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The case for nuclear war

It is a measure of the complete degeneracy of the fake left these days, that at a time when Pentagon insiders are saying that there is a one-in-three chance that the majority of us will be annihilated in a nuclear war within days, that in the UK at least, the issue which is exercising the left the most is Boris Johnson’s illegal Christmas Party.  The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament are nowhere to be seen.  Nor has there been any attempt to rally the mass ranks who marched against NATO’s illegal war on Iraq nineteen years ago.  Might it be that, perhaps unconsciously, the fake left welcomes the blessed relief that might come from being vapourised in an instant beneath an exploding warhead from an ICBM?

Before dismissing this out of hand, you might want to consider the argument in favour of Armageddon made by psychologist Norman Dixon in the 1980s when we lived permanently under the shadow of nuclear war:

‘How did this happen?’

‘We had a disagreement’

‘About what?’

‘Ideologies, freedom, fairness, human rights, values, life itself.’

‘Wouldn’t it have been better to have reached some sort of compromise?’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Why?’

‘One must be true to one’s beliefs.  Besides, compromises leave everyone dissatisfied.’

‘So you decided to fight it out?’

‘Yes.’

‘Even though you knew this would kill everyone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then there would be no more disagreements?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Freedom, fairness, human rights, being true to one’s values – all this would have been achieved?’

‘Precisely.’

‘But what about life itself?’

‘You cannot have everything.’

‘But isn’t that irrational?’

‘Of course!  We are irrational.’

‘You mean you were irrational.’

 

“Few would dispute that, whether pleasant or unpleasant, living is difficult. It is really much easier to be dead. Survival of the individual and of the species is a task replete with problems. Its solution occurs in several ways – by chance, through fortunate mutations and natural selection, through instinct and through learning, through genetic evolution and through cultural evolution.

“What are the problems?

“As physical entities living creatures are complex constructions made from the environment in which they live. They are bits of the world put together in a particular way. The result has several indispensable characteristics. It resists falling apart and returning to the heap of ingredients from which it came. It grows and increases in complexity, and it reproduce itself. To achieve all this, it depends on the environment from which it came, of which it is a part, and to which it will ultimately return. It depends on it for food, water, air, warmth and all else which its organisation requires. It also has to resist all those things which threaten its existence – other organisms competing for the same resources, predators which like to eat it, extremes of heat and cold, bacterial invasion, and opportunities for falling from high places.

“Various strategies are employed to bring all this about. Simple creatures such as sea anemones can sit around like guests in a well-run hotel, waiting for everything to be brought to them, but many animals need to explore and discover all they can about their habitats.

“If they strike lucky by finding, say, in the case of cockroaches, the warm, dark, dirty kitchen of a West End restaurant, their troubles are over. Having, perhaps, heaved a sigh of relief, they can settle down to a life of untramelled domesticity. However, the thing to notice about the so-called lower animals, whether land-based or sea-locked, is that they survive by adapting to, rather than seriously changing, their environment. Apart from such minor constructional activities as nest building, web spinning, or digging holes in the ground they seem content to leave this world much as they found it.

“There are, however, a few animals which adopt a very different strategy for dealing with the problems of survival. The most conspicuous of these is ourselves, and the strategy that of cultural transmission culminating in civilisation and cultural progress.

“For some people cultural progress probably means the arrival on this planet of such things as libraries, picture galleries, sewage farms, birth control clinics and the British Council. For others, it might include the Women’s Institute, Beethoven’s Fifth, British Rail, false teeth, the Royal Family and bank holidays.

“Then there are the people themselves. We think of these consequences of cultural evolution – ‘civilised people’ – as law abiding, well behaved, decent and polite. They use plenty of soap and there are quite a few things which they wouldn’t dream of doing in public.

“But there are other less attractive products of cultural evolution – prisons, the Mafia, electric chairs, VAT, other people’s politics and, in a class of their own, nuclear weapons. The thousands of nuclear missiles now stockpiled by the purportedly more civilised countries of the world are in a class of their own because (at the time of writing) they and they alone can put the clock right back to the beginning. Not only can they destroy the culture which begat them but everything else besides. They can probably do it in about twenty minutes and, just in case there is a hitch, there are enough of them to do the job several times over. And this is where this book really begins, for it is the existence and ultimate use of nuclear weapons which best illustrates the fact that we are, beyond any shadow of a doubt our own worst enemy.

“Our own worst enemy?

“Certainly only the most blinkered optimist could deny that the present outlook for humanity is bleak, and growing bleaker, and it is entirely our fault. The trouble is that people dislike being told this. Prophets of doom are notoriously unpopular. From earliest childhood, from the first time we heard mother saying ‘If you’re naughty Father Christmas won’t come’, or ‘I’m warning you, if I catch you doing that once more I’ll tell your father’, there is little pleasure to be found in pessimistic or threatening predictions. References to the future of others, as implied by such ominous snatches of overheard conversations as ‘I’ve been told he’s riddled with it … ‘, or ‘It seems they’re going to lose every penny’, or ‘She’s had everything taken away down below … ‘, may of course be accepted with equanimity, if not a mild frisson of pleasure. But when it is about oneself, even such helpful warnings as ‘Did you know you’ve left your lights on?’ instead of eliciting an immediate flood of gratitude probably evokes the thought ‘What a damn silly question: of course I didn’t bloody well know!’

“No wonder then that, when it concerns all of us, gloomy forecasts receive a cool reception.

“Over the years a number of writers have pointed out that unless we control population growth, conserve our resources and discard nuclear weapons we will soon become extinct. For all the effect they’ve had they might just as well have saved their breath. Their books have not slowed down the birth rate or the arms race. They are not hailed as potential saviours of the planet. If what they say is true, and there is no reason to doubt that it is, people evidently don’t want to know, let alone do anything about forestalling the catastrophes which lie ahead.

“Why should this be? Why are we content to go on living on the brink of extinction? Why do we go on electing reactionary governments which pile up armaments and seem hell-bent on doing everything in their power to increase world tension? And why do so many of us denounce with venom ‘peaceniks’, prophets of doom, advocates of disarmament, the CND, the women of Greenham Common, Bruce Kent and anyone else who in one way or another tries to extend the life of the world? (And why, as a subsidiary question, should ‘peaceniks’ be thought of as wet and effeminate sissies, while the advocate of bigger and better weapons of destruction see themselves as tough, virile he-men, when it is really they who are the more frightened of the two?)

“Such stock answers to these questions as ‘Since they feel helpless to do anything about it most people would rather not know’, or, ‘It’s better to be dead than Red’, or ‘Since it is unthinkable it must be undoable’ or ‘The last forty years of peace prove that nuclear weapons are our best safeguard against war,’ range from half-truths to sheer rubbish. People do know. They are not helpless. It is thinkable and even were it not it’s certainly doable.  Because we’ve spent forty years living on the edge of a precipice does not mean we won’t eventually fall over it.  You can push your luck too far.

“So could there perhaps be another reason why some politicians and large sections of the general public turn their faces so resolutely against warnings, let alone attempts at prevention of the forthcoming holocaust?

“Maybe the ‘better dead’ argument comes nearest to the truth. Could it be that at some deep, or maybe not so deep, level many people want or are at least prepared to accept the possibility of an end to life on earth?  Absurd?  But if they don’t, how else do we explain the calm acceptance of such ludicrous concepts as a limited nuclear war?  What other interpretation can we put on the fact that when some of the best brains in the world forecast a nuclear winter, which nothing or nobody will survive, instead of adopting the failsafe position of acting on the basis that the forecasters just might be right, every effort is made to discredit the idea on the basis of nit-picking objections to the theory.

“For those who don’t share this philosophy, the short-sighted pacifists who want to keep the world much as it is, the alarming thing is that the ‘lemmings’ have in fact a very strong case.

“By presenting the contents of this book in the context of a thesis entitled ‘It’s better to be dead’ maybe there would be more chance of getting people to read it. So let’s consider the case for this shocking but seductive suggestion.

“Although, under even the most adverse circumstances, most people cling to life, they are in this respect merely the victims of a biological pressure which evolved as a mechanism for survival and not to prolong happiness.  When one considers the fearful suffering of the living – the millions who have died and still are dying slowly of starvation, the billions who contract hideous and painful diseases, the vast multitude who spend their day in the degrading squalor of prisons and concentration camps, one might well conclude that for many it would be better to be dead.  When one thinks of the beaten, the tortured, the oppressed, the deprived, the bereaved, the lonely and the cold; when one contemplates the prolonged misery of the pathologically depressed, the perpetually terrified, and the self-mutilating victims of neurosis and schizophrenia; when one considers those born to spasticity or AIDS; and when one remembers all those who say, ‘I wish I were dead’ and mean it, then surely the notion that all this suffering could be terminated once and for all has a certain appeal?

“Being dead may be awful. We simply do not know. But being alive, for many people much of the time is awful. Many people do not believe in any sort of survival after death, and if they do it is presumably because they believe it would be enjoyable rather than unpleasant. Most people probably regard death as a merciful escape from the vicissitudes of life into a state of non-existence. As for the so-called joys of living they are so transient so ephemeral, and so often paid for (with interest) later that they are hardly worth the candle. If there is life after death it could only be a change for the better. As to whether people really hold these beliefs, it is perhaps noteworthy that those pronounced clinically dead on the operating table or after a road accident and are then miraculously brought back to life report their period of being dead as extraordinarily happy, so much so that they sometimes felt rather dismayed at being brought back to life. Whether or not they were actually dead and then brought back is immaterial to the present argument. Dead or alive, they evidently believed it’s nice-to be deceased.  We can continue in this vein. If there is no life beyond the grave then, by definition, the dead won’t know what they’re missing. Nobody (to my knowledge) worries about all the jolly things they missed out on during the billions of years before they were born, so why should they care about all those missed out on after they’re dead?

“But what about theological arguments against having a holocaust, i.e. that it would undo, perhaps literally in a flash, the whole miracle of creation? Instead of this extraordinarily complex interlocking system of animals, plants, oil, sunshine, water and politicians, there would be nothing but a lifeless cinder whirling endlessly (but now of course peacefully) through space. For those who believe in the existence of God the idea of a holocaust brings the added shame, the ultimate blasphemy, of having destroyed at one fell swoop what He so lovingly put together.

“At first sight this seems a powerful argument against the notion that anyone could risk, let alone want, a final cataclysm. But even here those who seem bent on destroying the world may have a point. If there is a God who created the world, then it is He who created the wherewithal (i.e. ourselves and atomic physics) for its destruction, so why waste time trying to interfere with His plans? Instead of trying to baulk His intentions (which because they are His are, by definition, ultimately unbaulkable) we should be glad to do His work.

“If, on the other hand, there isn’t a God, if the world came about by accident, then to others the only argument for keeping it in being is for the pleasure it gives to those who experience it. But we have already seen that this pleasure is, to say the least, very mixed. For many, if not most, people the costs of being alive far outweigh the benefits.

“According to this argument, since the beauties of nature exist only in the minds of those whose brains are responding to patterns of energy radiating from the environment, there is absolutely no point in worrying about preserving the physical sources of these aesthetic experiences once the brains which make them seem enjoyable have ceased to exist. A retrospective view of this planet supports this contention. Before the arrival of mankind there was no doubt much which would have delighted the then non-existent senses of beings yet to come – vast tracts of lushest green, sparkling streams, shining seas, huge lumbering beasts, exotic birds, shimmering sands and, between times, dazzling fields of virgin snow; and before that, long before that, a magnificent incandescent orb spinning through an azure sky; and before that, for aficionados of firework displays, breathtaking exhibitions of stellar explosions and other pyrotechnic marvels. What a waste that there was no one here to see it! Such a waste that it would really not have mattered one jot if it had never been. Since we are so unconcerned about all the events of the Universe which passed unwitnessed, why should we care about those which lie beyond the next great series of explosions – those of our own making?

“Before leaving this philosophical digression, there is one final argument in favour of a holocaust – the possibility, as implied by investigation of children who appear to recall events from a previous life, of reincarnation. Whether or not reincarnation occurs we simply do not know, but if it does then, for this writer anyway, the prospects are horrific. On statistical grounds alone, if you are born again into the world the chances are you will be an insect or maybe something smaller, living, probably, inside the intestines of someone else. If we come back as people, then the chances are we will be poor, hungry, diseased and living in some awful place without running water and decent sanitation. The chances of coming back as a well-fed professor living in an affluent democracy are so infinitesimally small as to be hardly worth considering. And even if one did end up as a well-fed professor how frightful it would be to endure prep school all over again.

“But if there is a really efficient holocaust, any danger of reincarnation is ruled out, for there’ll be nothing to come back to. For which we should be profoundly grateful.

“Now, whether or not these various arguments occur to those who are either actively assisting or at least condoning the present accelerating slide toward extinction is, to say the least, debatable. They should however, draw heart from the fact that a case can be made for their self-destructive philosophy. Far from being defensive about the subject matter of this book, they can now take comfort from the evidence outlined that unless we radically alter the ways we think, feel and act (which is highly unlikely) they will soon have their wishes granted and be dead…”

Now that the finite resources of Planet Earth have been exhausted beyond the point where our advanced civilisation can no longer be maintained, could it be that the elites who rule over us would rather see us reduced to ashes than to give up their long-held exorbitant privilege?…  It is certainly food for thought.

As you made it to the end…

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