Timothy Wilken
I introduced Joseph Caldwell‘s article Why We Need War, with the following words:
As Bush and Cheney rush to WAR to protect the American way. Many in Europe and elsewhere are having second thoughts. Even the American congress is feeling a sense of peril.
My readers know that I have been calling for a movement towards ONENESS in an attempt to lead humanity out of the adversary-neutral mechanisms that are destroying us and our planet. My calls have mostly gone unheard, and the momentum towards world war three seems unstoppable.
I still have some cards up my sleeve and have not given up, but I worry for this generation. A very very large number of humans could die, and die very soon. Many of them women and children, and perhaps to your surprise, many of them American.
Joseph George Caldwell is a man who has studied our human crisis for some time. Frankly, his writings frighten me. They predict a very dark future. Unfortunately, I am finding less and less argument against his logic.
Things are much worse than they seem. In this his latest treatise, he argues that humanity needs war to protect us from ourselves. That the only hope for any human future and for the rest of life on the planet – the only way to stop human overpopulation and the industrial rape of the Earth – is for most of humanity to die.
I received the following letter from a reader named Alan. His letter is posted in full, but interrupted with my annotations:
Timothy:
I find it truly bizarre that you would go to the length of posting Caldwell’s pro-war manifesto on your website, and on newsgroups. It is one thing to find yourself with “less and less argument against his logic”. It is another thing to widely distribute and promote an article which does not only *predict*, but essentially *advocates* WWIII. Note that I am not taking a position on what Caldwell has said. I am only pointing out the extreme incongruity of your dissemination and promotion of it. Did you not recently strongly advocate total personal disarmament? Are you now saying that you were wrong, and that we should arm and train for the coming war?
The role of CommUnity of Minds in the SynEARTH network is to focus on our human problems. It is open to all points of view. I often do not agree with a featured writer, but solving our problems requires understanding all perspectives. My motto for CommUnity of Minds’s is: “We each view reality from our own unique perspective, only a community of minds can show us the truth.”
I am strongly against war as I have written here: Beyond War. I am for a powerful form of disarmament that could be accomplished using a new mechanism I call “synergic containment“. I am still working on a full description of that mechanism for future publication.
My conclusion from reading of Caldwell’s treatise is that war is unwinnable. I believe Caldwell thinks that this unwinnablility is good, since total war will stop humanity’s attack on biodiversity and the planet.
The unwinnablity of modern war, is what the present advocates miss.
Progress + warfare = human extinction
We are Time-binders and the mark of human power is everywhere. When knowledge is incorporated into matter-energy, it becomes a tool. As Andrew J. Galambos explained:
“Humans develop evermore powerful knowledge and therefore evermore powerful tools. When tools are used to harm other humans they are called weapons. Since human knowledge can grow without limit then tools themselves can be made without limit. And limitless tools can will produce limitless weapons.”
And, limitless weapons (progress) combined with leveraged adversity (warfare) must by all definitions and understanding of science produce human extinction.
Bush and Cheney would not be so strongly advocating war against Iraq, if they realized that they couldn’t win. There are under the mistaken impression that America won the Gulf war in 1991. We didn’t. If we had, why would we need to refight it in 2002? If we, the western nations, had won World War I, why would there be any need to fight World War II? And, if the west won World War II, why would there now be need for World War III?
I found Caldwell’s piece to be provocative, and I sense that there is some truth in what he says, even if his case is weak. He makes a lot of bald assertions, but does not do enough documentation or persuasion. Both your text and his have interesting incoherences, as though written by individuals confused as to how they ended up saying what they are now saying. For example, he gives a long quote from Toynbee’s “The Suicidalness of Militarism” which seems perfectly inconsistent with his thesis. He never explains how this inevitable great war would reduce the population to the dramatic extent that he thinks is necessary (wars, even the bloodiest ones, seldom have much effect on population).
