Archive for the ‘nuclear war’ Category
world war three – or what?
So, there were only 21 years between the first and second world war, which ended over 80 years ago, and we’re all more civilised now, right? Some more than others of course – there are still plenty of nazis and fascists around. But who are these people?
Don’t get caught up in the nazi anti-Jewish thing, which was terrible of course, but nazism was more about racial elitism and superiority, together with lies about history and some fake previous ‘reich’ or estate or empire that needs to be resurrected. I’m tempted to call today’s efforts in that direction ‘Putinism’, but that might be getting too personal. No doubt an effective name and rallying call will be thought up soon enough – just another repetition of the fascism of old.
It’s unclear as yet whether this new world war has already started, slowly for the rest of the world, not so for Ukraine, and there are many things that could derail its escalation, most notably Putin’s liquidation. Currently, though, 73-year-old Putin is trying hard to give every impression that he’s not finished yet, that he’s just getting started. Russia has the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, though not by a large margin. It’s arguable that their military doesn’t have the discipline and training of their opposites, the USA, but that’s hardly a comforting thought. Putin clearly has no conscience with regard to the slaughter of innocents, and has encouraged his minions, and the Russian people in general, to think likewise.
So Russia is currently the epicentre of fascism and totalitarianism, and with the USA currently completely rudderless, western Europe has to shoulder the responsibility of effectively deterring Putin from using the nuclear option, which he’s undoubtedly considering. The problem, of course, is that Russia and the USA together possess 90% of the world’s nukes, leaving NATO (sans the USA) without much bargaining power. Anna Reid’s Borderland, updated from the 90s to cover the Putin era and his full-scale war on Ukraine, gives an indication of just how popular Putin is, and how catching his contempt for ‘the west’ has been, in Russia. It’s a bit similar to the popularity of Trump among the USA’s vast ‘left behind’. It’s hard, though, for anyone with the most basic humanist principles, to understand how such events as the Bucha massacre can be casually dismissed, or more likely, denied. It’s particularly difficult, I suppose, for someone of my own background, so far from such brutality, so cushioned against anything like this horror.
I would highly recommend Reid’s book, which has sometime brought tears to my eyes, sometimes enraged me, and often made me feel a strange mixture of good luck and a kind of ridiculous envy that I’ve never been remotely tested by the kinds of experiences that so many Ukrainians have gone through over the past twenty years or so, whatever their first language might have been. In Australia we struggle to find differences between east and west in this incredibly massive continent, with an area about 12 times that of Ukraine and only two-thirds or so of its population (which has declined since the war due to slaughter and emigration), and we would also struggle to find crises within our borders – though there are the occasional piddling anti-immigration protests, and a few days ago I encountered a few people protesting on the steps of our state parliament (in South Australia) – Cambodians protesting against Thai aggression – a border dispute that I know very little about, but it makes me wonder…
Border disputes are all about what part of some disputed land is ‘yours’ or ‘mine’. Having read Anna Reid’s book about the ‘disputed’ territory that is Ukraine, with its predominantly Russian-speaking east and Ukrainian-speaking west (to put it very simplistically), I’ve now embarked on another book, Shattered Lands, by Sam Dalrymple, which deals with the old British Raj and its partitioning, no doubt involving border disputes aplenty – not, though, including the Thai-Cambodian dispute, but likely the Thai-Burmese border to the west.
But all wars, including world wars, are border disputes, are they not? The second world war was about expanding the German ‘reich’ – to the east, the west, the north, the south and all points between. The first world war was about all sorts of border tensions, with British and French expansionism, the holding struggles of the Germans and Austro-Hungarians, and the decline of the Ottoman Empire. And of course there have been many others – North and South Korea, North and South Vietnam, the Mexican-American war of the 19th century. And think of China – to quote AINL:
China has historically expanded and currently asserts its borders through a mixture of war, military pressure, and diplomatic agreements, often stemming from long-standing historical claims.
References
Anna Reid, Borderland: a journey through the history of Ukraine, 2022
Sam Dalrymple, Shattered lands: five partitions and the making of modern Asia, 2025
https://online.norwich.edu/online/about/resource-library/six-causes-world-war-i
touching on women, the principal carriers of bonobo humanity
that book again…
So I feel I’ve been skating around the edge of the bonobo world lately, not getting the message across, and not even quite sure what the message is. Clearly their sexual openness is sort of intimidating to many humans, but it’s also clear that this openness is profoundly connected to their culture of greater caring and sharing than exists in chimp culture, or our own. It slightly annoys me when commentators suggest we should look past the sexual activity to the bonding and helping and mutuality that goes on, as if we (very literally) buttoned-up humans can have one without the other, but having said that, I too am nervous about focussing on frottage, outside of Max Ernst.
