- WALKING DEAD, PICK YOUR POISON

Weapon mentality is lethal by design. It cannot help it; that is what is does best. If you seek a dog that bites, you’ve picked the perfect rottweiler. Choose a friendlier pet.

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LEARNER full text (2024) and chapters

All or nothing, PeaceWorld or death

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APPRENTI texte integral (2024) et chapitres

Tout ou rien, Le monde paisible ou la mort

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WORLD WAR COVID
From WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld
Learner, begin

- WALKING DEAD, PICK YOUR POISON

“Most people do not understand the complicated machinery of government. They do not realize that every citizen silently but nonetheless certainly sustains the government of the day, in ways of which he has no knowledge. Every citizen therefore renders himself responsible for every act of his government. And it is quite proper to support it, so long as the actions of the government are bearable.” Gandhi quote from Raghavan Iyer’s, The Moral and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi, Oxford University Press, New York, 1973, p. 321.

We have reviewed how governments serve and cripple themselves. We’ve established their common traits, dissected their ideo-mumbo, religio-jumbo and technobabble. We have magnified government to cosmic proportions and stripped it down to component parts. Nonetheless, ancient evils may loom if we persist at olden ways. 

We are left with a simple question. Can we prevent weapon technology from committing omnicide, killing everything that lives? 

If you deny this prospect, think again. Weapon technologies evolved to induce the most pain, death and destruction — the same way rattlesnakes evolved to strike with their fangs. Years spent in a glass tank won’t prevent a viper from lashing out against a tempting target dangled just beyond the glass. Even if that attack gives it nothing but a superb headache, it will strike by reflex anyway. 

Decades spent recovering from total war won’t prevent a weapon technology from exerting its climax destructive potential, even if its next attack just hands us our pink slip and civilization’s. “Sorry, sweetie… Who’s next?”

Primitive weapon technologies let loose their climax destruction potential. Up ‘til now, the mass violence of total war had little impact on the biosphere, the living membrane wrapped around the Earth; but a massive one on the anthrosphere, the much slighter, more delicate membrane that contains human beings. 

Tightening their stranglehold on the human spirit, weapon managers (an insignificant minority otherwise) have monopolized social expression and snuffed out peace politics. Thanks to their info takeover, weapons managers have wrecked the biosphere and may soon wipe out the whole anthrosphere. 

On your mark… Get set… Go! 

Among the remainder, a handful relegated to the margins still sings hymns of peace, while everyone else venerates weapon management or ignores its threat until it’s too late. 

Everything needed for mass extermination has already been perfected. Many trivial but illustrative examples can be found here and there: quick-firing and rocket artillery of regional range and meter precision; tanks, aircraft and automatic weapons. Then there’s the more significant ones: nukes, chems, bugs and scalar “controls” of electrogravity, weather and tectonics. Add our high-tech drone nightmares. Humanity has already perfected all the mandatory rituals of omnicide: mass conscription, mass consumption, weapon bureaucracy, weapon myths as fresh as they are venerable, and so on. 

Like the Etna volcano, this avalanche of death is sliding down slowly; gravity has not set it loose yet.  Otherwise, everything required has been perfected to the edge of flawless suicide. 

Nonetheless, even the most devastating weapon states suppressed their destructive activities below climax potential. Such halfhearted attempts at unilateral disarmament have been unique in human history. Otherwise, more and more sophisticated weapon mentors have justified as much waste, lies and terror as their rapt listeners could subsidize.

During the mid-1800s, the German army perfected the General Staff College, the first Master’s Degree Program in Business Administration. After losing a hundred battles for every victory against the French, it seemed to them the best way to re-deal the cards. Mimicked soon thereafter by every other premier weapon state. There followed the senior prom of those military schools: World War I, which I call the Great Paroxysm. During this valedictory exercise, the front line became a giant, open-air factory mass producing misery, mutilation and death. The contending General Staffs, tasked with managing this biological disassembly line, held more in common with each other than with their own troops. Bound together with their entrepreneurial armorers, they formed some of the first modern multinational corporations. 

Actually, the first multinational corporations peddled weapon religion: featherweight fabrications, cheap, easy to assemble and disseminate. As long as freedom of worship, assembly, speech and thought could be suppressed, their babble was ideal merchandise for high-volume, high pressure salesmanship, quick profit, huge turnover and long-term monopoly. The same way our “social media,” mass advertising and politics peddle stupid narcissism to us at the expense of the common good. Nothing else sells better.

