Preventing World War III, Part 2

Has Our Whole World Gone Mad?

Last week, just before the Doomsday Clock was to be reset, I wrote “Preventing World War III,” of which this is “Part 2.”  It is a subtheme from the “Ultimate Violence” I have been writing about, as one of the principal concerns of our time.  The fear of having a president, who is also the commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military, who we immediately recognized had severe mental defects is the reason some of the most renowned mental health experts in the country quickly assembled for the Yale conference in early 2017 and then published our bestselling public-service book later that year.

Now, seven years later, with the menace of Donald Trump returning to the presidency, and with our world quite possibly careening toward global war, the threat of “Ultimate Violence” is considerably greater and more imminent.  What can be considered to be precursor Great Power “proxy wars” are already underway in Europe, the Middle East, and the Pacific.  Talk of WWIII is not only omnipresent, as I highlighted last week, but leaders in major countries, especially in Europe and Russia, are publicly warning, threatening, and even declaring that they expect that outcome.  I wrote last week: “It is neither rational nor sane to be preparing for WWIII, and yet that is precisely what is happening right now.”

And as I had feared and predicted earlier this month in my Newsletter, “Doomsday Clock 2024,” the official keepers of the metaphorical Clock put on a badly produced and inept non-ceremony last Tuesday, refusing to advance the Clock!  This, even though throughout the world fear of, and preparations for, World War III had considerably increased.  With all of their staff, advisers, supporters, and establishment funding—a budget of more than 4 million dollars yearly—the Bulletin bungled badly (they have even since covered up the botched broadcast with an edited version online), and they only allowed their small, like-minded bunch who “don’t like to rock the boat” to speak: two Washington insiders and a handful of U.S. professors.  Though in this day and age, they could and should have easily had the input and involvement from persons throughout the world, they only brought on one person from India, relegating him to dealing only with climate issues, with no mention at all of the serious danger of nuclear war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.  Then they added a little Bill Nye, “the Science Guy,” to provide a little entertainment, stardom, and levity—but Nye could only add to the bumbling, being neither serious nor humorous.

Furthermore, even with all of their staff, funding, establishment prestige, and promotion, and despite the overwhelming worldwide importance of preventing WWIII, their YouTube live broadcast had only some 3500 people watching when they began, a number that steadily dwindled throughout.  In fact, an hour later, most viewers seemed to be bored, have lost interest, or have deserted, leaving just a few hundred.  If the Doomsday Clock, whose very raison d’être is to prevent WWIII, is not truly serious about its mission—because it has become more a coverup operation—who can properly mobilize popular will?

With this year still getting going, I would like again to thank those of you who are following me here, and who are subscribing to my Newsletter and helping to make it possible for me to continue on my own.  Substack has indeed made it possible for some of us, who are blocked in one way or another because we have strayed from the corporate mainstream media, in our attempt to inform and to educate the public as best we can.  Even the most substantial, respected, and honored journalists such as Seymour Hersh or Christopher Hedges are now essentially shunned for knowing too much and informing us all too honestly.  

Even before the New Hampshire primary, Hersh wrote in his Substack:

“The Republican nominee will be Donald Trump, unless he is stopped by the courts, and at this point the odds are that he, if untethered, will sweep to victory this November and could bring the House and Senate with him.”

Few voices have so clearly echoed my warnings about Trump and what I have come to call, “Trump Contagion,” in its full manifestation!

And Hedges has recently written in his Substack:

“Biden has always been an ardent militarist—he was calling for war with Iraq five years before the U.S. invaded.  He built his political career [on] draconian laws that more than doubled the U.S. prison population, militarized the police and pushed through drug laws that saw people incarcerated for life without parole.”

That said, as much as the Biden foreign policy team has become aligned with the “military-industrial-CIA” imperialists, these are not matters of mental unfitness.  These are dangerous ideologies, such as militarism and American exceptionalism.  It is far, far more frightening to imagine Donald Trump and his appointees being in charge of American foreign policy again, as Hersh and I believe us to be on course.  We need only look back at his last presidency, when supposedly “no wars were started,” but extinction-level self-destructiveness began in terms of disintegration of the World Order, geopolitical destablization, emboldening of rogue nations, weakening of the United States, and slaughter of over a million Americans on our own soil.  We are now ripe for self-annihilation as a nation and a species, in ways we could have never imagined before him.

A startling conclusion from a major recent study revealed the likely consequences of a full-scale nuclear WWIII.  Many tens, maybe hundreds, of millions would immediately die.  But that would pale with the consequences in the months and years ahead when more than half of the human race, five billion persons, would perish from radiation, disease, and starvation.  Humanity has never before faced such destruction of civilization, that the horrendous radiation and climatic impact on the planet would be incalculable and irreversible.  Even if there were “only” to be a “limited” nuclear war, for instance between India and Pakistan, not only those countries would be devastated, but in fact all of humanity would terribly suffer with an estimated one in five humans dying of radiation, disease, world chaos, and starvation in the immediate subsequent years.  We must reckon with the fact that this is not just an election; we cannot afford another unfit presidency,