‘World War III Has Already Begun’

How a Mad, Military-Industrial-CIA Complex Thinks

Daniel Ellsberg recently died.  Our government was once determined to lock him up forever for releasing “The Pentagon Papers,” so as to create so much fear that no one else would ever do what he had done.

Years before Ellsberg, Robert Oppenheimer—the singularly most important person tasked with urgently developing the atomic bomb—when he decided that he must use his unique stature and credibility to prevent nuclear war and World War III, our government severely threatened him, stripped him of all his positions, and declared him a Soviet sympathizer and a traitor.  In his last years, in great despair, Oppenheimer fled with his family into remote exile in the Virgin Islands, both to escape the ostracism and to help his family survive the catastrophic nuclear war he foresaw.

That full-scale global thermonuclear war, the anticipated World War III Armageddon, has not as yet come to be, although the Doomsday Clock Oppenheimer helped to create, and Ellsberg in later years endorsed, is now closer to terminal Midnight than it has ever been since its creation in 1946.  In the interim, since World War II, catastrophic regional “proxy wars” have taken place, killing millions in many countries.  The secret American army known as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has been tasked with overseeing these proxy wars as well as many covert wars, assassinations, coups, “regime changes” (the real reason for the migration crisis from South America), and media control.  Additionally, our country has also championed increasingly destructive economic bombs, colloquially known as “sanctions”, which have further increased human suffering, global disparities and refugee crisis, and many more millions of avoidable human deaths.

So, why am I stating that “World War III has already begun”?  It is actually not I who am saying this.  This is what Ukraine’s security chief declared on September 5, 2023, alongside none other than one of the most senior American officials, a retired four-star general who has also served as head of the CIA, who was endorsing, concurring, and legitimizing him.

“If somebody thinks that World War III hasn’t started then it’s a huge mistake. It has already begun.  It has been underway in a hybrid period for some time and has now entered an active phase.”

These are the precise words of Aleksey Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, the Ukrainian equivalent of the position Henry Kissinger held in the White House long ago.  Next to him was David Petraeus—now retired but clearly still fronting for the American government as well as the Pentagon and the CIA—who chimed in by saying: “I haven’t seen anything like it since World War II.”

Our nation is thus being led into, largely without knowledge, (and being conditioned to accept) an all-out World War, by the very institutions that may have been involved in the assassination of a president intent on curbing nuclear arms.  Partly to blame is our corporate media, which are too busy propagating transient and frivolous matters, having been designed to keep Americans preoccupied with “bread and circuses.”

When I wrote my textbook, Violence, in 2014 (it took another five years to publish because of a family illness), I highlighted humanity’s “collective suicidality”—exemplified in a triad of dangers: structural violence, environmental violence, and nuclear violence.

As a result, our country, still in the lead for the rest of humanity, seems to be in some kind of denial trance: we are either uninformed about what is really happening or inured to such alarming news as, “World War III has already begun!”  We are thus getting further absorbed into “the Ultimate Violence” I have been warning against, with the Doomsday Clock ticking faster and louder than ever toward Armageddon.

Recently in the United States, major historic natural disasters have taken place in Hawaii and Florida, and there has been an outpouring of sympathy and support for those who have lost their lives, their homes, and their livelihoods.  In many countries, there are intense, unprecedented wild fires, more than ever before.  Yet, the little lifestyle adjustments that are necessary to prevent such disasters, we do not do.

In terms of scale, World War III, even in a limited form, would instantaneously unleash calamities that are thousands, even millions, of times greater—and as my late friend Bernard Lown had shown, all the doctors and the hospitals in the world would not be able to help the victims….  Indeed, the living would envy the dead, as they would find the survivors suffering horrible deaths from radiation and starvation, when organized human civilization will have been destroyed. 

Our own country used the only two atomic bombs deployed in war, within days of their creation, against Japanese cities when that country was already defeated.  Not just Oppenheimer but most of the senior military generals made dire warnings against their use.  Now, our world has many thousands of super nuclear weapons immensely more powerful than those “mini” bombs, with near-instant and unstoppable delivery systems.  And, indeed, every day “war games” are being played on how and when to use these weapons to “win” World War III!  Soon, there will be no escape, as the human-caused extinction of human civilization takes place….

Albert Einstein was asked in an interview: “If you have one hour to save the world, how would you spend that hour?”  He replied: “I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and then five minutes solving it.”  In other words, he would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once he knew the proper question, he could solve the problem in less than five minutes!  This applies equally on a daily basis. If we took fifty-five minutes out of each hour pondering the major questions of our world, instead of spending all of the sixty minutes mindlessly building and feverishly maintaining what is no longer tenable—while expending extra effort trying to propagandize that this is the only way—then we just might find a real solution.  Then, the solution would be simple, achievable in five minutes.