April 13, 2018 "Information Clearing House" - For the first time since 1962, world war could be only days or hours away.

That fact is appallingly frightening and profoundly sad, but what is most devastating in assessing what has brought us to this point is the sickening harmonic it sounds with the greatest tragedies in modern history. 

Both World Wars were triggered by the blind arrogance of rigid, irrational, egocentric elites captive to wildly distorted visions unhinged from reality who, in their furious self-absorption, cocooned in their power fantasies, allowed themselves to drift casually into horrors of unimagined scale.

It is no secret to the world--though it is to our dull, propagandized people--that we have been ruled for decades by contemptible whores to American Oligarchs in our Presidency and Congress whose only mission is promotion of criminal predatory Capitalism behind the shield of brute military violence.

On Capitalism’s payroll, funded and elected with dirty money, they served the oligarchy exclusively, indifferent to the needs of the American citizenry

America is now run by an infantile hysteric who dominates the smoking wreckage of a sclerotic bureacracy, and a noxious, putrid cloaca of a Congress, in conjunction with a pompous, dimwitted military generalled by ignorant, insulated automatons, pickled in their own yahoo Jingo dogma. 

This authoritarian combination of malevolence and idiocy has brought us to the brink of incomparable catastrophe that the hysteria from the President, and from all official voices, has rendered increasingly likely, if not certain.

Sadly, possibly tragically, there is no significantly powerful and morally persuasive corpus of opposition to the virus of war madness that has infected our entire political apparatus.  The elites are uniformly complicit.

Not that getting support for war has been difficult in America.  It has always been easy for the controlling elite.  Herr Goering had it right:

“All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

 Another factor that favored our war enthusiasm since 1812, is that there was never any chance its inevitable destruction would come home.

These two qualifiers are absent now.  We are obviously not being attacked in Syria, though our pet Jihadis are, and it is very possible, if hot war should erupt, that great, even incalculable, damage could be done at home; to us, to our families, our children, to those we love.

During the long, tense, dangerous period of the Cold War, America and the USSR engaged for decades in a duel for advantage in nuclear weaponry and neither prevailed.  If, at certain points, one or the other had a slight tactical edge, the impulse to war was stifled by the recognized validity of the principle aptly abbreviated MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction.  A first strike by one would result in a devastating response from the other.  This awareness created a stasis, a balance, a stability in a time of total enmity.

Operating rationally though bitterly opposed and hostile, the powers worked through many crises with diplomacy.  Never friends, ever enemies, they saved themselves and each other through close engagement.  This sanity prevailed even in the terrifying near-disaster of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Both sides suffered setbacks, defeats, betrayals; both were confronted with costly and embarrassing reversals and losses; they reviled and insulted each other, and damned each other to perdition.  But they behaved with determined restraint and moderation for the most part, never using wild pretensions and absurd, incredible inventions as sufficient causes for war.

All that is gone.  Not that it was wonderful: it was sane, prudent, pragmatic.  What we have now, under our Imperial monsters, hysterics, and psychos, is a regime that, having destroyed weak countries, provokes the strongest; having failed in every single war it forced down our throats, aspires to fight new ones; having demonized and/or alienated the most powerful national leaders on earth by imbecile accusations spun from fevered imagination and fairy dust, it proposes to punish them for imaginary transgressions. 

The question for Americans is, when does this hysteria become treason?  At what point of our shame is open rebellion the only choice?  If not now, when?

Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net