A Russian pilot has been killed by US-armed terrorists in Syria. The Ron Paul Institute‘s Daniel McAdams writes the following about this new development:
“The scenario where a US-backed, US-supplied jihadist group in Syria uses US weapons to shoot down a Russian plane and then murders the pilot on the ground should be seen as a near-nightmare escalation, drawing the US and Russia terrifyingly closer to direct conflict.”
McAdams is not fearmongering; he is stating a plainly obvious fact. The Trump administration has just announced that it is restructuring its nuclear weapons policy to take a more aggressive stance toward Russia than that which was held by the previous administration. This is coming after this administration’s decision to arm Ukraine against Russia, a move Obama refused to take for fear of escalating tensions with Moscow, as well as its decision to continue to occupy Syria in order to effect regime change, along with numerous other escalations. The Council on Foreign Relations, which is without exaggeration as close to the voice of the US establishment as you can possibly get, is now openly admitting that the “United States is currently in a second Cold War with Russia.”
In a recent interview with The Real News, leading US-Russian relations expert Stephen Cohen repeated his ongoing warning that “this new Cold War is much more dangerous, much more likely to end in Hot War, than was the 40-year of Cold War, which we barely survived.” In a previous interview with the same outlet, Cohen elaborated more extensively:
“We are in new cold war that is much more dangerous than the last cold war for various reasons. One is that the new cold war today, as we talk, includes three fronts. U.S.-Russian fronts, they’re fought with hot war. That’s Syria. That’s the reckless NATO military build-up on Russia’s western boarders, which has resulted in a situation today that ordinarily artillery, not missiles, ordinary artillery, can hit Russia’s second city of Saint Petersburg. Just think about that and the instability. And the third front is Ukraine.”
Cohen explains how the political pressures placed on Trump by the ongoing fact-free allegation that he is a Kremlin puppet makes it far more difficult for him to negotiate on these multiple fronts agilely, thus making it much more likely that Trump will choose to advance when he should retreat, hold his ground when he should back down, and generally be locked into patterns of aggression and forward movement rather than the back-and-forth finesse required for safe cold war negotiations with a nuclear superpower.
We came within a hair’s breadth of nuclear annihilation on more than one occasion during the last cold war, and the further things escalate in this new one the more likely we are to tempt fate again. The only reason we survived the extremely tense stand-offs in the last cold war ultimately boiled down to pure dumb luck in some cases, and there’s no legitimate reason to believe we’ll get lucky again.
To be clear, I am not saying that the US or Russia actually want nuclear war. Two men with guns pointed at one another in a conventional standoff generally don’t want either weapon to discharge, either. What I am saying is that we learned in situations snatched from the brink of disaster by men like Stanislov Petrov and Vasili Arkhipov that there are too many small, unpredictable moving parts involved in a nuclear standoff for cold war escalations to unfold safely and predictably, and the more tense things get the more likely it becomes that a nuclear warhead gets discharged in the chaos and confusion. Once a single warhead goes off, Mutually Assured Destruction comes into play. Add into that the hot war dynamics and political pressures described by Stephen Cohen and we’re looking at some very uncomfortable odds as a species.
In my view most of the political disagreements I have with people ultimately boil down to this. I see us as facing an immediate existential crisis as a species that needs to be dealt with right now, and people say I should be more worried about this or that conservative figure saying rude things on Twitter. We are facing the very real possibility of near-term human extinction; I don’t know how to care about the petty sectarian squabbles in America’s various political factions. It really is time for us to all get over ourselves and grow up.
This unprecedented crisis should be drawing us together, yet we’re more politically divided than ever. It is evolve or die time, and we’re all still arguing over airplane peanuts while the plane is in a full nose dive.
Thought experiment:
Imagine if you wake up one morning and turn on the TV to an emergency broadcast alert that a nuclear weapon has been discharged by either the US or Russia in the chaos and confusion of this convoluted new cold war, and saying that you need to seek shelter immediately.
What thoughts will go through your head as the realization dawns that this is really happening? Do you imagine that you will be spending much time thinking about how Trump said “shit hole countries”? Will you spend your last moments on earth mentally shaking your fist at Antifa and “libtards”? Or will you instead perhaps wish that you and your brothers and sisters around the world had more aggressively opposed these new cold war games your leaders have been playing?
It is entirely possible that you will one day in the near future find yourself in this very situation and answering the questions I just asked you for yourself.
Let’s skip that part of our story together, please. The reason they need to work so hard to manufacture consent for these escalations is because they require that consent. If we all loudly raise our voices and say “No. Enough. This ends now,” they will necessarily have to obey. The Russiagate psyop exists because the western power establishment is trying to cripple the Russia-China tandem in order to ensure US hegemony, and if they tried to thrust us all into a new cold war without our permission they’d shatter the illusion of freedom and democracy they depend on to rule you. If we all rise as one voice and withdraw that permission, they will be forced to obey.
Can we do this, please? Can we make ensuring our survival into the future a priority right now and put bickering over identity politics and the president’s tweets on the back burner until then? We’ll have a whole future ahead of us to sort that stuff out if we survive the urgent crisis we are facing right now.
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24 responses to “The Increasing Likelihood Of Nuclear War Should Straighten Out All Our Priorities”
[…] that time Cohen has remained steadfast in pointing out every step of this march toward Armageddon and how it has been unfolding exactly […]
I think the situation is even worst. Back in the 80s I lived in Boston and was flipping channels when I happened upon an interview of Richard Pearle, one of Reagan’s neocon advisors. In total seriousness he described how the US could take over the entire USSR with nothing more than a fleet of aircraft carriers that were stationed in the Arctic ocean. These people are too insane and flat out stupid to learn from their many failures. In their linear thinking minds they just did not pushing hard enough. Their latest lapdog president (aka Dipshit Donald) is pushing for smaller nukes in order to keep his masters’ wet dream alive: a winnable nuclear war.
The same idiots thought they could defeat Afghanistan and Iraq in a month. Yep.
We slept too long over the years. This comes as it was prophecied. We’ve expected it for years and we’re now led ( for quite some time I might ad) by people that are right and wring enough to get it done. Pray for the world and hang on the Bible was right
“The scenario where a US-backed, US-supplied jihadist group in Syria…”
Is this not treason and should that not worry us more? Because if all, I mean ALL, would be tried and punished appropriately. Then the nuclear war would not be a worry anymore.
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.” — Marcus Tullius Cicero
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I’m becoming numb. It’s a matter of survival.
I was born a year before the end of WW II. I lived through the Korean and Viet Nam conflicts. I survived every minute of McCarthyism and the first cold war. I criticized the nonsense of WMDs – and that’s just for starters.
My goal has always been to live to reach a triple-figure age. Now, the country in which I was born is increasingly threatening to take that away from me. People blindly spend their money at places like Amazon and for products from people like the Koch brothers, both of which turn around and use that profit to harm us, their customers. The mainstream media and our government lie to us. The creators of the largest search engine and social media outlet increasingly censor submissions, the truth it doesn’t want seen and anything else that serves to support their goals as (using Caitlin’s phrase) pathological elites.
It feels to me as though we are inexorably marching backward to 1984.I really don’t want to get there. It wasn’t really such a wonderful year.
“Can we do this, please? Can we make ensuring our survival into the future a priority right now and put bickering over identity politics and the president’s tweets on the back burner until then?”
Supposing I agree (which I do), where do I sign up and what do I do next?? How can we make alliances?
Elite oligarchics and CIA agents ought to be at least as concerned about human extinction as anyone. “We will all fry together when we fry”, as Tom Lehrer said. If they think they’re going to survive in underground tunnels, they’re delusional.
Caity, again you tell a compelling story of the absurdity of our conversations around Russia and American relations. One of the major reasons I left Facebook was because people were making a bigger stink about Trump’s antics on Twitter instead of the critical manipulations of the Deep State to create escalations between Russia & the US. People supporting candidates that vote for giving Trump enhanced war powers while at the same time saying he is a treat to humanity. We are living in strange and dangerous times and the citizenry is distracted by getting 6ft heros and chips to watch a football game that doesn’t even have a home team on it. I felt like I was trying to wake people who were making noise about nonsense while the Earth was being crushed by the machinations of our corporate rule.
I applaud you Caity, for your bravery and commitment to calling out the truth to a world of people wearing ear plugs.
It almost seems as if the Deep State, having been apprised very early on of the Ruski scare angle, hatched at the DNC, thought to themselves that in the long term Trump will be an even better pawn because he will have to do our bidding to fend off Dem accusations of Putin puppethood. Now, both Duopoly Parties are treacherously alligned/unified in their pursuit of a HOT war and for handing over control to the unelected power of Intel to prove their ability to “protect/to keep us plebs safe” as if the Constitution stressed safety over freedom. Brilliant! And concurrently, all the economic/social stressed citizens have time to conclude from the abysmal, content-free coverage of the MSM is that Dem vs Repub battles are on again. The MSM presents it as political battle ttheaterwithout covering the content just as they did with Hillary’s/Podesta’s emails. Trump has indeed proven to be a Uniter, not a divider. The public is simply unaware of this fact and its dire consequences, by design.
If you’ve already read these;
http://russia-insider.com/en/meet-corrupt-billionaire-hoaxter-who-has-brought-about-new-cold-war-william-browder/ri22423#.WnXP2uujr9w.reddit
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/02/02/nunes-memo-reports-crimes-at-top-of-fbi-doj/
Roberts does unfairly divvy out blame to one group, ignoring the fact that many neocons are Christian like Hillary, but he makes some important points.
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/02/nuclear-posture-review/
https://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2018/02/02/1017367-the-loser-dems-mike-whitney/
Sorry for another Roberts but it popped up while searching for the other above and it is relevant.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-01-25/paul-craig-roberts-warns-russiagate-stakes-are-extreme
Thank you Caitlin. Very well stated.
It has been completely clear to me here in northern Wisconsin for decades.
Sadly, most in USA cannot grasp what you have written.
They have felt no pain, only avarice, during American hegemony.
The issue is so massive most cannot/will not try to comprehend.
All empires fail. This time, will empire take down the planet with it’s collapse?
Thank you again for your good work.