{"id":75368,"date":"2016-06-20T12:00:55","date_gmt":"2016-06-20T11:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=75368"},"modified":"2016-06-19T17:18:12","modified_gmt":"2016-06-19T16:18:12","slug":"the-end-of-m-a-d-the-beginning-of-madness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/06\/the-end-of-m-a-d-the-beginning-of-madness\/","title":{"rendered":"The End of M.A.D. \u2014 The Beginning of Madness"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"armas-nucleares-4.jpg_1718483346<\/a><\/p>\n

7 Jun 2016 – <\/em>John Helmer, who explains military-strategic matters better and more knowledgeably than just about anyone, headlined on May 30th, \u201cThe Red Line Crossed, In the Cross-Hairs, At Trigger Point\u201d<\/a>, and he opened:<\/p>\n

First there was the red-line announcement. On Friday <\/em>[May 27th] in Athens there was the cross-hairs statement. By the month of October, the month before the US presidential election, there will be the trigger point.<\/em><\/p>\n

The US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies are going to war with Russia, accelerating the inevitability that Russia will strike in self-defence. This is what the first and second statements by President Vladimir Putin warn. There will be no statement of warning.<\/em><\/p>\n

News media in the West treat any such report \u2014 that Russia might be placed into a situation in which a blitz nuclear attack against the West would (and maybe even will) be Russia\u2019s rational response to Western operations to surround Russia with hostile forces on its borders \u2014 as if there\u2019s something kooky about any such opinion:<\/em> they treat it as if the West weren\u2019t ruled by people who are that<\/em> evil, as if recognizing such evil in a ruler in the West is to be prohibited (especially if that ruler is America\u2019s President, instead of, for example, Turkey\u2019s President, whom apparently one is allowed to impute to be evil). On the present occasion, however, they should pay close attention to the situation Helmer describes, and they should report about the matter, while there might still be time enough to avert an unimaginable catastrophe, which (as Helmer explains in detail) could quite possibly happen this year.<\/p>\n

The West is in stark reality-denial. Whereas the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, between JFK and Khrushchev, was accompanied by an appropriate public fear on both sides, the even more dangerous situation this time<\/em>, between Putin and Obama, elicits such fear only<\/em> among the Russian people, not at all among Americans and other Westerners.<\/p>\n

Mutually Assured Destruction, or M.A.D., isn\u2019t only a reality in a nuclearly armed multipolar world, but it is also, and equally importantly, also a mass-psychology<\/em>, of belief that there cannot be any winner of a nuclear war \u2014 that (especially regarding a nuclear conflict between the two nuclear superpowers) any nuclear war will destroy the planet we all share. This sense of a shared fate on both sides, is central to M.A.D., as what it was<\/em> \u2014 the foundation-stone of the post-world-war era, the era in which existed the longest extended period without a global war, since the advent of global war in 1914.<\/p>\n

That era is, tragically, now over.<\/p>\n

M.A.D. ended as a mass-psychology in the West, but not in the East \u2014 not in Russia, and not in any other of the world\u2019s free nations, otherwise known as the independent<\/em> nations (the nations that aren\u2019t<\/em> under the control of the U.S. aristocracy and of any of the aristocracies that are allied to that aristocracy \u2014 nor of any other foreign<\/em> nation\u2019s aristocracy), or also called the \u201cBRICS\u201d nations (which just recently lost its \u201cB\u201d when Brazil underwent a coup<\/a>, which changed Brazil to becoming now a satellite of the U.S., which will probably (if nuclear war is averted) then be \u2018rescued\u2019 by IMF loans that will increasingly strip the Brazilian public and leave them with even lower living-standards and even deeper indebtedness, which will increasingly be owed to foreign<\/em> lenders).<\/p>\n

M.A.D. resulted from the balance that existed when America\u2019s NATO alliance was counterbalanced by the USSR\u2019s Warsaw Pact alliance. Therefore, the very idea of nuclear \u2018conquest\u2019, in a military sense, was simply assumed to be impractical, not only by the publics<\/em> on both sides, but (at least as crucially) by the two opposed aristocracies<\/em>, West versus East, U.S.-allied versus U.S.S.R.-allied.<\/p>\n

