The Near Term
By Paul Edwards
December 02, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- The fate of humanity
in the immediate future will be determined by
the undeclared but entirely real war between the
American Empire and Russia and China. Both
gigantic and exceedingly powerful nations are
perceived and treated as enemies, one already
engaged in proxy war with America in Ukraine,
and the other menaced and provoked by American
policy on Taiwan.
The risk of truly cataclysmic war is greater in
Ukraine, as it has been contemptuous of peace
negotiations, and The Empire and its EU/NATO
allies have supplied great quantities of weapons
that permit Ukraine to continue to fight despite
horrific losses. From all indications, including
bellicose official statements, it is clear that
America and the EU/NATO want the conflict to go
on indefinitely, and they assume that is
possible when it isn’t.
Russia, having for decades declared its
determination not to allow hostile forces to be
stationed on its borders, offered a proposal for
mutual security arrangements that would satisfy
both itself and Ukraine, that was ridiculed and
rebuffed by The Empire. It therefore forestalled
a massive attack by Ukrainian forces on the
Lugansk/Donetsk Russian ethnic areas they had
bombed and damaged severely for eight years by
mounting what Putin called a Special Military
Operation to defend those areas.
The short term goals of that operation had some
success but were answered by a great escalation
of force by Ukraine, backed and funded by The
Empire and its allies. This changed the game for
Russia which then moved to retrench and augment
its forces, and is said to be about to mount a
massive offensive, assisted by the massive,
widespread destruction of Ukraine’s electrical
and power generation capacity, to end resistance
and the war.
Supposing this to be true, the question is how
The Empire and its allies will respond. Two
obvious possibilities are that they will assist
Ukraine’s defensive retreat and capitulation,
which would mean great loss of face and
humiliation; or that America will enter the war
and face Russia with NATO troops, and perhaps
its own. This would mean an end to controlled
proxy war, and escalation to a general one. It
is at least possible that in the face of all-out
Russian offensive, The Empire would fold at the
prospect of the terrific cost in blood and
dollars opposition would entail, but it seems
unlikely, given its monomaniacal obsession to
destroy Russia, and the stridency of its vow to
see Ukrainian “victory”.
If, through raw stupidity or blinding hubris,
the American Empire triggers a massive European
war—which is what it would be, if American
troops and weaponry were committed—it is
impossible to predict how great a conflagration
could result. Once war is initiated, it carves
incomprehensible patterns, far beyond the
capacity of man to fathom. The atmosphere of
buried hostility that surrounded the complex
knot of trivial miscalculations and resulting
disasters that led to WWI provides a fine
illustration of this. Nations, lost in their fog
of propaganda and pride, can’t anticipate
consequences, and they operate from an arrogance
that is only much later drowned in blood.
There is no reason to expect the American Empire
to learn from its many failures and defeats,
particularly since all those appalling debacles
worked to enrich the War Machine, which is the
Oz behind the curtain of The Empire. None of the
American Wars, from Korea on, was solely about
winning on the battlefield. The larger purpose,
behind the jingo propaganda, was to make huge
amounts of money for the War Machine, the toxic
brain worm that has run The Empire for all of
our lifetimes.
In the event of open war between The Empire and
Russia, which both will see as an existential
battle for survival, there can be no upper limit
to violence beyond which neither will go. That
insures that if one side is suffering
intolerable damage and is in mortal peril of
losing the war for its life, it will almost
certainly resort to using the most potent
weapons it has, which are nuclear.
The consequences of Nuclear War for humanity are
incalculable, and there is no point in
speculating about them. What is certain is that
the catastrophe would be on a scale never
experienced in the history of our species, and
that the impact on mankind and the natural world
could mean extinction of life on earth.
Nuclear War cannot be considered as a one-off
event that, when terminated itself, has no
continuing consequences. The end of a Nuclear
War, regardless of what remains of life when war
ceases, will be only the beginning of a
cascading series of disasters it will have
triggered. These, too, are unimaginable, but the
principle of cause and effect means they are
inevitable. If remnant human and other life
persists after such a war, its effects on the
physical world will efficiently complete life’s
mass extinction.
It is possible that none of this doomsday
scenario will occur. Governments, even empires,
can be capable of sound, sensible decisions,
particularly to avert their own destruction. The
normal pattern though, as history shows, is for
them to take such action after, rather than
before, disaster. Yet, it remains possible.
History teaches that momentum in events has
enormous power, the power of inertia, described
in the Laws of Motion. The plans of men in power
are hesitant, or impulsive, and usually poorly
reasoned. There has often been a horrifying
inevitability about the eruption of wars that
shows how little control nations have over their
destinies. This is as true for other governments
as it is for empires. In the present case, that
means that a resolution cannot be devised that
does not involve some compromise by all parties,
The Empire and Ukraine, and Russia. Whether this
is a real possibility will depend on their
capacity to comprehend what the refusal to find
a solution acceptable to both parties portends.
Paul Edwards is
a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be
reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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