To avert the next world war - An appeal to individual responsability

In 1848, after the restauration of monarchies all over Europe which followed the Congress of Vienna in the aftermath of the fall of Napoleon, a series of popular uprisings shook both the old and new worlds. The roots set by the French Revolution had not been extirpated.  

I remember it vividly.

When I was growing up in the 70s, whether you lived in Tehran, Kabul, New York or Moscow, women wore mini skirts and men sported bell bottomed pants, while both genders were undistinguishable in their  predilection for floral motifs. People across the globe were just as identical in their blind devotion to sex, drugs and rock and roll as they were in their utter loss of religious fervor and scarce sense of patriotism. 

A quarter of a century of indoctrination in peace-loving Illuminist internationalism by UNESCO, whose first director happened to be Julian Huxley, the brother of the more famous Aldous, had done an outstanding job at eradicating that archaically dogmatic world that lay defunct under the ruins of Berlin and Hiroshima, while ushering that creeping, uniform, reassuringly meaningless brave new one which we all got used to and became so jaded with.

Today, internationalism has become the dreaded "globalization", the European Union, which not even Napoleon was able to achieve, is seen as a collection of tyrannical bureaucrats disconnected from the populations which they don't represent, the world and its dog has re-descovered nationalism, a Crusader religious fervor is back in vogue and the Earth has become flat again, and all this, to the chagrin of Illuminism, which after three centuries of relentless popularity, is now widely regarded as the satanic conspiracy of a sect known as "Illuminati". 

So what happened ? Is one to believe in a clash of those "civilizations" which are back on everybody's lips?

After the collective planetary orgy of demented consumerism which lasted more than half a century, we have suddenly become jealous of our "cultures" once again? The various generations of boomers,bloomers, Xs and millenials,invariably conditioned by ubiquitous media to live only by the law of the purchasing impulse, to be what they own, to aspire exclusively to the ephimeral and the mundane, have now suddenly remembered that they are part of a "civilization"?

And if so, why? Just because of the financial crisis that crashed  the markets in 2001 and 2008? Just because the orgy could not continue at the same, doggedly exponential pace as before? 

And again, if so, how ? By replacing the global consumerist orgy with an endless succession of incomprehensible as absurdly unjustifiable conflicts which nobody really cares for ?          

Really ? Is this sudden collective metamorphosis even remotely credible? Even taking into consideration the ever shorter memory that so typically characterizes that "man without qualities" as dubbed by Robert Musil to illustrate the then burgeoning mass society at the eve of WW1, which still feels so ominously close?  

But I tell a lie when I claim that "nobody" cares about these wars, international policing interventions, special operations, or whatever one wants to call them.

Somebody does care.

Setting aside the Yom kippur war, the subsequent petrol shock provoked in retaliation by OPEC, the Iranian revolution and the Soviet-Afghan war, which were, in retrospect, relatively contained, merely preparatory events with respect to today's scenarios in terms of the collectively pervasive, ever more dogmatic animosities we now consider the norm, the current trend all started, I'd say, with the the first Gulf War of 1991, when the underlying reality of that relatively seemingly uneventful, numb, "New World", suddenly came knocking at the door for the bill, as the obvious, crudely came to be revealed even to the most hapless: the planet's flagship for democracy was in reality just a nepotistic cartel of oilers, bankers and weapon manufacturers, whom having found themselves freed from any antagonism against a defeated and agonizing Eastern Block( which happened to be officially dissolved by that same year)  demonstrated how the new, one and only global boss, had no scruples in waging the first total war since WW2, with the excuse of freeing Kuwait from an unlawful invasion, when the local thug and former ally pulled on his leash to turn against that very cartel which was drowning his eternal war effort with artificially plummeting oil prices, rather than persevering in his (this one of course very lawful) invasion of the land of the Ayatollahs, as he had been armed, bread and expected to do.  

By the second Iraq war, allegedly provoked by 9/11, it became even more obvious that the elephant in the living room didn't even need to make up credible excuses anymore : in the very own words of Bush Junior (did I mention nepotism ?) after raising, once again,both Iraq and Afghanistan to the ground : "oops, no nuclear weapons!"

And on it goes, from one story of bitterness and revenge by expended former allies ( or "partners") to another. From Bin Laden, former ally and leader of Afghan Mujahhidins, to the crazed ISIL bunch created out of nothing by the CIA and overtly protected by the US contingent in Syria, to the current phase, which sees a vengeful and paranoid Putin seeking to resuscitate the former prestige, influence and expanse of Holy Mother Russia, allegedly diminished by the betrayals of a hypocritical Western "partner", at the expense of the Ukranian populations. 

This takes us to the current modern day Greek Tragedy  which we are all beholding: On one side, the Ukranians, whose sole aspiration having become the Europeanisation of their country and the promise of material benefits that come with it,  twice ousted ,by the street, the pro-Russian candidate Yanukovych. On the other side,  their offended Russian cousins who saw in this a "Russophobic" stance, a betrayal of the Slavic brotherhood and a breach of both explicit and implicit agreements and mutual reassurances which came as a legacy of the dissolution of the USSR.

What followed, beginning with the Russian invasion of Crimea, is history.

Here's my claim :  the Russian population, or rather part of it, is indeed disgusted with what they consider to be a betrayal of former bonds by populations such as Poles and Baltics, in their having joined an organization, NATO, which was created for the specific purpose of containing the now defunct USSR, and which in their eyes has no further reason to exist, let alone grow and expand. The apparent leaning of Ukraine ( which means "border lands" in Russian) towards that camp, was the last drop. It's just as true, that many Ukrainians felt insulted in their sense of liberty and dignity by the influence of their Russian neighbor in their internal affairs, while they were recovering their sense of indipendent nationhood after so many years of cohabitation with other nations.

However,  Ukranians still spoke both languages in their households, as most of their families are mixed, just as many Russians consider Ukraine as a sister nation, given that so many of them have recent origins, family and/or friends in that country.

So how did  the current situation unfold ?

The question is rather: who asked Putin to invade Crimea? Would the Ukranian populations spontaneously have started a civil war in Crimea and then in Donbass had they been left to their own devices, keeping in mind their deep ethnic and cultural ties with the Russians?  Who does the current war benefit? What does Putin have in common with the American cartels? Why do the European bureaucrats feel that they should meddle in Eastern Slavic affairs? Why do the Anglo-American cartels feel the need to impeach a Eurasian rapprochement at any cost ?

So many obviously rethorical questions...The point being, that all these populations have no other real concern than to live a comfortable life, find a good job, raise their children, go on holiday twice a year and receive a pension when they age. They have been conditioned to be nothing more than consumers for generations. 

Otherwise said, there is today an abysmal divide in intentions and interests between the ruling class and the common man. The international ruling class of billionnaires ( of which both Putin and the Bushes are part) start the wars, and the ever more impoverished consumer has to fight them. 

And yes, this is no novelty. Kings and aristocracies of the past have always been related and intermarried across borders, while they thuggishly crushed and used the peasantry as cannon fodder in archane squabbles of which the common man understood nothing nor cared for. In the same way, as soon as the first blood was drawn, it became just as easy back then as it is today, to rally both camps around the cause of patriotism and just revenge, to give meaning to the deaths. And so the clockwork is wound up to run its inevitable, deterministic denouement.

There is however a fundamental difference with the past : if the worst that could happen back then, was the accumulation of corpses which ended up fertilizing the fields, today, the potential use of nuclear weapons could render those fields contaminated for innumerable generations to come.

It is with infinite sadness, upon witnessing the results of the first experimental explosion of the nuclear bomb to which invention he contributed, that Robert Oppenheimer recited verses of the Bhagavad Gita where Lord Krishna manifests himself to Arjuna in his most terrifying form to convince him to fulfill his duty of going to war even against his own relatives, as regardless of any events unfolding on the battlefield, the armies he was confronting would eventually be consumed by time, ultimate manifestation of the divine.

What was missed in this extremely fatalistic and somewhat cynical apology of duty however, is that we ourselves, as humanity, have become the deity. 

So when Nietzsche declared with great pathos more than a century ago, that "God was dead" (in the conscience of contemporary man), he couldn't envision back then that he was already being replaced by an entity which was to reveal itself to be much more than that "ubermensch" for which advent he advocated: from the discovery of atomic energy to that of the code of life itself, no day passes without groundbreaking progress in fields such as longevity, debellation of cancer and viruses, understanding of the very creation of the universe, artificial intellingence(if not even conscience), which have suddenly rendered much of the philosophical existential problems that had always haunted humanity to this day, all but obsolete. 

And yet, Nietzsche did however foresee correctly the danger that instead of a "superman", humanity could rather produce "the last man"; a quintessencially mediocre entity solely preoccupied with inane distractions and contented with tepid comforts.

The tragedy of the contemporary human condition lies precisely in this contradiction: to be a deity which has delegated its will power to a malignant Demiurge, which is the oligarchic ruling class of the transnational cartels. 

We might well be reaching Mars very soon, but we are still completely subjugated by a minority of thugs, be it under the guise of Western Corporations, Russian oligarchs or Chinese party apparatchiks,  swayed like so many reeds in the wind, our energies and bodies bled, our destinies determined, in a never ending pursuit of agendas that are to the vast majority of us, utterly and forever obscure.   

We are a malleable deity. Sapiently shepherded by an alternation of fear and granted petty pleasures. Our lives carefully catered for from cradle to grave by corporations which have all but replaced the nation state. We give them our allegiance, our souls, renounce our freedom of speech and thought, while they preoccupy themselves even with our "wellbeing". We are constantly polled, engaged in miriads of lame pursuits, taught that the corporation is our family, our home, our fatherland, made to sign documents to promise as much, constantly enlisted in meaningless, repetitive, brainwashing compliance trainings, encouraged to work more and more in the isolation of our homes, fed free pizza and even beer on the job. All the while, our real occupation is to desire and consume.

That's why I can't stop repeating it: this is our alibi. We, the common man, are not the ones to start the wars. We simply lack the energy, the immagination, the malice, the interest.

So how did we get to the current sorry state of affairs, the question begs ...

Freud dominated the past century and his shadow still looms large over this one. He discovered the subconscious, the profoundly irrational nature of man, allegedly. Well, it sure became a self-fulfilling prophecy, I say. That revival of reason, which began with the Renaissance and found its apotheosis in the age of Enlightenment, had already come under attack by Kant. Nietzsche again completed the job by calling for a triumph of the "Dionysian" (which might explain why he ended up hugging a horse and getting interned into an asylum for the demented). And Nietzsche had a huge influence on Freud, whom he knew personally.

I am not denying that there is an inherently weak, dark,  influenceable quality to the human mind; surely the consequences brought upon humanity by adepts of both Nietzshe and Freud such as messers Hitler and Goebbels, must speak for themselves. 

What I am saying is that the subconscious has to be wilfully encouraged to prevail over the rational. In other words, it's education, culture, nurture, that determine which side prevails in the average individual. If we fatalistically declare that man is intrinsically flawed, originally "sinful", fundamentally irrational and if on top of that you design a society which is based on the constant promotion, illustration, beatification, of whatever base instict, impulse, desire,goes through the mind,then what you get is unsurprisingly enough, the 20th century. If consumption is all you're taught from earliest childhood, including the consumption of feelings, people, music, sex, murder, by media that come to follow you ever closer, even into your bathroom, day and night, chances are that you will become a vacuous consumer of anything, including violence. I'm quite sure I'm stating the obvious.

Yes, "God is dead" all right. Or rather, he was. Because nowadays there is every intention to resuscitate him, judging by the way religions fanaticism and intolerance are making a come back. And this, obviously not because of a spontanuous need to restore order and morality, which do not need a superstructure such as religion to inhabit the conscience of men, but rather as yet another (well tried and tested) instrument of control of the masses by the usual suspects.

We, the people, don't need the empty shell of religion, made of the mind-numbing identities, superstitions and dogmas, that are so useful to the powers that be to sow their politics of division, just as we don't need that typically systematic, blind, maniacal repudiation of everything that religion stood for, which so characterized certain parts of society in the past century.

All that is useful in any religion, can be condensed into a single, perfect, ingenious precept : "do unto others as you would have others do unto you" ( although "do not do unto others as you would not have others do unto you" would be a good enough start). Any good deed, or at least the avoidance of harm, can be derived as a logical consequence of this single golden rule. I would like to add the need for Forgiveness, which although also derivable from the former, is particularly absent in our world.

This essence of any religion is what has organized, disciplined, civilized even the most remote and isolated human communities across the ages. It is what induced their martyrs to extreme sacrifice and built cathedrals that took centuries of painstaking patience and labor to be erected .

It is, what we have demonstrated time and again of being capable of, when freed from manipulation.  

So what then are we to do ?

Russians and Belorussians are being vilified for not making themselves heard, for allegedly not having the courage of rising against their tyrants, their local organized thuggish mafia, their Demiuge. This is a forgetful and unfair judgement that does not consider how many rebellions, revolutions, protests, both these populations have gone through in their not too remote past and in the recent one.

In the recent past they freed themselves from their middle-ages and then from the Soviets. Today, they are being confronted with sapiently malevolent modern organizations which follow their every move and crush their every expression of will.

In the West, we are getting drawn into a quagmire of which we are partly responsible, for having meddled into the affairs of the Eastern Slavs from the very inception of this tragedy during the Euromaidan. Although we all understand the risks of our current involvement, nobody dares to speak their mind freely, because we are steeped in a witch hunt atmosphere againt the "politically incorrect". 

There is an asset that has never existed before in our history, which potentially interconnects us all in a mesh network( every node is connected to every other node). We just need to know the email address of any person in order to reach them instantly. And yet, we are mostly using this asset for applications such as ...Tik Tok.

Don't go invading the streets. They are your streets.

Don't obstruct public services. They are your services.

Don't destroy others' property. It's not yours.

Don't point your finger at your leaders. They have been allowed in power by you, regardless of the political system. They are of you. Don't threaten them. Don't harm them. Forgive them and forgive yourself.

Rather, reach out to your local constituents, if you can, and express your thoughts. 

Get up, leave the smart phone, open the door, get out, knock at your neighbor's door. Tell them you'd  like to talk.

Whatever you do, it won't make a smidgeon of a difference. There will be no medals, no paradise. You will still remain trapped in this tiny bubble of air racing around in ellipses, somewhere in the universe. There might still be a catastrophic change of climate. You'll still die (although nowadays this may take a bit longer ) and you'll still end up in a hole to decompose.

But if in spite of the above, you can't find within yourself a plausible reason to try to individually make a change, no well-meaning person or group of can find one for you. 

(Although rest assured.... the ill-intentioned will immediately volunteer to do so).

"How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't. "

       

Shakespear- The Tempest