George W. Bush surrounds himself with “expert advisors” then listens and does what they say. It doesn’t matter what the rest of the world thinks. He his doing what is “right”. We will see the “truth” in the long run. Many of these advisors are “neo-hawks” and it is reported that they are advocating the use of nuclear weapons. But would the use of nuclear weapons result in a limited war? Certainly, Caldwell is not talking about a limited war. He is talking about world war three.
In world war II, only one of the combatants, America had nuclear weapons, and that combatant had only three or perhaps four. One was used to test the prototype in New Mexico. Two were dropped on Japan, and the fourth one was not used.
The Hiroshima blast destroyed more than 10 sq km (4 sq mi) of the city, completely destroying 68 percent of Hiroshima´s buildings, another 24 percent were damaged. Nearly 130,000 people were killed; more than 60,000 were incinerated almost instantaneously in a tremendous fireball. In Nagasaki one-third of the city was destroyed and nearly 66,000 people were killed. This was in 1945.
Since then, humanity has made a lot of progress. Today the five acknowledged nuclear powers possess about 31,000 nuclear warheads.These weapons are much more powerful and can be delivered anywhere on Earth with the touch of a button.
|
Country |
1945 |
1955 |
1965 |
1975 |
1985 |
1995 |
2000 |
|
United States |
2 |
2,280 |
32,400 |
28,100 |
23,500 |
14,000 |
10,500 |
|
Russia/USSR |
0 |
200 |
6,300 |
23,500 |
44,000 |
28,000 |
20,000 |
|
United Kingdom |
0 |
10 |
310 |
350 |
300 |
300 |
185 |
|
France |
0 |
0 |
32 |
188 |
359 |
500 |
450 |
|
China |
0 |
0 |
5 |
185 |
426 |
400 |
450 |
|
Totals |
2 |
2,490 |
39,047 |
52,323 |
68,585 |
43,200 |
31,535 |
India and Pakistan have not “formally” placed their nuclear arsenal on a delivery system. Israel is not listed here, but it is known they have a least 100 weapons. It is rumored that Egypt still has 6 (loaned to it by the Soviet Union during an earlier Egyptian/Israeli War) and never returned. Egypt is even today actively seeking nuclear weapons. (link)
Iraq, Iran and Libya are also actively seeking weapons. And, let us not forget North Korea. And, even Japan has recently hinted that if they chose they could make nuclear weapons in very short order.
Before its collapse in 1991, the Soviet Union had more than 27,000 nuclear weapons and enough weapons-grade plutonium and uranium on hand to triple that number. Since then, severe economic distress, rampant crime, and widespread corruption in Russia and other former Soviet countries have fed concerns in the West about loose nukes, underpaid nuclear scientists, and the smuggling of nuclear materials. And security at Russia´s nuclear storage sites remains worrisome; only 40 percent of them are up to U.S. security standards. (link)
This is why I fear that any use nuclear weapons could open “pandora’s box” and produce very high civilian counts. Caldwell thinks that would be good for non-human life and the planet. I don’t agree.
Some Bush’s advisors have proposed hitting the entire middle east, Iraq, Iran, Egypt, and Syria with a nuclear strike all on the same day. Taking out the capitals of all of those nation states simultaneously. This would be the best way to protect the oil. And don’t forget that is why we are there. Another scenario would be get a good conventional war going, and then when Iraq hits Israel, wait for Prime Minister Ariel SHARON to take out the middle east with his 100 nuclear weapons. I think he would be glad to do it. He only needs the justification.
You say that “Things are much worse than they seem.” Perhaps. But how would one know? How do YOU know?
I am referring to the state of the planet. In our pursuit of unlimited growth and profits, we are destroying the planet. We are fouling our own nest. The signs of this are the loss of biodiversity, the degradation of air, water, soil, plant and animal life. The increasing disease states through out the world, but especially in Africa, Asia, and South America. See: Its Much Worse Than It Appears, Did you know, CRISIS, Problem #1, Scientists Speak, Global Warming, & Die Off .