Weapon states poisoned themselves with super-virulent biochem toxins during the Greater Paroxysm (WWII, sic) and afterwards. The Allies seeded a remote island with anthrax spores that can still kill, a century later. Nazi scientists refined lethal gasses and exterminated human prey with them by the million; the Japanese slew as many innocents with weapon-grade disease. 

As we speak, biological weapons are being developed without letup in complete secrecy and criminal silence, with our blessing. The end products are lethal and infectious beyond imagining. 

Since human encroachment is wrecking more and more biomes on Earth, the disease organisms of local animals must adapt or perish. Germs comfortably adapted to Disease Levels Three and Four among their usual animal hosts devolve to Levels One and Two in unfamiliar human hosts. See the chapter Beyond Darwin. 

Meanwhile, unforgivable public health failures have opened a Pandora’s Box of ancient plagues. Richer health care agencies could have held them in check or eradicated them. Resurgent infections, both those known historically and those new and unfamiliar, betray public health incompetence on a global scale. The UN’s introduction of cholera to Tahiti, and WHO’s failure to eradicate Ebola in each of its pre-epidemic manifestations are further examples. 

Disease outbreaks are beginning to afflict epidemiological naïve populations who live in zones once temperate, that global heat death has turned subtropical and more disease-prone. Add the war reactionaries and their dupes wage against safe vaccination. Global public health is starved when it should be refunded tenfold. Child mortality from absolutely preventable disease, anyone?

No recent combatant nation has wielded its deadliest weapons, at least against equally armed adversaries. No matter how desperate the outlook, we held back unilaterally, with no public agreement in place — or so one could hope. 

Hitler, Stalin and their minions could have farted toxic gas from the rubble of their besieged capitals, yet refrained one and all. Japanese artillery could have fired barrages of anthrax and botulism into the faces of oncoming American Marines, but they did not. The Americans could have carpet-bombed Communist countries with disease, and vice-versa against the American landscape. Barring a few loose-cannon exceptions, everyone abstained.

A score Prism nation-states assert regional dominance by threatening their neighbors with aggravated disruption. North Korea is a good example of this kind of international hostage crisis. Picture a crazed thug bunkered in his house and holding a neighbor hostage at knifepoint: the current state of this world’s Disunited States.

The United States would croak outright if a dozen “small” atomic warheads flash-fried the same number of American city centers. The collateral effect of two hundred million starving, RIIDS-afflicted Americans clawing for survival would see to the rest. A half-dozen warheads might do the trick; not to mention one or more well-aimed E M Peas, (electro-magnetic pulses). One or more multi-megaton detonations, aimed optimally high over Lebanon, Kansas, could shut down unshielded electric civilization from San Diego to Norfolk. Take bets on how long it would take to recover and rebuild.

RIIDS affliction, by the way, is Radiation-Induced Immune Disease. It is similar to AIDS but would afflict every surviving radiation victim. Nuclear war bureaucrats never want to talk about RIIDS, never. 

Global civilization would seize up if a score of fireballs seared major urban nerve centers across the planet. Hundreds of times that number are poised for the Terminal Paroxysm, plus an untold tonnage of biotoxins and exquisite chemical poisons. Besides which, scalar weapons of meteorological and tectonic warfare have been perfected. 

You may have been assured that there were fewer warheads than those on inventory, that the stock had been reduced by a series of masterful negotiations… or so it’s been mansplained to you. Such that the promise of planetary genocide at a moment’s notice may not put you off your feed. But those nuclear cooked books don’t include “tactical” and smaller warheads held in secret reserve, or those detached from thousands of obsolete missiles but still in inventory.

Do you recall the classroom model of gravity? A rubber sheet is stretched out flat like a trampoline. Heavy weights dimple this sheet, representing planets and stars. The demonstrator rolls a marble across it. The marble rolls towards one of the dimples, circles the heavy object and spirals into contact with it — thus illustrating gravitational mechanics?

The trampoline represents WeaponWorld, across which thirty or so wars disgrace us. Its congested surface shrinks with every upgrade of our communication network. Each of those wars is a weighty mass — especially the one between Israel and Palestine: the central sun of our weapon solar system. The marbles are nuclear warheads either locked away in government arsenals or passed from billionaire hand to terrorist hand. We’re just waiting for one of those marbles to click against one of those weights, and boom!

