War has always been the bane of Humankind.
We started like this…
Ended up thus…
Violence has always been our Dark Passenger, to quote Dexter Morgan. We have always had a fascination with killing our brethren. Whether we did it piecemeal or in retail fashion or in bulk, via mass-murder and genocide, matters little in this case.
Violence, mayham, murder and death have been our companions since times immemorial. We have always been proficient at killing one another, whether we liked it or not, in spite or perhaps because we were so good at it.
We have always been on the lookout to do it better, faster, to more people, before they could do it to us.
And the crappy thing, it worked for the longest time.
One day though, our species’ favourite pastime – killing – stopped being ‘fun’ and instead became counterproductive and quite unhealthy for the human race.
That day was July 16, 1945. The time was 05:29 MWT or 11:29 GMT. The place: Trinity site in Alamagordo, New Mexico. That’s when and where the United States of America became the world’s first nuclear power.
40 years later, the combined arsenals of the superpowers held 20,000+ nuclear weapons.
Somehow, during the dark years of the Cold War, a time which will surely be remembered dichotomically in History, as the best time to be alive in the Free West, and the worst time to live in the East, the two camps did not come to blows. Not directly, that is, and not in a nuclear exchange.
We were ever so lucky.
But today, that danger is more present than ever before.
The Collective West has just approved the offensive use of its lethal armaments delivered to UKR against the territory of nuclear-armed Russian Federation.
The risk of a runaway escalation of missile strikes from conventional warheads to nuclear-tipped ogives is now non-zero. I repeat, the risk is now real.
Russia will not tolerate HIMARS or drone attacks targeting its civilian rear-areas of its national territory. Not in the long run. Why not? Because it knows it does not have to fight with one big arm tied around its back.
The problem with escalation is that a nuclear riposte to conventional provocations will alter the state of geopolitics forever. It will signal that all bets are off and that if War must be waged, one might as well engage in Nuclear Warfare, if it had to.
And that bodes horribly for all those who just want to raise their children in peace and be left alone by world politics and warmongers who only care about making a profit at the expense of billions of our planet’s denizens.
The world today is in shambles. And it’s not just the politicians or the controlling elites’ fault. It’s our fault because there’s billions of us, almost the entire human race saying no to war; while there’s maximum 10 million fat cats on their side who beg to differ.
If we ever needed it a wake up call, then this is it.
For all the talk about democracy and power to the people, we are all acting more like subjects than citizens of the world.
We, the people, are the grave danger. Our ignorance allows for the puppeteers’ bliss. And that’s a shame, that’s a crying shame.
Götterdämmerung 