You do not give details; you only imply that Caldwell’s (pro-war) view is correct. (Which it MAY BE; that’s not my point.) Caldwell’s view is that war is not only inevitable, but that it is *fundamentally good and wholesome*. Is this your view, also?
NO! I am a synergist. I want us to put away war and act responsibly.
Synergists believe there is enough for everyone, but only if we work together and act responsibly. They believe humans are interdependent and can only obtain sufficiency by working together as community. Synergists best understand the language of love.
But, to be successful in our present world, the synergist must understand all three languages and know when to use them. Synergists must sometimes use the language of force, and sometimes the language of money, it depends on whom they are talking to. However, when synergists are seeking allies–when synergists are seeking to build community–they must speak the language of love.
You can read synergic alternatives to the Armageddon predicted by Joseph Caldwell in the following articles: ONENESS, A Synergic Future, SYNOCRACY, ORTEGRITY , GIFTegrity , Solutions #1, Chaordic Design Process, Vision for a Synergic Transition
Note too that I AM NOT CRITICIZING YOU. Perhaps the opposite of that, even. I suspect that in reading Caldwell’s piece you might finally have found yourself (as I once found myself) questioning assumptions long unquestioned—assumptions internalized from a lifetime of exposure to mainstream media, schools, religions, etc. You might have found yourself wondering, perhaps for the first time ever, if the “ideals” of peace and non-violence—which we’ve been spoon-fed and which we swallowed as good liberals and subjects of liberal indoctrination—may not be as they are represented. That there might be a whole other side to things, and that some of the things we take as axiomatic might be precisely wrong. MIGHT. PERHAPS. I really do not have all this figured out yet. But perhaps that is what happened to you, and what precipitated the very odd event of your posting, with apparent approval, Caldwell’s tract. And in my view, anything which causes the questioning of long-unquestioned assumptions is almost necessarily good. I only wish that you had given a little more detail as to the “inner journey” that resulted in your being moved to post that article.
Winston Churchill is credited with saying, “Before age 30, if you are not a liberal, you don’t have a heart. After age 30, if you are not a conservative, you don’t have a brain.”
I think life is more complicated than this. Synergists choose to work together and speak the language of love. But they must also act responsibly. I did not post Caldwell’s article to promote it. I posted it as a tool to wake up humanity to the growing dangers we face. I am afraid we are nearing a point of no return. Any war will only make things worse for humans. A war like Caldwell envisions will create a dark age that may well eclipse humanity.
FYI, I am placing the Caldwell item in a file that I have with the heading “Might is Right; In Praise of War and Violence”. Therein, Caldwell will be in the company of fascists, Nazis, and other “Will to Power” types whose writings are nearly indistinguishable from his.
I think his writing is a little different from theirs. The fascists and Nazis thought that they could win. Caldwell predicts the human species will be reduced in numbers to less than 500 million, perhaps to less than 10 million. While Caldwell seems to think this might be winning, (for biodiversity and the planet) I certainly don’t. And I expect such a scenario could just as easily end with zero humans left.
Thank you Alan, for your intelligent and thoughtful letter and thanks for sharing the following clips and links with me.
