Illustrative Image
Written by Edward Curtin. Originally published on GlobalResearch
Social psychosis is widespread. In the words of the British psychiatrist, R. D. Laing, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.”
He was not referring to raving, drooling, hitting-your-head-against-the-wall lunacy but a taken-for-granted acceptance of a world long teetering on the edge of nuclear extinction, to take the most extreme example, but surely only one of many. The insouciant acceptance and support of psychotic rulers who promote first-strike nuclear war is very common. First strike nuclear policy is United States policy.
I recently wrote an article about the dangers of the fourteen U.S. Trident submarines. These subs constantly cruise under the oceans carrying 3,360 nuclear warheads equivalent to 134,400 Hiroshima bombs. All are on first strike triggers. And of course these are supplemented by all the land and air based nukes. My point was not very complicated: now that the United States government has abrogated all nuclear weapons treaties and continues to escalate its war against Russia in Ukraine, we are closer to nuclear annihilation than ever before.
This conclusion is shared by many esteemed thinkers such as the late Daniel Ellsberg who died on June 16, 2023 and whose 2017 book The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, makes clear that nuclear war, waged intentionally or by mistake or accident, is very possible. In the months before he died, he warned that this is now especially true with the situation in Ukraine and the U.S. provocations against China.
The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal recently addressed the UN Security Council on the danger of U.S. actions in Ukraine and asked:
Will we see another Douma deception, but this time in Zaporizhzhia?
Why are we doing this? Why are we tempting nuclear annihilation by flooding Ukraine with advanced weapons and sabotaging negotiations at every turn?
Finian Cunningham has just raised the specter of a thermonuclear catastrophe initiated by a U.S./Ukrainian false flag attack on the Zaporozhye Nuclear Power Plant.
So my article was in no way unusual, except for my concentration on the Trident submarines.
When, against my better judgment, I read some commentators’ responses to my piece at a few websites where my article was posted, I was taken aback when I read the following [all emphases are mine]:
“Like many other boomers, Edward J Curtin Jr is caught up in ‘nuclear terror’ … whereas on 4chan you see that a large portion of the young generation has come to accept the massive evidence that Hiroshima & Nagasaki were chemically firebombed like Tokyo, and ‘nuclear weapons’ most likely do not exist at all. The 10 alleged ‘nuclear powers’ have had reasons to hoax together, just like the global collusion on ‘covid’ & ‘vaccines’.
So, the point is? Subs with nukes have been cruising around the world’s oceans for over 60 years, back to the time when they tried to scare us with the Cuban missile crisis. I was on a fast attack sub during the Vietnam war, friend of mine got boomer duty, which is what they call the ones that carry the missiles. They’re there for show, they aren’t going to use them. Yes, they should be banned internationally, just in case. But as with the Nuremberg trials and principles, that’s not nearly enough. We’re going to need to create our own New World Order
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper
I vote for the bang!
The nuke is exaggerated. Reality is that too many will survive a nuclear WWIII.
There will still be too many useless eaters and psychos left in the underground bunkers no matter how many nukes we drop. Like Chernobyl it will only develop to paradises for animals, natives and homeless on food stamps, while we the exceptionals will suffer from an underground life for 50 years without seeing natural light .
A global virus and for double insurance a coupled vaxx, will be a much more effective tool to clean the filth and double shareholders profit..
Dear Ed the sea monsters about as real as nukes.
Another one of the “elites” hoaxes.”
To hear that there are no nuclear weapons and never were; to learn that some in their embrace of nihilism hope for a nuclear holocaust; to read that nuclear weapons are never going to be used because they only exist for show – well, this at least confirmed my suspicion that many who comment on articles are either bonkers or trolls or both.
Some probably have nothing better to do than inform writers how wrong they are. It frightened me. It made me wonder how many of the millions of silent ones think similarly or have come to embrace hopelessness as a way of life – the feeling that they have no power because that has been drilled into them from birth. I have long thought that cultural normality can be understood as the use of one’s freedom to create a prison, a cell in which one can convince oneself that one is safe because the authorities have established a sacred umbrella to protect one from an apocalyptic hard rain that they never think is going to fall.
The Pew Research Center recently surveyed the American public on their sixteen greatest fears. Nuclear war was not one them.
It was as if nuclear weapons did not exist, as if they have been buried in the cellar of public awareness. As if Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Newman’s motto was the national motto: “What? Me worry?” No doubt more Americans are aware of the gross public spectacle of Joey Chestnut stuffing his mouth with sixty-five hot dogs in ten minutes than they are of the Biden administration’s insane escalation toward nuclear war in Ukraine. We live in Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle.”
