was on the side of the killers. I could not imagine how they looked like. The people who died, they had faces, had souls, had meaning. The killers were faceless. After that I saw some of them- old men, fragile, nothing fearsome or anything. Still, they had no faces. They had masks. You could see those masks distorting, moving, trying to adept, to cover, to pretend. You could see zombies. But you could not listen to them, no matter what they said. Because there was nothing to listen to. They did not exist.

But we existed. And we all had to live after that movie, after leaving the dark hall with the screen which gave us a powerful knowledge and demanded powerful answers. I remember us having a discussion, many discussions. How can a person live after seeing that? What could make a person content? How can you change your life now that you know such things did happen, do happen, will happen? None of us could come up with the answer. Eventually we forgot. We were just children after all.

And here comes The Cove. Open the link above if you hadn't seen the movie. It got an Oscar in the Y2009 after all.

Every year, in the killing season which lasts for about 6 months there, in a Secret Cove in Japan they kill dolphins. The migrating groups are herded to the Cove and killed by spears and knifes. 23000 of them every year according to the documentary which was filmed COVERTLY. American filmmakers had to do it in secret because it could be dangerous for them. Those simple Japanese fishermen who had a meal around the campfire and then proceeded to kill dolphins would not hesitate to kill humans too, They had no face. There is no way to have a face and do what they did- turn the emerald Cove into the pool of blood. I saw that pool of blood. It awakened the old nightmares. And even more it awakened when I saw that filmmaker marching into the whaling conference with a screen showing that movie on him and" being escorted our by security. It was as if history stood still and Stephan Lux killed himself again for dolphins like in 1936 he did for the Jews. Only that did not help in 1936 and it does not help now. What helps? Knowledge is power, now you know; what can you do? Go vegetarian?

History of every land is filled with murder, says Russian poet Kornilov. He also says that luck is the only thing which gives us a luxury of non-participation. We did not kill 100000 Japanese in one second in 1945. We thus have a right to be disgusted by the dolphin-killing, But do we? Our recent Vice- President Cheney openly boasted of killing 400 birds in one day- and he is not in an asylum. He is in fact out there. We see people boasting of killing every day. Our beloved movie heroes have a license to kill. I so far had never seen even one scene in the movies when a woman rejects the pass from a secret agent who kills. In the old westerns that happened. Not anymore. We got used to it. Japanese know. They are used to killing dolphins. Nobody cares. Their people surely do not. And that's maybe the answer.

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The writer is 67 years old, semi- retired engineer, PhD, PE. I write fiction on a regular basis and I am also 10 years on OEN.

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