The end result of\u00a0U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush\u2019s secret strategy, in 1990-1991, of terminating that M.A.D. by his regime\u2019s lying so as to fool Gorbachev to terminate the USSR and its Warsaw Pact while Gorbachev (and then his successor Yeltsin) allowed continuation and even expansion of NATO<\/a>, has become, in the West, a total lack of the near-hysteria of mutual fear of nuclear annihilation that had existed in both the West and the East during the Cold War, and its replacement now by a nonchalant West and an increasingly terrified East, as the West is making preparations for\u00a0what the U.S. aristocracy seems increasingly to believe to be a previously unprecedented situation, in which the U.S. aristocracy and its allied stooge-aristocracies (in Europe, Japan, and Australia) can emerge as actual victors after a nuclear war<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Thus, in the West, there is no hysteria, such as once existed, for everyone to build his\/her own family bomb-shelter, even as the West now is tightening its nuclear noose around the Russians\u2019 collective neck. Instead, that previous fear and sometimes even hysteria, has been replaced by a situation in which only some individuals (no one knows whom nor how many) from the West\u2019s aristocracies, have purchased\u00a0elaborate hardened underground luxurious bunkers<\/a>,\u00a0in preparation for their increasingly likely future existences in\u00a0a presumed post nuclear-holocaust world<\/a>, and meanwhile the Western masses<\/em> are not at all outraged at their being left fully exposed with no bunkers at all; and, the reason they\u2019re not, is that they believe that, as their country becomes \u2018protected\u2019 by a ballistic-missile-\u2018defense\u2019 or BMD or ABM (anti-ballistic-missile) system against the \u2018enemy\u2019 (now just Russia), they\u2019ve got no more need to worry about \u2019the enemy\u2019<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The Reagan-era \u2018Star Wars\u2019 anti-ballistic missile defense dream for the American aristocracy, is now starting to be realized finally in an Obama-era Lockheed Martin\u00a0\u201cAegis Ashore Missile Defense System\u201d<\/a>\u00a0nightmare for the Russian people alone, as the putative imagined pathway towards global victory for America\u2019s aristocracy is becoming installed in eastern Europe and other areas bordering on and close to Russia. The American and other Western publics are blithely unworried about it, because the aristocracy\u2019s \u2018news\u2019 media have told them that this is \u2018just a defensive measure against possible further Russian aggression<\/a>\u2019 (not a reach-for-global-conquest by America\u2019s aristocracy, which it actually is<\/em>).<\/p>\n

This is one of the reasons why, from the standpoint of America\u2019s rulers, it\u2019s so vitally important for information about those luxurious bunkers<\/a> to be circulated only in publications for the elite, such as FORBES<\/em>. If the general public were to become increasingly aware that the few billionaires amongst them are making their own preparations for living in a possible post-nuclear-holocaust nation, then the uncomfortable questions would arise as to why the federal government is not<\/em> assisting the general public to do likewise (or at least to live in some<\/em> kind of bunker, such as did<\/em> happen back in \u2018the good old days\u2019).<\/p>\n

This is also the result of the \u2018libertarian\u2019 or \u2018neoliberal\u2019 ideology, the ideology of \u2018individualism\u2019, which the aristocracy has systematically inculcated now into generations of people in the West, which denigrates the government\u2019s obligations to the public, and which raises instead to the ideal, the belief in the rightness of \u2018every man for himself\u2019 and \u2018we are not<\/em> in this together\u2019, because \u2018the masses of lazy bums and stupid people should get nothing more than whatever they deserve\u2019. If, perhaps, a billionaire can afford to live \u2018safely\u2019 deep underground, then \u201cmore power to him,\u201d according to this ideology, which proclaims that equality of rights is wrong, and that instead a person deserves to have no more rights than he or she has property<\/em>, wealth, dollars \u2014 things to trade with other individuals who possess wealth. In the U.S., this transactional basis for individuals\u2019 rights was the ideology of the Supreme Court in a series of decisions such as the 2010\u00a0Citizens United<\/em><\/a>\u00a0decision, that a person\u2019s right to \u2018free speech\u2019 should be proportional to how much money he\/she spends<\/em> to buy it so as to persuade others to vote the way one wants them to vote, or to buy whatever else one wants them to buy.<\/p>\n