So now I’m going to focus a bit more on the sexual side, and not just in reference to bonobos. Some years ago I read Jared Diamond’s little book Why is sex fun? (though I was pretty sure I knew the answer). Erogenous zones are hypersensitive, even more so when stimulated by another – like tickling, only different somehow. And with concealed ovulation, adult humans, like bonobos and dolphins, are sexually receptive for most of the time. This isn’t the case with chimps, so for bonobos this is an intriguing case of relatively recent evolution. Diamond’s book didn’t speculate too much, but looked at two extant theories:
“Many-fathers” theory says that concealed ovulation allows women to have sex with many men and create paternity confusion, which then decreases the chances of infanticide. “Daddy-at-home” theory says that women entice men to be around, provide and protect, by allowing them to have sex regularly. By combining both, we reach the conclusion that concealed ovulation arose at a time when our ancestors were promiscuous to avoid infanticide (“many fathers theory”) but once concealed ovulation evolved, the women chose monogamous relationships with more dependable cave-men (“daddy-at-home theory”).
Much of this is less than relevant to today’s WEIRD human world with its contraceptives and prophylactics, but ‘permissive’ sex has still to overcome the barriers of religion, and, for women, discrimination.
In any case Diamond completely missed the possible role of sex in bringing people together, in creating alliances, and the kind of overall cultural harmony that appears to subsist in bonobo society. This cultural harmony, which transcends the mother-child bond or the supposedly ideal development known as the nuclear family, has been the main attractant for me vis-a-vis bonobos, because I was brought up in what is called, by cliché, a ‘toxic family situation’, bearing in mind Tolstoy’s clever dictum that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. This situation was most salient for me in the late sixties and early seventies, the ‘hippy era’, when free love was touted, along with the death of the nuclear family. The hope that this idea gave me in my teen years was almost unbearably painful, but it all fizzled out. I didn’t learn about the bonobo lifestyle until more than a decade later, in the mid to late 80s, but that was rather too late, and a whole species out of reach…
But that’s just my personal situation. Bonobos still offer an example for our species in general, as we socially evolve, very slowly and in piecemeal fashion, out of patriarchy. But what exactly is this example, if it isn’t sexually modulated empathy, which is so far from a species that is so compartmentalised, un-neighbourly, sexually repressed, competitive, materialistic and personally hubristic as ours?
Of course, the hope surely lies with the greater empowerment of the human female, who, by and large, hasn’t quite the intensity of the above-mentioned traits than the male. Or am I just pissing in the wind? Of course, there are outrageous and apparently obnoxious females on the political scene, especially in the USA, when a lot of reportage focuses on the outrageous and obnoxious. But I believe, and fervently hope, that women are better at operating co-operatively and below the radar. For example, I’ve written before about Arab and Israeli women getting together to lobby against injustice and to promote sexual freedom, amongst other things (okay, sexual freedom is probably low on their list of priorities right now), a particularly difficult task considering the status of women in Moslem cultures, and their apparently feverish fear of homosexuality, especially among the lower classes. The Haifa Women’s Coalition, for example, based in that coastal northern Israeli city, suffers from the sorts of cultural tensions no bonobo would ever have to deal with, such as a concern about being dominated by Ashkenazi Jews, and a fear of backlash re ‘abnormal’ sexual preferences. Sigh, if we could only just give in to and celebrate sharing our basic primate primacy.
I could go on about the backlash against female empowerment in China, Russia, Burma, the Middle East, etc etc, the product of power politics that I like to hope are ultimately ephemeral – given a 1000+ year time-line for a bonobo humanity – which reminds me, I need to save my pennies to be cryopreserved – I really really want to see that future.
Meanwhile, I’ve noted, rather belatedly, that others have been discovering and basing some writings on bonobos, one way or another. Two recent examples, The bonobo gene: why men can be so dumb, is apparently a light-hearted account by an Aussie TV sports producer, Steve Marshall, of toxic masculinity and the male appendage. It’s clearly not about science (what could this bonobo gene be?), but anything that mocks the jocks can’t be a bad thing. More intriguing to me, though, is The bonobo sisterhood: revolution through female alliance, by Diane Rosenfeld, which sounds like it’s tactfully avoiding the sexual stuff. We’ll see – I’m definitely going to grab myself a copy.
Taking the long view on a future bonobo humanity is of course the only way to stay hopeful. In spite of the situation in Israel-Palestine, in Ukraine-Russia, in Afghanistan, Syria, South Sudan, Burundi and so on, the human world is far less overtly violent than it was centuries and millennia ago. Reading Simon Sebag Montefiore’s rather too whirlwind a world history (The World: a family history), amongst countless others, will tell you that. Even with a nuclear holocaust currently hanging over us (I recently encountered someone who fervently favours a nuclear strike – and strong male leadership – to stop Putin), and our slowness in handling the global warming crisis, I can’t seriously envisage a future human wipeout. The fact is, it often takes shocks at our own cruelty and stupidity to bring about anything like bonoboesque reform. It took two World Wars and all the barbarity they entailed to get us to become more global in our concerns, to take more seriously the concept of universal human rights and united nations, though these are still not taken seriously enough. Worse before it gets better? I can only hope not.
