The Game Of Nuclear Brinkmanship Has No Winners
In 2022, Being Anti-(Nuclear) War Is Now A Position That Is Marginalized, And Must Be Constantly Justified
Photo by Pablo Stanic on Unsplash
Sometimes, it takes the hindsight of many years of perspective to truly understand and appreciate the impact of pivotal moments in life.
50 years have passed, so I’m fuzzy on the details, but as I recall, the Virginia Beach school system had allowed the two major political parties to engage students at my High School, none of them of voting age, to “participate in democracy” via voting in mock elections in the runup to the real-life general election of November 1972. Richard Nixon, the incumbent Republican candidate, was pitted against George McGovern, the Democratic nominee.
The spokespeople for the two major parties, after a school assembly explaining the exercise, encouraged students to become living endorsements for their candidate of choice by wearing buttons on their clothing during “campaign week.” Presumably, this would be an introductory civics lesson in participatory democracy. Boxes of buttons were passed out by volunteers of the two major political campaigns at tables set up in the hallways. Freedom of “choice” in action. The students, including myself, felt the pressure to conform, and willingly pinned multiple bright, shiny buttons onto their dresses and shirt collars.
Being politically unsophisticated, young, and impressionable, and knowing my conservative parents supported him, I made the dubious (and ultimately wrong) choice of “supporting” Richard Nixon. The button, sporting the unattractive visage of Nixon smiling like a Cheshire cat, was no more than an empty platitude. People who lived through this era know Nixon wasn’t a social animal, and smiling was more of a reaction to the stress of public appearances and press scrutiny. All of Nixon’s public appearances usually featured uncomfortable moments of silence, as Nixon did his best to put a positive spin on his terse statements and unengaging speaking style by smiling while beads of perspiration formed on his brow.
Marketing, at that time, was not a science, except within the confines of Madison Avenue advertising for newspapers, radio, and television.
“Nixon’s The One!” proclaimed my ludicrously understated and vacuous campaign pin. Arguably, one of the least inspired campaign slogans ever.
Christopher (not his real name) was both my adolescent and political nemesis, and as it turned out, my savior, in terms of sparking political and cultural awareness.
Christopher had, through the blessings of good genes, skipped the awkwardness of adolescence, bypassing pimples and growth spurts in favor of mature confidence, good looks, sophisticated humor, and an aura of charm. Christopher ultimately introduced me to the seminal Pink Floyd album “Dark Side Of The Moon”, the political humor of the Marx Brothers in “Duck Soup,” and the audio-induced mushroom trips and revolutionary humor of the Firesign Theater. He also introduced me to another anti-war hippie and future bandmate, forging a friendship and spiritual bond that lasted for years until his untimely death.
The girls loved Christopher. Think of a young Jackson Browne or Dan Fogelberg bedecked in Levis jeans and workshirts and leather boots, and in our senior year, carrying a guitar everywhere he went to serenade adoring ladies with the songs of Bob Dylan, Stephen Stills, and the before mentioned Fogelberg, and you get the idea.
Being the antithesis of all that, I did my best to merge with the walls, hide in the back of classrooms, and just survive the days and weeks of what seemed like the interminable prison of public education.
I suppose it was inevitable during the mock “campaign week” in October of 1972 that Christopher, flanked by his politically sophisticated friends, some of them talented musicians that were literally performing the musical anti-war anthems for our High School English classes at assemblies and in the classroom, called me out publicly in the hallways during lunch break one day. I cringed.
As a McGovern supporter, Christopher demanded to know, in what seemed like a fairly serious tone, why I supported Richard Nixon. Nixon, Christopher said in so many words, was getting young men killed over in Vietnam, and was an existential danger to youth. He was destroying the native populations of North and South Vietnam by proxy, and might even engage in a nuclear “solution”. He was vile and pernicious and couldn’t be trusted.
The older, sophisticated “hippie” contingent that flanked Christopher nodded in solemn agreement. In addition to their McGovern buttons, they were wearing other buttons that expressed their anti-war sentiment with peace symbols and doves. From my perspective, their collective, silent condemnation, even if rooted a bit in naivete, made me suddenly, painfully aware of my ignorance.
I had no words in reponse. Embarrassed, I shuffled on my feet uncomfortably, feeling intellectually outgunned, and shamed, in a sense, that I was supporting a candidate without good reason or moral justification, a useful idiot, that, in supporting Nixon, was supporting death and destruction. It was a fairly heavy intellectual realization.
Christopher had made a permanent indelible point.
As history records, George McGovern never stood a chance in the real election of November`1972. He was defeated by Nixon in a landslide. It was a victory as much for the Military Industrial Complex that his former boss Dwight Eisenhower had warned about, as it was for Nixon personally.
Nixon’s failed promises of de-escalation, troop withdrawal, or “Vietnamization” turned, in subsequent years, into an ugly, pointless escalation of destructive fury and a painful, consequential withdrawal. Vietnam was a disaster, a portent of the outcome of American involvement in future wars and hegemony to come.