This transactional concept of an individual\u2019s rights is a protection of dollars, not really<\/em> of people. It\u2019s for (and in service to) an aristocracy, not<\/em> a democracy<\/a>. This Supreme Court has supported aristocracy, not democracy. And, since, after WW II, this has increasingly become the new ethos<\/em>, not only in the United States but in all countries that take the U.S. to be the ideal, Western publics are not at all outraged at being left high-and-dry in the event that perhaps the new military-security system, which is replacing the shared safety of M.A.D., is replacing it with the competitive and non<\/em>-shared safety of \u2019nuclear primacy<\/a>\u2019, and will end up leaving the public out in the cold nuclear winter<\/a> in the enemy\u2019s camp.<\/p>\n

After all, in the totally competitive world, what\u2019s won is taken, and what\u2019s lost is given; and, \u2018to the victor belong the spoils\u2019. This might not necessarily be so in economics, but it certainly is so in the military; it even defines the military outlook \u2014 which, after all, is what we\u2019re talking about here.<\/p>\n

And, if people have to pay for their rights, then the \u2018enemy\u2019 isn\u2019t the aristocracy \u2014 certainly not that of one\u2019s own nation \u2014 but instead, it is the people who don\u2019t have the money to buy their own rights. Some people call this type of political system \u2018liberty\u2019 or \u2018libertarianism\u2019 or \u2018liberalism\u2019 or \u2018neoliberalism\u2019; but, by whatever name it is called, it certainly isn\u2019t<\/em> democracy, and it certainly isn\u2019t<\/em> equality of rights, and it certainly isn\u2019t<\/em> equality of opportunity. It is, in a word: fascism<\/em>. That\u2019s an extension of the military outlook, into everything<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But another accurate term for it is: madness<\/em>. However, it is a madness that has been sold, by Western aristocracies, to the publics in the West, which is the reason why the belief in M.A.D. is now gone from the West. The popular belief there now is: eat or else be eaten. And, what is to be eaten isn\u2019t the aristocrats who are selling this poison; it\u2019s \u2018the enemy\u2019. (Meanwhile, America and NATO can call thugs like this<\/a> \u2018friends\u2019 and even \u201cmembers of NATO\u201d and still call themselves supporters of \u2018democracy\u2019, a term that\u2019s now devoid of meaning in the West.) This is why Western publics don\u2019t care about the fear that the Russian people feel concerning the installation of America\u2019s anti-ballistic missile systems.<\/p>\n

In the most fundamental sense, the concept that we are all in this together is gone, in the West. If it doesn\u2019t exist in both the West and the \u2018East\u2019 (namely, in Russia, where it does<\/em> exist), then a nuclear war is extremely likely, and the real question is: When will it be likeliest to happen?<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 <\/em>They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/a>,<\/em> of\u00a0<\/em>Christ\u2019s Ventriloquists: The Event that Created Christianity<\/a>, and\u00a0of<\/em>\u00a0Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thesaker.is<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mutually Assured Destruction, or M.A.D., isn\u2019t only a reality in a nuclearly armed multipolar world, but it is also a mass-psychology, of belief that there cannot be any winner of a nuclear war. But the concept that we are all in this together is gone in the West. If it doesn\u2019t exist in both the West and the \u2018East\u2019 (namely, in Russia, where it does exist), then a nuclear war is extremely likely, and the real question is: When will it be likeliest to happen?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75368","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weapons-of-mass-destruction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75368","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=75368"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75368\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75368"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=75368"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=75368"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}