Meanwhile, I must get hold of that book…
References
nuclear issues – the end of complacency? Vive la révolution des bonobos!
So, Japan’s sense of itself as a mighty, controlling power, which had been corroding fast since its foolhardy attack on Pearl Harbour, was brought to an abrupt end in August 1945, the result of two atomic bombs, the only such weapons ever used against a human population.
Those explosions also set off two contradictory trends, which have persisted ever since; the proliferation of nuclear weapons at the behest of two ‘superpowers’, the USA and the Soviet Union (together with desperate attempts to acquire such weapons by wannabe superpowers), and a refrain of ‘never again’ by most members of the world community. This disastrous contradiction has persisted to this day, so that we’re now faced with the bizarre scenario of a worldwide anti-nuclear consensus, together with a total nuclear arsenal which could destroy the biosphere many times over. If ever any alien needed proof of the crooked timber of humanity, surely this scenario would be the first thing to point out.
It’s hard for a non-military person to make sense of the quantity and type of nuclear weaponry owned and deployed, if that’s the word, by the USA. But I’ll give it a go. Here’s the first thing I found:
As of 2021, American nuclear forces on land consist of 400 Minuteman III ICBMs spread among 450 operational launchers. Those in the seas consist of 14 nuclear-capable Ohio-class Trident submarines, nine in the Pacific and five in the Atlantic.
This doesn’t appear to tell us anything of the destructive power of these ICBMs. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, gets to the point quickly enough:
Less than one percent of the nuclear weapons in the world could disrupt the global climate and threaten as many as two billion people with starvation in a nuclear famine. The thousands of nuclear weapons possessed by the US and Russia could bring about a nuclear winter, destroying the essential ecosystems on which all life depends.
So the first quote is from Wikipedia, I think, and clearly 400 isn’t thousands, but does it really matter when we know from experience that two bombs can bring a nation to its knees? Those bombs may have killed as many as 200,000 – the exact total will never be known – but even while the world was reeling from the shock, the USA was experimenting with more powerful hydrogen fusion bombs, and the Soviet Union was trying desperately to catch up. The situation today, I’ve read somewhere, is that Russia has slightly more bombs than the USA, but with these numbers, comparisons are meaningless, and odious.
We’ve lived with this situation for the whole of my 66-year lifespan. Presumably the leaders of the nuclear-armed countries feel that this situation, this stand-off of sorts, should continue ‘forever’, which reminds me of Mr Pudding’s recent remark that the regions of eastern Ukraine that he subjected to sham referenda were now Russian ‘forever’, forgetting that Russia itself has only been a country for a mere few centuries – as has Australia, New Zealand, all the countries of North, South and Central America, most of Europe and Africa. It all makes this ‘forever’ talk sound pretty shallow to me.
The point I’m making is that we can’t rely on the ‘foreverness’ of the mutually assured destruction argument for possession of nuclear weaponry. After all, as the buffoon that the USA recently allowed to become its President allegedly said while in office – ‘What’s the point of having nuclear weapons if you don’t use them?’
Yes, true, in a sense. There’s no point in using them, so there’s no point in having them. We can surely do better than this, despite our crooked timber.
Again, I look to the women. Think of these two self-styled superpowers. The USA is on its 46th President. How many of them have been women. I suspect that country will only be brought to its senses when the number of female Presidents historically matches the number of males. That’s unlikely to happen in the next 500 years. Hopefully, though, before that happens, they will have ditched their abysmal Presidential system entirely. I hope, but I don’t expect. United Staters are way too worshipful of their Presidential monarchy to submit to a more collaborative and flexible political system. Again, the ascent of women is their best hope for political improvement.
As to Russia, it experienced some of its best days under their Empress Catherine II, which admittedly, isn’t saying much. The description ‘enlightened despotism’ Is often used to describe her reign, and she certainly compares well to her predecessors and those who followed her, but again that’s not saying much. She was the last female ruler of Russia, as her son Paul introduced the Pauline Laws in 1797, effectively preventing women from succeeding to the Tsardom. And of course we know how many women became leaders during the Soviet period.
Returning to the present, clearly Mr Pudding’s days are numbered, even if he survives his obscene Ukrainian venture. There is no clear system of succession, and I suspect that the scramble for power, post-Pudding, will be vicious. My hope, though, is that a more accommodating leadership will emerge – and indeed that will, I think, be more likely than the alternative, if only for pragmatic reasons. Relying solely on old Xi’s China for companionship is a more than risky proposition. Not much honour among thieves. Eventually, some time, one day, the Russian leadership will have to turn west, and start to moderate its thuggery. And then, maybe, the nuclear de-escalation, not to say disarmament, might begin. Yeah, and human bonobos will preside benignly, and playfully, over the earth.
References
A brief history of Afghanistan, by Shaista Wahab & Barry Youngerman, 2007
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Poland