Timothy Wilken
A FEW QUOTATIONS ON WAR AND VIOLENCE (that Caldwell missed, I guess)
“A prolonged peace favors the predominance of a more commercial spirit, and with it a debasing self-interest, cowardice, and effeminacy and tends to degrade the character of the nation.” –Immanuel Kant
Eternal peace is a dream, and not even a beautiful one. War is part of God’s world order. In it are developed the noblest virtues of man: courage, abnegation, dutifulness and self-sacrifice. Without war the world would sink into materialism.—Helmuth von Moltke, WWI general
War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.—John Stuart Mill
“Civil war is a terrible crucible through which to pass character; the dross drops away from the pure metal at the first touch of the fire.”—Rear Admiral Raphael Semmes, Confederate States Navy
“It is strange that the more obstinately Humanity runs away from the reality of war, the more terrible and inhumane the wars get, and the more deeply Humanity goes down the Spiral of Horror into Vileness.”—Alexander Dugin
“Love of war stems from the union, deep in the core of our being, between sex and destruction, beauty and horror, love and death… the closest thing to childbirth for women: the initiation into the power of life and death… The love of destruction and killing in war stems from that boyhood fantasy of war as a game… Men love war for love and war are at the core of man. We must love one another or die. **To overcome death, our love for peace, for life itself, must be greater than we think possible, greater even than we can imagine.**—William Broyles, Jr., Vietnam veteran, in “Why Men Love War,” Esquire, 11/84
“Any people can have body peace if they will sell their souls for it. Peace is a condition, not an end. It is a condition our souls can live with only if our souls and minds are free. Unless you will buy peace for your body with the most violent of war: murder of your soul.”—Geronimo (Watch for Me On the Mountain, pg 130)
When individual thinkers and idealists talk of peace, as they have done since time immemorial, the effect is negligible. But when whole peoples become pacifistic it is a symptom of senility. Strong and unspent races are not pacifistic. To adopt such a position is to abandon the future, for the pacifist ideal is a terminal condition that is contrary to the basic facts of existence. As long as man continues to evolve, there will be wars.—Oswald Spengler
“War, stress or conflict is to the man what maternity is to the woman. I do not believe in perpetual peace; not only do I not believe in it but I find it depressing and a negation of all the fundamental virtues of man.”—Mussolini
PS: Some other things I found relevant to this topic:
From the Atlantic, June 2000
The Return of Ancient Times: Why the warrior politics of the twenty-first century will demand a pagan ethos
by Robert D. Kaplan
“Western admirers of Rabin and Hussein prefer to forget their ruthlessness. But Niccolò Machiavelli would have understood that such tactics were central to their virtue. In an imperfect world, Machiavelli wrote, good men bent on doing good must learn how to be bad. And in this world virtue has much less to do with individual perfection than with political results. By substituting pagan for Christian virtue, Machiavelli explained better than any political scientist today how Rabin and Hussein could become what they were. There is nothing amoral about Machiavelli’s pagan virtue either. The late Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin observed that Machiavelli’s values may not be Christian but they are moral. Berlin implied that they are the Periclean and Aristotelian values of the ancient polis—values that secure a stable political community.”
“The uncomfortable classical truths enunciated in the fifth century B.C. by the historian Thucydides, revived by Machiavelli, and imbibed by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison—truths such as Morality and patriotism can best be obtained through self-interest; Conflict is inherent in the human condition; The law of nature precludes a republic of perfect virtue and demands instead a balance of forces among men and groups—are often forgotten. The American elite has come to believe that the solution for humanity is to adopt a few universally applicable remedies, such as democracy, respect for minority rights, and free-market capitalism. Whether liberals or neoconservatives, many of those who came of age in the 1960s have trouble dealing with such facts as national characteristics ingrained by historical and geographic circumstance, and violence for its own sake.”
“As distasteful as the ideas of Machiavelli and Hobbes may seem to the contemporary mind, those two philosophers invented the modern state. They saw that all men needed security in order to acquire material possessions, and that a bureaucratic organ was required to regulate the struggle for acquisition peacefully and impartially. The aim of such an organ was never to seek the highest good, only the common good.”
“The Founding Fathers departed from Machiavelli in placing more faith in ordinary people, but they did adhere to his ideas of pagan virtue. Recognizing that faction and struggle are basic to the human condition, they substituted the arenas of party politics and the marketplace for actual battlefields.”
Also see the Atlantic archives:
“Four Star Generalists,” by Robert D. Kaplan (October 1999) Military history pierces the philosophical fog that often surrounds the other humanities.
“Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism,” by Robert D. Kaplan (June 1999) “What Kissinger has always offered is a grimly persuasive view of the human condition.”
“And Now for the News,” by Robert D. Kaplan (March 1997) The disturbing freshness of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall.
Elsewhere on the Web Links to related material on other Web sites.
Machiavelli Online — General information about Machiavelli, the text of some of his writings, and links to related sites. Posted by a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania.