http://edwardcurtin.com/on-the-edge-of-a-nuclear-abyss/
On the Edge of a Nuclear Abyss
Two days after Russia attacked Ukraine and the day before Vladimir Putin put Russia on nuclear alert, I wrote a little article whose first sentence was: “Not wanting to sound hyperbolic, but I am starting to conclude that the nuclear madmen running the U.S./NATO New Cold War they started decades ago are itching to start a nuclear war with Russia.”
It was an intuition based on my knowledge of U.S./Russia history, including the U.S engineered coup in Ukraine in 2014, and a reading of current events. I refer to it as intuition, yet it is based on a lifetime’s study and teaching of political sociology and writing against war. I am not a Russian scholar, simply a writer with a sociological, historical, and artistic imagination, although my first graduate academic study in the late 1960s was a thesis on nuclear weapons and why they might be someday used again.
It no longer sounds hyperbolic to me that madmen in the declining U.S. Empire might resort, like rats in a sinking ship, to first strike use of nuclear weapons, which is official U.S. policy. My stomach is churning at the thought, despite what most experts say: that the chances of a nuclear war are slight. And despite what others say about the Ukraine war: that it is an intentional diversion from the Covid propaganda and the Great Reset (although I agree it achieves that goal).
My gut tells me no; it is very real, sui generis, and very, very dangerous now.
The eminent scholar Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research agrees that we are very close to the unthinkable. In a recent historical analysis of U.S.-Russia relations and nuclear weapons, he writes the following before quoting Vladimir Putin’s recent statement on the matter. “Vladimir Putin’s statement on February 21st, 2022 was a response to U.S. threats to use nuclear weapons on a preemptive basis against Russia, despite Joe Biden’s “reassurance” that the U.S. would not be resorting to ‘A first strike’ nuclear attack against an enemy of America”:
Let me [Putin] explain that U.S. strategic planning documents contain the possibility of a so-called preemptive strike against enemy missile systems. And who is the main enemy for the U.S. and NATO? We know that too. It’s Russia. In NATO documents, our country is officially and directly declared the main threat to North Atlantic security. And Ukraine will serve as a forward springboard for the strike.” (Putin Speech, February 21, 2022, emphasis added)
Putin is absolutely correct. It is why he put Russia’s nuclear forces on full alert. Only those ignorant of history, which sadly includes most U.S. Americans, don’t know this.
I believe that today we are in the greatest danger of a nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, something I vividly remember as a teenager. The same feelings return. Dread. Anxiety. Breathlessness. I do not think these feelings are misplaced nor they are simply an emotional response. I try to continue writing on other projects that I have started but feel stymied. The possibility of nuclear war, whether intentional or accidental, obsesses me.
In order to grasp this stomach-churning possibility within the context of Ukraine, we need to put aside all talk of morality, rights, international law, and think in terms of great power politics, as John Mearsheimer has so clearly articulated. As he says, when a great power feels its existence is threatened, might makes right. You simply can’t understand world politics without thinking at this level. Doing so does not mean justifying the use of might; it is a means of clarifying the causes of wars, which start long before the first shots are fired.
In the present crisis over Ukraine, Russia clearly feels existentially threatened by U.S./NATO military moves in Ukraine and in eastern Europe where they have positioned missiles that can be very quickly converted to nuclear and are within a few minutes range of Russia. (And of course there are U.S./NATO nuclear missiles throughout western and southern Europe.) Vladimir Putin has been talking about this for many years and is factually correct. He has reiterated that this is unacceptable to Russia and must stop. He has pushed for negotiations to end this situation.
The United States, despite its own Monroe Doctrine that prohibits another great power from putting weapons or military forces close to its borders, has blocked its ears and kept upping the ante, provoking Russian fears. This fact is not in dispute but is shrugged off by U.S./NATO as of little consequence. Such an attitude is pure provocation as anyone with a smidgeon of historical awareness knows.
The world was very lucky sixty years ago this October when JFK and Nikita Khrushchev negotiated the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis before the world was incinerated. Kennedy, of course, was intensely pressured by the military and CIA to bomb Cuba, but he resisted. He also rejected the insane military desire to nuke the Soviet Union, calling such people crazy; at a National Security Council meeting on September 12, 1963, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a report about a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union which they wanted for that fall, he said, “Preemption is not possible for us.”
Such leadership, together with the nuclear test ban treaty he negotiated with the USSR that month, inter alia (such treaties have now been abrogated by the U.S. government), assured his assassination organized by the CIA. These days, the U.S. is led by deluded men who espouse a nuclear first strike policy, which tells one all one needs to know about the danger the world is in. The U.S. has been very sick with Russia hatred for a long time.
After the terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis, many more people took the threat of nuclear war seriously. Today very few do. It has receded into the ”unimaginable.” In 1962, however, as James W. Douglass writes in JFK and the Unspeakable:
Kennedy saw that, at least outside Washington, D.C., people were living with a deeper awareness of the ultimate choice they faced. Nuclear weapons were real. So, too, was the prospect of peace. Shocked by the Cuban Missile Crisis into recognizing a real choice, people preferred peace to annihilation.
Today the reality of nuclear annihilation has receded into unconsciousness. This despite the recent statements by U.S. generals and the U.S. Ukrainian puppet Zelensky about nuclear weapons and their use that have extremely inflamed Russia’s fears, which clearly is intentional. The game is to have some officials say it and then deny it while having a policy that contradicts your denial. Keep pushing the envelope is U.S. policy. Obama-Biden reigned over the U.S. 2014 coup in Ukraine, Trump increased weapon sales to Ukraine in 2017, and Biden has picked up the baton from his partner (not his enemy) in this most deadly game. It is a bi-partisan Cold War 2, getting very hot. And it is the reason why Russia, its back to the wall, attacked Ukraine. It is obvious that this is exactly what the U.S. wanted or it would have acted very differently in the leadup to this tragedy. All the current ringing of hands is pure hypocrisy, the nihilism of a nuclear power never for one moment threatened but whose designs were calculated to threaten Russia at its borders.
The media propaganda against Russia and Putin is the most extreme and extensive propaganda in my lifetime. Patrick Lawrence has astutely examined this in a recent essay, where he writes the same is true for him:
Many people of many different ages have remarked in recent days that they cannot recall in their lifetimes a more pervasive, suffocating barrage of propaganda than what has engulfed us since the months that preceded Russia’s intervention. In my case it has come to supersede the worst of what I remember from the Cold War decades.
Engulfed is an appropriate word. Lawrence rightly points to this propaganda as cognitive warfare directed at the U.S. population (and the rest of the world) and notes its connection to the January 2021 final draft of a “diabolic” NATO study called “Cognitive Warfare.” He quotes it thus: “The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century,” . . . “Humans are the contested domain. Cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”
This cognitive warfare, however, has a longer history in cutting edge science. For each successive decade beginning with the 1990s and a declaration from President (and ex-Director of the CIA) George H. W. Bush that the 1990s would be the Decade of Brain Research, presidents have announced additional decades long projects involving the brain, with 2000-2010 being the Decade of Behavior Project, followed by mapping of the brain, artificial intelligence, etc. all organized and funded through the Office of Science and Technology Project (OSTP) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This medical, military, and scientific research has been part of a long range plan to extend MK-Ultra’s mind control to the population at large under the cover of medical science, and it has been simultaneously connected to the development and funding of the pharmaceutical industries research and development of new brain-altering drugs. RFK, Jr. has documented the CIA’s extensive connection to germ and mind research and promotion in his book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. It is why his book is banned from the mainstream media, who do the prime work of cognitive warfare for the government. To put it clearly: these media are the CIA. And the issue of U.S. bio-weapons research and development is central to these many matters, including in Ukraine.
In other words, the cognitive warfare we are now being subjected to has many tentacles connected to much more than today’s fanatical anti-Russian propaganda over Ukraine. All the U.S. wars of aggression have been promoted under its aegis, as have the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the economic warfare by the elites, the COVID crisis, etc. It’s one piece.
Take, for example, a book written in 2010 by David Ray Griffin, a renown theologian who has written more than a dozen books about 9/11. The book is Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee’s Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory. It is a critique of law professor Cass Sunstein, appointed by Obama to be the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sunstein had written an article with a plan for the government to prevent the spread of anti-government “conspiracy theories” in which he promoted the use of anonymous government agents to use secret “cognitive infiltration” of these groups in order to break them up; to use media plants to disparage their arguments. He was particularly referring to those who questioned the official 9/11 narrative but his point obviously extended much further. He was working in the tradition of the great propagandists. Griffin took a scalpel to this call for cognitive warfare and was of course a victim of it as well. Sunstein has since worked for the World Health Organization (WHO) on COVID psychological responses and other COVID committees. It’s all one piece.
Sunstein’s wife is Samantha Power, Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations and war hawk extraordinaire. She gleefully promoted the U.S. destruction of Libya under the appellation of the “responsibility to protect,” a “humane” cover for imperialism. Now she is Biden’s Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an arm of the CIA throughout the world. It’s all one piece.
The merry-go-round goes round and round.
I have gone off on this slight tangent to emphasize how vast and interconnected are the players and groups on Team Cognitive Warfare. They have been leading the league for quite some time and are hoping their game plan against Team Russia will keep them there. So far they are winning, as Patrick Lawrence says:
Look at what has become of us. Most Americans seem to approve of these things, or at least are unstirred to object. We have lost all sense of decency, of ordinary morality, of proportion. Can anyone listen to the din of the past couple of weeks without wondering if we have made of ourselves a nation of grotesques?
It is common to observe that in war the enemy is always dehumanized. We are now face to face with another reality: Those who dehumanize others dehumanize themselves more profoundly.
Perhaps people are too ignorant to see through the propaganda. To have some group to hate is always “uplifting.” But we are all responsible for the consequences of our actions, even when those actions are just buying the propaganda and hating those one is told to hate. It is very hard to accept that the leaders of your own country commit and contemplate unspeakable evil deeds and that they wish to control your mind. To contemplate that they might once again use nuclear weapons is unspeakable but necessary if we are to prevent it.
I hope my fears are unfounded. I agree with Gilbert Doctorow that the Ukraine-Russia war separates the sheep from the goats, that there is no middle ground. This is not to celebrate war and the death of innocent people, but it does demand placing the blame squarely where it belongs and not trying to have it both ways. People like him, John Mearsheimer, the late badly missed Stephen Cohen, Ray McGovern, Oliver Stone (see his 2016 film Ukraine on Fire), Scott Ritter, Pepe Escobar, Patrick Lawrence, Jack Matlock, Ted Postol, et al. are all cutting through the propaganda and delivering truth in opposition to all the lies. They go gentle with fears of nuclear war, however, as if it is somewhat possible but highly unlikely, as if their deepest thoughts are unspeakable, for to utter them would be an act of despondency.
The consensus of the experts tends to be that the U.S. wishes to draw the Russians into a long protracted guerrilla war along the lines of its secret use of mujahideen in Afghanistan in 1979 and after. There is evidence that this is already happening. But I think the U.S. strategists know that the Russians are too smart for that; that they have learned their lesson; and that they will withdraw once they feel they have accomplished their goals. Therefore, from the U.S./NATO perspective, time is reasonably short and they must act quickly, perhaps by doing a false flag operation that will justify a drastic response, or upping the tempo in some other way that would seem to justify the use of nuclear weapons, perhaps tactical at first.
I appreciate the input of the Russia experts I mentioned above. Their expertise dwarfs mine, but I disagree. Perhaps I am an excitable sort; perhaps I am one of those Patrick Lawrence refers to, quoting Carl Jung, as too emotional and therefore incapable of clear thinking. (I will leave the issue of this long held but erroneous western philosophical belief in the division of emotions and thoughts for another day.) Perhaps I can’t see the obvious that a nuclear war will profit no one and therefore it cannot happen. Yet Ted Postol, MIT professor of technology and international security, while perhaps agreeing that an intentional nuclear war is very unlikely, has been warning of an accidental one for many years. He is surely right on that score and well worth listening to.
But either way, I am sorry to say, perhaps because my perspective is that of a generalist, not an expert, and my thinking is informed by art as much as social science and history, my antennae pick up a very disturbing message. A voice tells me that the danger is very, very real today. It says:
Beware, we are on the edge of a nuclear abyss.
....
http://patricklawrence.us/patrick-lawrence-the-casualties-of-empire/
The Casualties of Empire
Diabolic methods of propaganda and perception management are at work now that have no precedent. This is war waged in a new way — against domestic populations as well as those declared as enemies.
The news reports come in daily from Moscow, Kiev and the Western capitals: how many dead since Russia began its intervention in Ukraine on Feb. 24, how many injured, how many hungry or cold, how many displaced. We do not know the true count of casualties and the extent of the suffering and ought not pretend we do: This is the reality of war, each side having its version of unfolding events.
My inclination is to add the deaths in Ukraine these past two weeks to the 14,000 dead and the 1.5 million displaced since 2014, when the regime in Kiev began shelling its own citizens in the eastern provinces — this because the people of Donetsk and Lugansk rejected the U.S.–cultivated coup that deposed their elected president. This simple math gives us a better idea of how many Ukrainians are worthy of our mourning.
As we mourn, it is time to consider the wider consequences of this conflict, for Ukrainians are not alone among its victims. Who else has suffered? What else has been damaged? This war is of a kind humanity has never before known. What are its costs?
Among paying-attention people it is increasingly plain that Washington’s intent in provoking Moscow’s intervention is, and probably has been from the first, to instigate a long-running conflict that bogs down Russian forces and leaves Ukrainians to wage an insurgency that cannot possibly succeed.
Is there another way to explain the many billions of dollars’ worth of weapons and matériel the U.S. and its European allies now pour into Ukraine? If the Ukrainians cannot win — a universally acknowledged reality — what is the purpose here?
Whether this strategy goes as Washington wants, or if Russian forces get their work done and withdraw to avoid a classic quagmire, remains to be seen. But as Dave DeCamp noted in Antiwar.comlast Friday, there is no sign whatsoever that the Biden administration plans any further diplomatic contacts with the Kremlin.
The implication here should be evident. The U.S. strategy effectively requires the destruction of Ukraine in the service of America’s imperial ambitions. If this thought seems extreme, brief reference to the fates of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria will provide all the compelling context one may need.
Brzezinski’s Plan in 1979
To an extent I find surprising given it calamitous consequences, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s plan in 1979 to arm the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets remains the more or less unaltered template.
President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser saw nothing wrong with getting into bed with what became Al–Qaeda. Now it is the Nazis militias that infest Ukraine’s National Guard that the U.S. arms and trains.
If the record is anything to go by, this conflict could well destroy what remains of Ukraine as a nation. In the worst outcome, little will remain of its social fabric, its public spaces, its roads, bridges, schools, municipal institutions. This destruction has already begun.
Here is what I do not want Americans to miss: We are destroying ourselves and what hope we may have to restore ourselves to decency as we watch the regime governing us destroy another nation in our name. This destruction, too, has already begun.
Many people of many different ages have remarked in recent days that they cannot recall in their lifetimes a more pervasive, suffocating barrage of propaganda than what has engulfed us since the months that preceded Russia’s intervention. In my case it has come to supersede the worst of what I remember from the Cold War decades.
In January 2021, NATO published the final draft of a lengthy study it called Cognitive Warfare. Its intent is to explore the potential for manipulating minds—those of others, our own—beyond anything heretofore even attempted. “The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century,” the document asserts. “Humans are the contested domain. Cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”
In a subsection headed “The vulnerabilities of the human brain,” the report has this to say:
“In particular, the brain:
is unable to distinct [sic] whether information is right or wrong:
is led to believe statements or messages it has already heard as true, even though these may be false;
accepts statements as true, if backed by evidence, with no regards to [sic] the authenticity of that evidence.“
And this, which I find especially fiendish:
“At the political and strategic level, it would be wrong to underestimate the impact of emotions…. Emotions—hope, fear, humiliation—shape the world and international relations with the echo-chamber effect of social media.“
No, we’re not in Kansas anymore. Cognitive Warfare is a window onto diabolic methods of propaganda and perception management that have no precedent. This is war waged in a new way — against domestic populations as well as those declared as enemies.
And we have just had a taste of what it will be like as these techniques, well-grounded in cutting-edge science, are elaborated. Yet more disturbing to me than the cold prose of the report is the astonishing extent to which it proves out. Cognitive warfare, whether or not the NATO report is now the propagandists’ handbook, works, and it is working now on most Americans.
This is what I mean when I say we, too, are the victims of this war.
Last week the conductor of the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, Valery Gergiev, was sacked for refusing to condemn Vladimir Putin. The same thing then happened to Anna Netrebko. The Metropolitan Opera in New York fired its star soprano for the same reason: She preferred to say nothing about the Russian president.
There is no bottom to this. Last Friday Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Senator, openly called for Putin’s assassination. Michael McFaul, briefly Barack Obama’s ambassador to Russia and the king of nitwittery, asserts that all Russians who don’t openly protest Russia’s intervention in Ukraine are to be punished for it. In the idiotic file, the International Federation of Felines has barred imports of Russian cats.
Here is the entry on this list of preposterous assertions that got me out of my chair in a rage last Thursday: The International Paralympic Committee banned Russian and Belarusian athletes—why the Belarusians, for heaven’s sake?—from the winter Paralympics that commenced the following day in Beijing. We’re now down to persecuting people whose hearts and souls are abler than their limbs?
The committee made it plain it acted in response to international pressure. I wonder whose that might be.
What Has Become of Us
Look at what has become of us. Most Americans seem to approve of these things, or at least are unstirred to object. We have lost all sense of decency, of ordinary morality, of proportion. Can anyone listen to the din of the past couple of weeks without wondering if we have made of ourselves a nation of grotesques?
It is common to observe that in war the enemy is always dehumanized. We are now face to face with another reality: Those who dehumanize others dehumanize themselves more profoundly.
“Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic.”
That is a snippet from a book by C.G. Jung, The Undiscovered Self, that a friend just sent. When our feelings get the better of us, we can no longer think or talk usefully to one another: This is the Swiss psychoanalyst’s point in simple terms.
The other day PBS Newshour ran an interview with one Artem Semenikhin, in which the small-town mayor was lionized for standing up to Russian soldiers. In the background, as the ever-alert Alan MacLeod points out, was a portrait of Stepan Bandera, the savage Russophobe, anti–Semite, and leader of Ukrainian Nazis.
What did PBS do about this careless oversight? It blurred the Bandera portrait and broadcast the interview with its Ukrainian hero. American journalism at its zenith.
It strikes me as the perfect metaphor for what has happened to our reasoning faculties — or, better put, what we have allowed to be done to them. Factual realities that lie beyond dispute, if inconvenient, are blurred out of the movie we think we’re watching.
It is the same with any genuine understanding of the Russian intervention. I have four words for what we need to read this crisis: history, chronology, context, and responsibility. Since none of these serves our cognitive warriors’ purpose, we are invited to blot them out. And once again: With dreadful fidelity to those actively manipulating our perceptions, we do so.
Context, the worst of us assert, is some idea those awful Russians came up with. We take no interest whatsoever in how the world may look from anyone else’s perspective. Who in hell, please tell me, thinks this is a good way to live?
I have rendered a pencil-sketch of a nation falling apart as it takes another one apart. A nation this far into one of Jung’s “collective possessions” cannot possibly do well. As is always the case (a thought that came to me as I studied the Japanese nationalists of the 1930s), the victimizers are victims, too.
If we are to find our way out of this funhouse, we will have to do one thing before any other: We will have to learn to speak in a clear, new language so that we can name things as they are instead of blurring them as PBS did that Bandera portrait.
And we must start with one word. Unless we can learn to call America an empire, we will stumble in the funhouse dark until it becomes so unfun we can no longer bear our own self-deceptions.
I see in here a virtue in this large, complicated moment. Between Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, which I count regrettable but necessary, and the joint statement Putin made with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Feb. 4, we are all called upon either to recognize the United States for what it has become, an empire violently defending itself against history itself, or accept our fate among the victims of this empire.
Clarity: It is always a fine thing, whatever the difficulties it brings.
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