Realize, when (not if) the nuclear curtain comes down, every nuclear reactor, chemical factory, petroleum refinery and bio-toxin lab will blow. Indeed, the entire infrastructure and biosphere  of the Northern Hemisphere will burst into flame and toxic smoke: almost every forest glade, grain field, frame house, household match and baby’s curl. Simultaneously? This global firestorm will probably drag on for years as a trickle of nuclear warheads gets doled out from snug, well-concealed command bunkers. 

This unfolding desolation will turn out to be very bad news for survivors. Radiation levels will remain toxic for years, especially in the smoldering ruins of big cities and downwind of them. Those would include major ocean, lake and river ports, mountain plateaus and passes, and healthier elevations in boggy lowlands: key geographic features civilization would find irreplaceable. New crops will be toxic for at least a decade.

We have been led to fantasize that nuclear war will only last two weeks. “Two weeks of hell, then the survivors can set to rebuilding!” This two-week figure comes from the Nuclear Rule of Sevens. Radioactive contamination drops by 90% every time another power of seven hours elapses after each fireball. 

Twenty minutes after the fireball, let’s say your little corner of Hell gets a thousand roentgens of radioactive fallout. That would be a pretty light dose downwind of most bombs; it could easily be many times stronger. Just five hundred roentgens will kill everyone exposed to it in a few hours or days of rot-from-the-inside agony. 

Run and hide in a deep-dug, blast-proof shelter with walls reinforced by steel, lead and thick concrete, equipped with minutely filtered air and a reservoir of clean water. Make sure you can dig yourself out from under the treacherous surface debris; also, that your shelter is far enough away from city firestorms … at least a few dozen miles upwind. Better to die quickly on the surface in the primary blast, rather than slow cook in your bunker. Such shelters do not lend themselves to improvisation on short notice, despite President Reagan's lies to the contrary; deadly silence since.

Explosion + seven hours: one hundred roentgens: a very nasty dose that will bring cancer to many. Don’t stir from your shelter. 

Plus seven x seven hours = 49 hours or two days: ten roentgens. Don’t eat or drink anything exposed; don’t breathe the outside air without a good gas mask with fresh filters; throw away or bury the clothing you've worn outside; plus shower thoroughly in precious, clean water. Never use rain or surface water at this time! Don't bother to boil or filter it; it will be radioactive in any case. A state-of-the-art distillery and filtration system might reduce some radioactive contaminants in suspicious water, but not enough to make it completely safe to drink or wash in.

I hope Uncle Sam has paid for your bomb shelter with its self-contained supply of water and filtered air, because none other than millionaires can afford it. Did you know the Swiss built blast-proof shelter space for all its citizens, with filtered air, good water and sufficient supplies? At least they used to… The rest of us were too cheap to see to it.

Holland was ruined during the endgame of World War II (sic). Thousands of Dutch citizens died of starvation. Nonetheless, the survivors built a massive system of dikes by 1953, which rich Americans never managed to duplicate around New Orleans. Capitalist swine: self-satisfied profiteers of banana-Republican governance.

Plus seven x seven x seven hours = two weeks, and radiation levels supposedly returned to “normal.” 

Then again, the soil is still “hot” at aboveground nuclear test sites. A century later, they give off twice the “normal” background radiation. In turn, that “normal” count has tripled since World War II (sic) and probably quintupled since Chernobyl and Fukushima. Sextupled? 

So much for the “rule of sevens!” Good luck jump-starting civilization! 

This, assuming your particular bomb wasn't maliciously clad with “dirty” isotopes with less radioactive fizz but a longer half-life. If so, multiply the toxic interval by half (using gold cladding with a stronger initial burst of radiation but shorter duration), by twice as long, years longer or perhaps thousands of years. It depends on how deadly the cladding. 

The rule of thumb? If a radio-isotope burns you quick, it will fade away quickly; if it kills us slow, it may last forever from our point of view.

In any case, the dirtiest bombs are so-called Hydrogen (H-bombs). Only 10 or 15% of their energy is released by thermonuclear fusion, the rest by very radioactive fission processes (thanks a lot, Edward Teller). This according to an article by Howard Morland, “The Holocaust Bomb: a Question of Time, at http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/morland.html. See also an historic article on the H-Bomb in Progressive magazine, http://www.progressive.org/images/pdf/1179.pdf. 

Set your counter closer to 20,000 roentgens than 1,000 and do your sums accordingly. That dose would require over one hundred days spent underground instead of two weeks, to get back to nearly “safe” levels of exposure.

This formula does not take into account second, third, fourth, etc. waves of nuclear attack. The radioactivity from each wave will last as long after the first one did, and add to its toxicity. 

Can you hold your breath that long? Raise livestock and children underground; the mushrooms, carrots, potatoes and grain of your daily bread? I doubt it. Once you emerge from your shelter, remove (somewhere, somehow) eighteen inches of long-contaminated topsoil and plow, in any way you can, the clay underneath.

Five central command nodes monopolized nuclear weapons during the Cold War: France, the US, the USSR, China and the UK. Despite this constraint, nuclear accidents and tripwire confrontations imperiled the future far more often than the blank score currently advertised. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_close_calls 

Since the bankrupt Soviet Union spun out of the arms race – at least temporarily – any billionaire with a taste for genocide could acquire his own nuke or the makings thereof. While insanely wealthy fools spend millions on comic books and other doltish “collectables,” what do you think the really serious money collects? More countries are lining up to flaunt their nuclear arsenals, with well-funded terrorists not far behind. 

Scalar weapons’ antenna arrays are even easier to build. They can transmit destructive energies from any corner of the Earth to any other spot, unstoppable and hard to trace. At low energy levels, they can broadcast chafing fields over wide areas in which everyone becomes sulky, stupid and Republican. The Soviet leader Khrushchev threatened to do just that back in the 1960s when his researchers began the project. Reactionary tendencies in the American heartland could result from ongoing irradiation of this kind. 

Slightly stronger energy applications can sicken living things under the target zone and eventually kill them. Electromagnetic equipment can be neutralized, whether as point targets or across broad expanses, no matter how well shielded. Higher energy levels can focus on high and low atmospheric pressure zones to induce catastrophic weather effects. Greater energy applications can distort seismic fault lines and trigger earthquakes. Apparently, this weapon can be used defensively to create a bubble of destruction around a protected site; it might even block incoming nuclear missiles if fed enough energy.

The famous inventor Tesla initiated these studies. Apparently, he abandoned them right after the Tunguska atmospheric explosion in 1908. Draw your own conclusions.

What is most disturbing about these longitudinal waves of scalar transmission is the fact that they can, by sloshing their energy back and forth, multiply input energy instead of reducing it through well-known transmission inefficiencies. Feed the energy of, say, one atomic reactor into an antenna array, and get the effect of several on the targeted point or area. 

Seismic and meteorological phenomena have this in common: they represent energies equivalent to several large nuclear weapons exploding simultaneously or in series. 

Scalar weapons have been demonstrated during a few mind-boggling exercises (three direct-hit hurricanes in a row, anyone?). Soon thereafter, inconsequential terrorist individuals and organizations can take advantage of them, more handily than with expensive, cumbersome, dangerous and more easily traceable nuclear devices. 

Atomic bombs use fission reactions to break down heavy isotopes and produce kiloton explosions equal to thousands of tons of TNT. Nuclear weapons use fusion reactions that jam two small atoms together to form one bigger one and produce megaton explosions amounting to millions of tons of TNT, up to the fifty million tons of the “Tsar Bomba” Russian test explosion — or more. Their only TNT limit would be the weight and volume of the explosive device.

Who could imagine a million tons of dynamite going off in a fraction of a second?

This new input to the threat formula leads to hallucinatory results. Weapons elites would rather hone their precious threat deterrent without pause. No matter how abject the outcome, they insist that any conflict surpassing a minimalist, AK-47-and-machete stage can be calculated using the same old military logic. Yet they always wind up getting imaginary results from their ultimate calculations and going home in defeat. 

It’s a little like the impenetrable arithmetic of a tax form: “When you’re done, divide the end-product by the nuclear square root of -1.” 

The climax use of weapons has never been a sane proposition; it has become even less so. No longer can major powers go stomping wherever they wish with all the firepower at their disposal. World opinion would never allow them a “decisive” victory. “You've made a wasteland and called it Peace.” The losing side’s only option would be nuclear counterstrike. 

