Make Love, Not Strangelove

by Adam Young

Finally, some good news. A story on Yahoo! News reported that a recent poll suggests 2/3rds of Americans may think nuclear weapons should be abolished, even those kept primed and ready by good ‘ole peace-loving Uncle Sam.

The polls was of 1,001 adults with a 3% margin of error taken on March 21-23, and found that by and large the younger the polled, the more likely they are to both fear and revile the use of and the continued existence of nuclear weapons of any kind.

This is certainly progress, especially considering the toxic influence that the propagandists for evil like Max Boot, National Review and the other commentators and outlets of Brownshirt America have received under the present regime. Certainly Max Boot has never shied away from advocating and defending mass murder, and National Review once suggested applying a little nuclear persuasion to the city of Mecca .

However, when it came to the only time (so far) where that hallowed agent of the "culture of life," the United States government, has vaporized actual human beings with the nuclear eraser at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the poll found that 6 in 10 people age 65 and older still approved of the use of the atomic bomb. It’s not that surprising that the older would be the most unwilling to reevaluate the lies they were told in their youth, especially by the State’s propaganda. It’s hard at any time in your life to recognize that you are no more than a pawn in the plans of the State. But happily, six in ten people aged 18 to 29 disapproved of dropping both Fat Man and Little Boy.

Could we hope that the younger members of society have seen through the propaganda about the “Last Good War”? That the myth promoted by the Atomic Bombers simply exists to justify the vast slave empire that is the military-industrial-think-tank complex that has grown up since that last good war? Maybe they no longer buy the myth that the atomic mass murder of 300,000 Japanese civilians actually saved the lives of a million American soldiers. Maybe somewhere they have learned that Truman invented that figure as cover for the decision to bomb that had already been made. Or, maybe the perverse immorality of the argument itself revolts them, the idea that to save the lives of soldiers, you instead slaughter innocent civilians. But such is the morality of the State. Maybe they have heard the truth that Japan tried to surrender through its ambassador to the Vatican and Moscow , but the U.S. wasn’t interested.

The poll also found that 53% of Americans fear and expect the terrorist detonation of a nuclear device somewhere soon, within the next five years. 52% of Americans also think a nuclear attack by one regime against another is somewhat or very likely by 2010. To normal people, this is a deep pessimism. To the neocons, it’s the hoped for “creative destruction” that allows these parasites to thrive.

They are right to fear this possibility though, although it is for the “wrong” reasons. I don’t think I’m wrong to assume that most of these polled are focused on the human and environmental damage that a nuclear attack by a State or terror group would unleash, and not what these attacks would do to the liberties of those in the recipient countries as well as those of us in other countries as well, judging from the response of Blairite Britain to 9/11.

Of course, we can thank the modern State for the threat of nuclear terrorism. Without the State and its perverse and inhuman incentives for mass slaughter, no group would have the interest in acquiring, much less creating from scratch, these monstrous assaults on any notion of proportional response or defense against attack.

It’s likely that if the modern State didn’t already possess these and other weapons of mass destruction, so-called terrorist groups wouldn’t be interested in acquiring an ability to kill enormous numbers of innocents. If a State itself measures its status in its power to kill all life on Earth, how is any group going to be able to get the attention of this monster but through the application of mass destruction itself?

Certainly the Dr. Strangeloves who constitute the full depravity of the present regime in America, full of hubris for themselves and hatred for the rest of humanity and the humane doctrine of pacifism, believe that the only way to counter opponents to their domination is through ever greater demonstrations of violence and destruction. These men even plot and plan to create small nuclear weapons to be used “as battlefield weapons,” although the obvious goes unsaid: Today’s battlefields are urban streets and houses. Perhaps it doesn’t occur to these gangsters that these devices themselves, or even just their blueprints, could fall into the hands of groups that would use them against Americans. Or then again maybe that is the idea, as the regime grows ever bolder in its targeting of domestic “threats” and works to overthrow the traditional cultural order that underpins acceptance for civil rights that protect the individual from encroachment from the State.

Atomic weapons are the perfect symbol for the modern state. Homicidal, genocidal, all around the enemy of civilization and despoiler of social norms of discourse and harmonious relationships. Surely it isn’t a coincidence that the “counter-culture” and a more self-indulgent and irresponsible social ethos pervaded American society at the same time that MAD –Mutually Assured Destruction- was enthroned as a rational doctrine for the defense of civilization.  

Even more insane is that after the horrors of the Second World War, so-called “peace-loving, democratic” States are still allowed by their subjects to plot and prepare to rain down death upon any who challenge its existence or merely seek to frustrate its aims.