Christopher had Nixon’s number in the most prescient sense, Nixon ultimately resigned in disgrace years later over Watergate, but in hindsight, the critical difference between Richard Nixon and today’s politicians is that Nixon was a master diplomat.
John F. Kennedy and Nixon, despite being major political nemeses, were similar in that regard. Kennedy and Nixon were both intellectually sophisticated enough to know that Cold War tensions with Russia had to be eased. The very existence of humanity depended on it. 50 years later, those voices of diplomacy and reason have disappeared, along with any semblance of anti-war sentiment prevalent in my youth. Those that do speak out are mocked, marginalized, and suppressed.
Many people my age, weary of a lifetime of political machinations and manipulations, some ensconced in material comfort and not wanting to rock the boat are, unfortunately, buying into the false narrative spun about the proxy war in Ukraine by the Biden administration, The Pentagon, and the corporate spokespeople that make up the Military Industrial Complex. It’s as if a lifetime of lessons and living through actual history hasn’t made any impression at all. It’s alarming and completely discouraging.
Consider that as I type this, another “anniversary” has passed, one whose historical lessons have been lost to contemporary war lust in 2022. The AUMF (Authorization For The Use Of Military Force), passed 20 years ago this month, was used to bypass democratic consent by both Obama and Trump to expand war without the consent of the governed.
“In response to a request from President George W. Bush in October 2002. Enacted 13 months after the 2001 AUMF, which was directed against those responsible for the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq AUMF was drafted for a very different purpose. Specifically, the resolution permitted the president to use armed forces as “necessary and appropriate” to “defend U.S. national security against the continuing threat posed by Iraq” and to “enforce all relevant Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.
The reference to such resolutions concerned the allegation that the Saddam Hussein regime was in breach of certain U.N. Security Council resolutions that prohibited the possession of weapons of mass destruction. A presidential commission concluded in 2005 that “not one bit” of the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that the regime had begun producing nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons proved correct. Yet this false claim seems to have become a minor footnote in the historical record of the war that followed.
Saddam was quickly deposed and President Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” and an end to major combat operations on May 1, 2003. Despite this declaration, and the former Iraq leader’s execution in 2006, the fighting continued. By the time President Obama officially declared the Iraq War over and removed all U.S. troops from the country in December 2011, it was estimated that at least 126,000 Iraqi civilians had been killed, along with 4,500 U.S. servicemembers. Thirty-two thousand more troops were wounded in the war, which cost taxpayers approximately $800 billion.
With the Iraq War having been officially over for nearly 11 years, it begs the question as to why, apart from being a matter of historical interest, the law that authorized it even merits discussion. Indeed, prior to the post-9/11 era, the anniversaries of statutory force authorizations or declarations of war have been seldom observed, let alone accompanied by calls for their repeal.”
One person I recently engaged with on Twitter, much younger, asked, concerning the proxy war in Ukraine, “What other options are there? It’s as if the diplomatic option, pursued actively by past Presidents of both parties was not even a possibility, and, after all, they say, we can’t do NOTHING, seeing that the “madman” Putin decided, in a vacuum, to suddenly invade and annex territories like Hitler annexed whole countries.
The true narrative of the US and NATO provocation of Russia is all but buried.
The same people ask, incredulously, why all Ukrainams are being “smeared” as Neo Nazis, despite open affiliations some Ukrainian militias have with historical foundations in Nazi Germany. Obviously, ALL Ukrainians aren’t in this category, but corporate journalists like Mehdi Hasan, disingenuously conflate calling out US support (since 2016) for Neo Nazis as smearing ALL Ukrainians as Neo Nazis in the same way that many innocent Muslims were smeared as terrorists. These subtle distinctions are lost in the attention-grabbing hysteria the media loves to generate for clickbait and ratings.
Independent journalist John Pilger makes a critical point here as we march closer to nuclear extinction:
A jaded, senile Joe Biden squints ominously, apparently with no sense of human empathy, warning us that we are as close to Armageddon as we have been since the Cuban missile crisis. The assumption is that it would be Russia that launches the first strike, and not America, (or NATO) the only country that has actually used a nuclear weapon in modern history. It’s a moot point.
Nuclear war is the end of life as we know it.
“It is estimated that there would be more than 90 million people dead and injured within the first few hours of the conflict.”
Imagine if, during the Cuban missile crisis, John Kennedy had also insisted on invading Cuba, escalating a dangerous situation even further. Nothing could be more of a contrast than the one between a young engaged, intellectually superior John Kennedy and an old, intellectually disengaged Joe Biden as the nexus of a historical, existential crisis repeats itself. Diplomacy, in 2022, in the case of The US/NATO/Western alliance, is not even a consideration.
Kennedy’s approach was to project strength but never leave diplomacy off the table. What person in their right mind could think otherwise?
I checked in recently with Christopher on Facebook. It’s sad to see that his once well-articulated anti-war stance that so inspired me has turned into pro-war cheerleading and projecting moral attributes on immoral people.
If the majority of our species doesn’t embrace diplomacy and peace no matter the odds, we will not survive. Period.