Although he was writing years ago, Ronald Laing’s words sound ironically prescient today after so many years of endless propaganda, the destruction of human experience resulting in destructive behavior, and the relentless diminishment of human beings to the status of machines:
At this moment in history, we are all caught in the hell of frenetic passivity. We find ourselves threatened by extermination that will be reciprocal, that no one wishes, that everyone fears, that may just happen to us ‘because’ no one knows how to stop it. There is one possibility of doing so if we can understand the structure of this alienation of ourselves from our experience, our experience from our deeds, our deeds from human authorship. Everyone will be carrying out orders. Where do they come from? Always from elsewhere. Is it still possible to reconstitute our destiny out of the hellish and inhuman fatality?
That is the key question now that more than fifty years have elapsed since Laing penned those words in his now classic book, The Politics of Experience(isbn.nu). He said then, which is exponentially truer today, that “machines are already becoming better at communicating with each other than human beings with each other.” Talking about deep things has become passé for so many.
If we don’t start worrying and unlove the machines, we are doomed sooner or later. Sooner is probable. Nuclear weapons are very real. They are poised and ready to fly.
If we continue to live in denial of the madness of those who provoke their use while calmly promoting first-strike policies as the U.S. government does, we are worse than fools. We are suicidal.
As Daniel Ellsberg told us, “Don’t wait ‘till the bombs are actually falling.” That will be too late. There is no doubt that before a nuclear war can happen, we must go insane, normally so.
Let’s make the few protest voices in the wilderness the cries of hundreds of millions:
End nuclear weapons now before they end us.
Stop escalating the war in Ukraine now.
Make peace with Russia and China now.
“There is such a thing as being too late,” Martin Luther King, Jr. told us on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was assassinated in a U.S. government plot.
“We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation.”
This article was originally published on the author’s blog site, Behind the Curtain.
Edward Curtin is a prominent author, researcher and sociologist based in Western Massachusetts. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
certainly did not help when china and india made deal$ with the american $atan 21 years ago after (3 building 2 planes) that bought their $ilence in exchange for american jobs and manufacturing exported… and a revolving door to h1-b citizenship on “tap”… while russia also stayed silent with the “red-ist of lines” drawn after the maidan coup in 2014 doing “nothing” then!…
you could easily argue that all of them are guilty of not worrying enough about “them”!…
because had china and india not made those deal$ with yankee d00dle $atan in exchange for their tacit approval of the annihilation of afghanistan and iraq… followed by russia taking profound steps to protect the eastern donbas after the maidan coup… this world would be a far better and safer place than it is right now!
what do you suggest people do? vote harder?
better to die in nuclear war than live in a world of degenerates.
very well said, ‘imho’.
does anyone actually read the comments, i certainly don’t, i just scroll past and read comments from real people
love them or hate them, it’s hard to see how the doctrine of mutually assured destruction does not continue to apply and thus it’s hard to believe that anyone with a finger on the button would ever push it.
every human being should listen to the mlk speech from april 4 1967 as he declares for all time that his own government is the perpetrator of the most violence upon the earth. one year exactly to the hour he gave that speech those same people killed him. wake up
us actually understand the issue and is trying to stay away from direct confrontation with russia. the psychos who do not want to understand the situation are in london, unfortunately with the 5 eyes ++ and jiew/masson network, they indeed have international reach.. it would take something like 100 assassinations worldwide to remove the key movers.. the head of the hydra would be next ..
this is a true nest of mentally retarded conspirators, less brain than chickens
wakey wokey bakey bokey takey tokey yawn…nookers have been around since the 40’s and we’re still here. problem witrh nookers is, its a weapon you cant really use. journas like to hype nookers to try and scare people, but if you read about mad and detente etc. then you understand whats up and politicians and their garbage threatening the world, and the world ignoring their nookergandas…blessed be one and all
anybody conversing with average westerners about world affairs will tell you, these people are the most dumbed down, gullible people in the world
how i learned to stop worrying and love the bomb
seems to me that civilizations have a life span. they start out creative but eventually bad ideas and bad practices become so entrenched that they cannot be dislodged from within. corruption inevitably leads to dysfunction until some outside force easily brings them down.
dr. strangelove here…martin luther king (mlk) was psyop , ‘mlk’ is acronym for the molok/molech god humans are sacrificed to just as ‘blm’ is for balaam another name for same. so humans are going to git slaughtered like it or not nukes or not, its all already planned out and all sides are doing same homage. so love it!!
i grew up as a teen in the 80’s. they were depressive as hell, as we all believed that ww3 could happen any moment. it was only after the ussr fell that the fear of nuclear war started to go away. people have forgotten and grown up without that fear. what is currently happening in the ukraine would not be encouraged as massive anti-war rallies would take place in the west out of fear of nuclear war.
there is a book called death object: exploding the nuclear weapons hoax book by akio nakatani that posits nuclear weapons are a deception. have you heard of it?
i would like to hear your opinion of it if you have.
i suspect your commenter may be familiar with it.
thanks
you should do something with these bots, trolls or whoever is writing those stupid and offensive “comments”. some spam control bot or suppress the comments section, in this way is operating is useless. nobody will waste his/her time browsing this shit.