Some will tell you that we haven’t begun the next nuclear war yet, (quite a few nuclear catastrophes, you bet) despite eighty years of trying. They’re certain we’re not about to start one now or any time soon. 

Which presents us with an interesting problem. During the years between WWII (sic) and the 1980s, the likelihood of nuclear war on Earth approached 100% every day. It is still atrociously high now, forty years later, despite our collective denial. Serious nuclear reactor accidents have happened dozens of times since, but not the single one needed to set off a nuclear war. Such was the case, even though there were always less than a thousand nodes of responsibility for those accidents, at work for a certain length of time; whereas many more command nodes on the military side, on watch for much longer stretches of time. The combat accident should have been inevitable when compared to corresponding statistics of civilian failure. No preventive system managed to stop them all; no human system could have prevented it categorically all by itself.

What superhuman awareness should we thank for that rescue from our worst selves that has lasted for 31,000 days of quite likely annihilation?

This killing within acceptable limits doesn’t take new biotechnologies into account. Taking advantage of breakthrough skills that will become commonplace within the next few years, lone whackos may cook up incredibly infectious, flesh-eating microbes in their kitchen sink, so to speak. For example, a crazed city-killer could find a functional workbench in any Community College laboratory. 

State-of-the-art biological warfare can string together the components of a new organism, more or less like boxcars on a freight train. Take the contagion of a flu virus, say, and attach the toxin-producing machinery of Ebola or Yellow Fever; tailor the weapon system to any circumstance or level of lethality desired — even target a specific race or ethnicity (for example, eaters of pork). The only thing that has prevented the release of these experimental models up ‘til now has been that they might mutate beyond the protection of the vaccine designed to protect the people belonging to the releaser.

This would not be a problem for the genius psychopaths WeaponWorld sets adrift in large numbers to do their worst. More and more these days, they don’t care any more about survivors than about their victims.

The latest bio-nano-technologies will compound this problem. They will soon produce lethal, microscopic, self-duplicating biocyborgs, deliverable as aerosol liquids or powders. Bio-technologies could put continental-scale casualties within the reach of some ambitious psychopath; help us regrow Eden, of course, too. The killing ones are fully mature by now, just waiting to be released into the wild. We have barely seen the surface of the Eden ones.

All this illustrates Buckminster Fuller’s model of ephemeralization: so-called “progress.” More activity (killing) can be accomplished with fewer overheads of material, time and cost.

“In 1917, … more performance with less weight and volume of materials, less ergs of energy, and less seconds of time investment per each accomplished unit of performance, manifested itself for the first time in the metallurgy, chemistry and electronics of World War I sea and sky armaments.” Critical Path, St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1981, pp. 132-33. 

The ultimate outcome of this weapon ephemeralization will turn out to be global military paralysis. A few military catastrophes will alarm the whole world to such an extent that everyone but crazies will freeze, too scared to so much as twitch. 

That will resemble the evolution of threat behaviors in a pack of wild carnivores. The deadlier the predators’ jaws and claws, the more elaborate, ceremonial and “polite” the pack’s social arrangements had to become to avoid self-destruction. Any pack that rejected exquisite politeness lost the evolutionary game for keeps; its DNA down the drain. In like manner, international nobility had to invent courtly etiquette and flowery palaver because any suggestion of personal insult drew fiery passion, cold steel and smoking blood. 

Tedious militarists whined long and hard against any check to their killing. They’ve shrieked for a return to the good old days of unlimited gore. During the Korean and Vietnamese Paroxysms, they bewailed orders curtailing their planned assaults against China, Russia and the Warsaw Pact. In vain, they appealed for offensives to “eliminate enemy sanctuaries.” Actually, the ultimate sanctuary of the Viet Cong guerrilla was the command bunker of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Force. 

Later on, French Armageddon enthusiasts indulged in the latest weapon ritual: smashing a coral reef as a nuclear test site so the international brotherhood of weapon scientists could refine its genocide calculations. They were looking for ways to carve the diamond facets of an opponent's military hard points, instead of flattening whole cities as area targets. As if the victims and their allies would have held back in like manner once this mass stupidity had taken a serious turn.

Another interesting weapon myth is the accusation of mass betrayal. Cocky militarists often stretch their nationalistic ambition beyond a realistic assessment of their country’s strengths and weaknesses. As a result, they get their nation stomped. This may be the unintended goal of every weapon manager: to get his unbearably peaceful homies gunned down once and for all. 

Once they’ve gotten their country crushed, they make swan dives for balmy fascist shores and discrete bank accounts. Emerging a decade or so later, their first words are always the same: “We were betrayed!” 

The German Army, bled white and collapsing at the end of World War I (sic), blamed German progressives for their surrender. Hitler’s henchmen accused the long-suffering German people of betraying them during their woeful endgame of the Greater Paroxysm. 

American hawks left Vietnam a smoking ruin, convinced they had defeated the Communists in detail. National Capitalist bitter-enders, they had robbed honest Vietnamese patriots of their hard-fought patrimony and handed it over to the worst Conspirators of Greed they could find.  Those failed to rally the country into a viable whole, as was inevitable given their well-earned unpopularity. Then last ditch Americans ran home, disgusted by their fellow citizens who had “forced” them into defeat. 

As if any outcome other than genocide, disgrace and hysterical evacuation was likely under those circumstances. The only other possibility would have been nuclear war: first across the length and breadth of East Asia, then the entire world.

No matter what those weapon mentors may have told you, bear this in mind. The American lap of the imperialist relay race of war against Vietnam (China, China, China, France, Japan, England, France, America, China) was an exercise in raw genocide – no more, no less – practiced and covered up with Nazi thoroughness. The CIA, the West Point Protective Association, the mighty assassins of President John F. Kennedy that overruled his veto of the war — each has kept busy since, concealing the gut trails of their innocent victims. 

The Chinese government was delighted to stage international Wrestle Mania in Vietnam. They had found there the most unbeatable patriots in Southeast Asia. Those rebels had thumbed their nose at the Chinese for millennia, no matter how many Vietnamese got massacred in the process. How ironic that America’s haughty, ignorant militarists could be driven to stub their toe against those intractable rebels. 

These mass-murderers permitted My Lai (my lie) and a galaxy of similar atrocities to go unreported. They insist that no real American patriot has the right to speak of such things. Those massacres were just the tip of a gore-Slurpee  whipped up under our nose. Only the slightest whiff of its stench has gone up our nostrils, and we are more than ready to dismiss that stench as an aberration. Here it comes again, wafting drone-borne from Iraq, Afghanistan and other dark corners of the World of the Poor with quite predictable blowbacks? Can’t you smell it?

This demon spawn continues to run the United States and through it, the rest of the world. Each new atrocity they organize furthers their Thousand Year Reich of waste, lies and terror. I’m afraid their apotheosis and ultimate defensive tactic will be to blow civilization back to the Cro-Magnon stage or worse, while they remain deeply sheltered from the fallout.

In truth, the Cold War was not fought in the manner we were led to believe: between the Capitalist West and the Communist East for control of the Poor South. Militarist Fat Cats on both sides wanted to swell their weapon budgets, based on their info proletariat’s fear of the Other. But they were terrified of nuking the whole planet and their own households before they had been properly fortified. So they couldn’t engage in total war, only in a few commando raids, aerial and submarine duels, and mini-wars waged among their proxy dictator states. 

No, the real Cold War was fought between the bipartisan psychopaths in charge of the world’s military-industrial complex, versus an international brotherhood of humanists, moderates, believers, small-d democrats and small-s socialists (the proto-Learners of the world) operating as isolated individuals and thus enormously vulnerable. Almost all them were arrested, tortured, shot and silenced as soon as they came into public view, along with their sympathizers and, if necessary, the napalmed armies of their supporters. The military regimes of the extreme Left and Right traded places every decade or so, back and forth across every other nation, to erase every trace of pacifist activists and their progressive politics as they emerged from both political wings of their country. The First and Second Worlds’ military, governmental and media machines crushed the Third World’s peaceful one, without exception or mercy. That was the real Cold War!

I just watched a television series on the origins of WWII (sic). I was struck by the geopolitical similarities between the 1930s and the 2010s. So many wars and rumors of war! 

