Preparations for nuclear war have been in the news, even mainstream news, more than just occasionally:
NATO unveils master plan to defeat Russia in nuclear war, Voice of London, UK., October 23, 2021 [1]
America’s failed weapons test shows Washington is currently hopelessly outgunned by Beijing in the race for hypersonic supremacy International Journal, Oct. 22, 2021 [2]
China says new hypersonic missile a blow to US ‘strategic superiority,’ New York Post, Oct. 17, 2021 [3]
This writer is puzzled by the absence of fear of nuclear war as a topic of concern.
As Capitalists Prepare Nuclear War Why is No-one Fearful?
Is everyone assuming that because nuclear war could end life on Earth the new nuclear weapons being so super expensively produced will never be used – even though spokespersons for NATO, and earlier this year for Britain, have threatened their use.[4]
Earlier this month yours truly wrote and saw published in the US, UK and India an article with a hopeful ending: Foreseen! A Celebrities Led Movement To Halt USA Nuclear War Preparations, however, after researching the writings of America’s most ever famous economists, Henry George and Thorstein Veblen, I wish to hedge my bet against such unfounded optimism.
Henry George and Thorstein Veblen perceived the nature of war to be central to the study of economics. Their ability to distinguish between the latent and manifest functions of war remains as penetrating today as it was at the end of the nineteenth century (when Veblen published most of his work). For our present permanent institutional framework known as the military-industiral-complex George and Veblen provide valuable insights as they examine the latent uses of patriotism and religion as tools to perpetrate war and violence.(Thorstein Veblen and Henry George on War, Conflict and the Military An Institutionalist Connection, Journal of Economic Issues, Vl. XXXI #2 June 1997)
With so much preparation and planning for nuclear war, It would
seem more than appropriate to study their conclusions.
For readers unfamiliar with Henry George, (1829-1897) George was an American political economist and journalist. His writing was immensely popular in 19th-century. Albert Einstein wrote that “Unfortunately Men like Henry George are rare.” Franklin D. Roosevelt praised George as “one of the really great thinkers produced by our country.” John Dewey wrote. “It would require less than the fingers of the two hands to enumerate those who from Plato down rank with him.” Leo Tolstoy, that George was “one of the greatest men of the 19th century.” José Martí, “Only Darwin in the natural sciences has made a mark comparable to George’s on social science. George Bernard Shaw claimed George inspired socialist reformers in Britain during the 1880s. Helen Keller found in Henry George’s philosophy “a rare beauty and power of inspiration, and a splendid faith in the essential nobility of human nature.” Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth was George’s great best seller and most influential work.[5] [6]
George’s great contribution was to see how these big issues of War and Peace bore directly upon the constellation of rules governing the relationship of people to planet, humans to humus, earthlings to earth. Social arrangements not based on the fundamental and equal human right to the earth lead inevitably to a gross imbalance of political power and thus to government corruption, odious public debt, war, and preparations for further war.( “Henry George’s Perspective on War and Peace,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, October 2021)
Thorstein Veblen saw the modern business leader as essentially a
latter-day predatory warrior-transformed, armed, and clothed in a
fashion that enables him to dominate modern society,
the fabric of credit and capitalization as essentially a fabric of
concerted make-believe resting on the routine credulity of the
business community at large. Veblen assumed depression to be the normal condition in a business-enterprise economy, to be relieved in periods of excitation caused by stimuli not intrinsic to the system like war and expansion abroad.[7]
Conclusion
American economists Henry George & Thorstein Veblen warned that private capitalism’s imperialism leads to war
Taking into consideration the studied observations of Henry George and Thorstein Veblen, it seems slightly more likely that the nuclear war being prepared for so many years will in some manner or another and to some degree or another eventually take place just as all the past capitalist wars did.
The most known expert on war and military said it succinctly:
“War is continuation of political commercial policy by other means,” – Karl von Clausewitz, 1832 (Prussian general and military thinker, whose work Vom Kriege (1832; On War) has become one of the most respected classics on military strategy. Encyclopedia Britannica)
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” -Edmund Burke
Nuclear War is being prepared and “good men do nothing.”
Could what Veblen observed in 1922 be still appropriate to 2021?
“The current situation in America is by way of being something
of a psychiatrical clinic…Perhaps the commonest and plainest
evidence of … unbalanced mentality is to be seen in a certain
fearsome and feverish credulity with which a large proportion of
Americans are affected…. There is a visible lack of composure and
logical coherence, both in what they will believe and in what they
are ready to do about it.” (The Theory of the Leisure Class,
XI 432)
Veblen saw a working class that, far from wishing to abolish the economic
system under which it worked, sought largely to occupy a more
rewarding and honorific role within it. In short, he saw emulation,
not revolutionary agitation, as the most persistent motive force of
the working class. Unlike Marx, who saw the proletariat ultimately rising up to
overthrow the ruling class, Veblen saw it as emulating the vested
interests, as seeking to be like them.[7]
It would appear that basically too few voices demanding sanity arise for the overwhelmingly deceptive propaganda and mesmerizing entertainment power of CIA controlled Western satellite-reach-powered mainstream media [see New York Times comprehensive article: ‘Worldwide Propaganda Network Built by the C.I.A.’ December 26, 1977, New York Times]
This powerful media has inculcated quiet acceptance of the status quo ‘protection’ of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), a doctrine of US military strategy and national security policy in which a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by two or more opposing sides would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender. The acceptance of, and trust in, this frightening hair trigger status quo seems to be holding, the continuing wildly super insane talk of possible first strike victory notwithstanding.
As the insanity of preparing for nuclear war against Russia and China takes place before our eyes, just as earlier when USA threatened nuclear war against the Soviet Union and China, we should remind ourselves of the danger of Americans again using nuclear weapons. Let us remember that the motive for the first and second US use of atomic bombs is now generally accepted to have been to intimate the Soviet Union, even though most of Russia’s cities lay in ruins with 28 million of its Soviet citizens dead as a result of the Second World War that had just ended (a war which had been made possible by corporate America’s arming of a poor and disarmed Nazi Germany. [8]
What insidious minded cabal of powerfully influential Americans pressured President Truman to order these two genocidal nuclear war crimes without even consulting the top commanding military during WWII and other key Americans? Apart from them having been war crimes, the same as the incendiary bombing of some 60 other Japanese cities, the Atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were acts of war committed while the US warfare was being conducted under the commands of Generals Eisenhower and MacArthur. Yet, the two Atomic bombs were dropped without their approval and without their being informed beforehand.
General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of United States Army Forces in the Far East, who was not consulted before the atom bombing and destruction of two Japanese cities, saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. “The war might have ended weeks earlier,” he said, “if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.” [9]
“Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary,” wrote Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, “the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.” [10]
Given what we know about the expected deadly effect nuclear war would have on the planet and all life on Earth, it would seem that a good amount of people everywhere would have come to realize the horrific danger to themselves, their loved ones, all fellow human beings, even animals and plants.
There should be millions of concerned citizens throughout the world demanding that Americans respect the rest of us and our planetary home, and end all plans and preparations for nuclear war, and explain why a war with Russia and China is even contemplated.
”Public ignorance and apathy is a concern for survival of the specie”
“Public ignorance and apathy is a concern for survival of the specie,” warned former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark, in his forward to nuclear physicist Micho Kaku’s To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon’s Secret War Plans.
A single Trident II submarine can inflict more death than all prior wars in history. Twenty-four missiles, launched while submerged, each with seventeen independently targeted, maneuverable nuclear warheads five times more powerful than the atom bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, can travel 5,000 nautical miles to strike within 300 feet of 408 predetermined targets. Nuclear winter might follow even if no other weapons are used.(Ramsey Clark)
If the US government for inhumane and specious reasoning used nuclear weapons twice, what assurance can be imagined that it would not for inhumane and reckless reasoning use nuclear weapons a third time?
In his 1879 Perspective on War and Peace Henry George concluded what seems applicable to today in America.
Social arrangements not based on the fundamental and equal human right to the earth lead inevitably to a gross imbalance of political power and thus to government corruption, odious public debt, war, and preparations for further war.( “Henry George’s Perspective on War and Peace,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology, October 2021)
We have met the enemy and he is us”: – Walt Kelly [11]
End Notes
https://the-voiceof-london.uk/13091/nato-unveils-master-plan-to-defeat-russia-in-nuclear-war-as-moscow-says-confrontational-playbook-shows-it-was-right-to-cut-ties/]
2. http://international-journal.com/blog/2021/10/22/americas-failed-weapons-test-shows-washington-is-currently-hopelessly-outgunned-by-beijing-in-the-race-for-hypersonic-supremacy/
3. https://nypost.com/2021/10/17/china-says-new-missile-a-blow-to-us-strategic-superiority/
4. Britain Threatens Humanity with Nuclear Winter Extinction Without Explaining Why It Foresees War, Greanville Post, May 8, 2021
Britain Threatens Humanity with Nuclear Winter Extinction Without Explaining Why It Foresees War
5. Martin Luther King Jr. referred to Henry George in support of a guaranteed minimum.
6. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz claims that we now know land value tax “is even better than Henry George thought.”George’s “single tax” is not only efficient, it is also the only tax necessary to finance public expenditures. [“The Mason Gaffney Reader”. masongaffneyreader.com.]
7. Douglas Dowd, Thorstein Veblen
8. 27 Million Died in Russia Because Wall Street Built Up Hitler’s Wehrmacht to Knock Out Soviet Union, OpEdNews, 8/11/2021
https://www.opednews.com/articles/27-Million-Died-in-Russia-by-Jay-Janson-Hitler_Russia-And-Us-Conflict_Soviet-Union_Wall-Street-Hegemony-170811-655.html
9, Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71
10. Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380
11. Walt Kelly (1913-1973) was the creator of the popular and acclaimed comic strip “Pogo,” whose memorable characters and potent political satire.