Everywhere on Earth, fascist tyrants arise, identical to their slimeball predecessors and contemporaries. It’s as if they had studied the same copy of Fascist Dictatorship for Dummies. They strut before more and more numerous supporters who’ve grown reckless from their discontent with current life. More and more of them rage before the camera. They reject any semblance of wisdom until they get their families sacrificed in war. They think they can sign up for organized murder under their Leader’s insane guidance and ease their misery that way. Oh brothers and sisters! What nasty surprises await you! Moderates wander around in circles: uniformly futile, unreliable, lacking conviction and bereft of political power. Modern armaments promise ever more lavish genocide. Corruption flourishes like well-watered black mold (see “fascist tyrants” above). The blood of innocents brims over and no one has the guts to stop  it. Millions more refugees abandon their home every year. Global managerial incompetence.

God, take back the helm!

Welcome to WeaponWorld, where mighty war criminals reign without restraint. Since when? Since written history began.

Until these facts are entered in the official record and those ghouls called out for their atrocities, trust nothing from them. Until then, their hallowed institutions will never do the right thing except by mistake and through revolt. We can’t heave a sigh of relief until the American government unveils those who conspired to assassinate President Kennedy and cover it up. Once the survivors confess to their part or once they die and are officially condemned, but never before. 

The Vietnam War: winnable? Iraq, Afghanistan? Now against Iran? Upcoming wars of corporate convenience, shareholder windfall and national bankruptcy? My ass. Whereas military interventions for purely humanitarian reasons (…, Rwanda, Bosnia, Syria, …) we shamefully let drop.

Modern weapon technologies are scaling themselves down from a horde of costly bludgeons into a handful of horrifically expensive, chrome-steel scalpels. A few orbital satellites, drone squadrons, terrorist cells, government commando squads and NGO guerrilla bands promise to replace swarms of ships, planes, tanks and ICBMs. The bludgeon swarms will be preserved, of course, for reuse whenever that’s more convenient. 

In the recent past, as many as seven thousand Abrams battle tanks were parked in the American desert. American armored units needed three thousand replacements at most. The others were waiting to be sand-choked and worn out in Iraq, no doubt to be replaced once again at our expense.

The only thing the American Army has learned during its recent wars, is how to manage a civil insurrection. I use the word “manage” advisedly, as in tending a campfire. How to prepare one, light it up, fan it hot and keep it going indefinitely by means of selective brutality. 

There are millions of fanatics, here in the USA, who never understood why the Nazis failed. At least twenty percent of the US population never figured that out, or what real war means when it’s fought on your doorstep instead of overseas. To American reactionaries, the worst traitors are moderates in their own ranks and everyone on the other side. That's the insurgency they are preparing to address. 

Unlike the American Civil War – prior to which slavers at the helm of American government stacked the deck in their favor through various political swindles, but lost because the industrial base still belonged to the North – this time, they will control every rag that’s left of the American industrial plant (especially the weapon factories) they’ve otherwise wrecked for decades. Their plan is to prevail over the ruins of America they’ have despised since their predecessors lost the Civil War. Unrepentant slavers …

At least in theory, modern weapons are “surgically” precise: they promise to reduce collateral damage to the biosphere as well as casualties among unarmed combatants. In practice? The Gulf War’s hundreds of thousands of children murdered because deprived of adequate medicine, water and nutrition by the United Nations; national economies devastated and regional ecologies sewerfied across the planet: these illustrate what “minimal collateral damage” entails. The controlled demolition of the Twin Towers, likewise. Downstream consequences, my young Learners. We must pay more attention to unforeseen consequences downstream. 

We need not limit ourselves to bilateral squabbles. In the future, every side will suffer from similar strategic insults. It will become more and more difficult to pin down exactly who did what to whom. This devastation with no return address will justify weapon elites’ collapse of local living standards and civil rights. 

Non-sustainable technologies are not bad per se, but because they cannot be sustained. Inevitably, the price of survival essentials will skyrocket. Each nation’s info elite will confront its disgruntled proletariat led by avenging proto-elites and armed by calculating foreign powers. 

Gleaming in the eyes of orphaned refugees who’ve turned psychotic, drafted on drawing boards for future manufacture, or stockpiled and ready to use against us: these weapons of mass destruction have our names stenciled on them. They need only be issued to millions of itchy-fingered troops – or a handful of pistol-waving fanatics – to rain down on us without letup. 

Could we dodge this death sentence?

IN FRENCH

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COMMENT?  markmulligan@comcast.net