Why is the World in a Headlong Rush to Self-destruction and World War Three
Four Reasons why so much of the world, from Ukraine to China to Korea and many other states, is beating the drums of war.
By
David Gottfried
The worldwide juggernaut toward oblivion through armed conflict is painfully evident. First, I will provide evidence of the world’s increased yen for war. Then, I will try to explore why the world is so headstrong in its desire to do itself in.
Evidence of Increased Bellicosity
In Asia: North Korea eyes South Korea and Japan with mordant suspicion, obsessively firing missiles at them. Mainland “Communist” China is consumed by a waxing desire to subjugate Taiwan, and Nancy Pelosi, while she was the Speaker of the House, traveled to Taiwan to advertise America’s willingness to match China gun for gun. Mainland China creates artificial islands in the South China Sea to use as a stepping stone for expansion in the Pacific.
Most recently, Mainland China floated a spy balloon over the United States. China used an enormous and very conspicuous spy balloon even though they have infinitely inventive and ingenious means of surveillance which are just as good as an enormous balloon that in its boxiness seems a throwback to relatively ancient technologies, such as the Zeppelin. Perhaps they used such a conspicuous device because they want to lure the United States into heightened antagonisms which could explode into war.`
In Europe: The West provoked Russia by moving the boundary of NATO more than one thousand miles to the East since the Berlin Wall fell. The Russians display their wrath on the funereal grounds of the once verdant Ukraine. NATO has given Ukraine many weapons and will now give Ukraine long range missiles to delve and destroy deep into the heart of Russia. Rumania and Hungary, once again, are quarreling for control of Transylvania. With the demise of communism, the lid blew off of Yugoslavia, and they reverted to their ancient ethnic and religious hatreds (Catholics in the West, oriented toward Berlin and Vienna, against the Eastern orthodox in Serbia). Poles enact statutes criminalizing criticisms of Poland during the Holocaust. Scotts convene a Scottish Parliament and attempt to divorce themselves from London.
A) The world wants war because it is rebelling against what it perceives as a sterile and bloodless modernism.
Modernism is sometimes characterized by a repudiation of the particular in favor of the universal. Modern men hold that it is better and more peaceful if we see ourselves as citizens of the world instead of citizens of a particular country.
However, when we are citizens of the world, we are cast adrift in a giant and boring melting pot and shorn of our familial roots and loyalties. When one is one human among six billion people on this planet, one is an anonymous, meaningless cipher. However, when I am an Ashkenazic Jew, I am the offspring of millennia of Jewish traditions and centuries of a certain European-Jewish way of life.
I had an art professor in my freshmen year of college who said that we start learning racism from the moment we sup on our Mother’s milk. When we are divorced from our roots, and its ineluctable racism, we are separated from our Mother. We European Jews call Yiddish the “Mama Loshen,” or the mother tongue. When we are stripped and deracinated in a lonely post-ethnic and post-religious world, we romanticize the past and long for the hearth fires of home even if the flames of the hearth will sometimes lead to the arson of war.
B) Just as the practice of circumcision, among Jews, may have aroused castration fears among gentiles, and inflamed anti semitism, the West’s growing tolerance of homosexuality and feminism might be stoking the East’s fury against the West.
Norman Podhoretz wrote, in or around 2009, that medieval Europeans believed that Jews used the blood of Christians to heal the blood loss Jews suffered from menstruation. Furthermore, Podhoretz wrote that European Christians, in the Middle Ages, believed that Jewish males menstruated just as women menstruated. (This idea might seem too fantastic to be credible to anyone, but do recall that people also believed that Jews had horns on their head.)
Apparently, European Christians believed that circumcision effeminized men; why else would they fabricate the delusion that Jewish men menstruated. Also, a manuscript entitled “Sexualities in Victorian England" notes that by 1850 doctors, in
Great Britain, were recommending circumcision for masturbation. Circumcision, apparently, was seen as a way to chastise males for excessive maleness or use of their genitals. If there is any doubt about the association between circumcision and emasculation, remember that the Jewish sage, Maimonides, commended circumcision as it was an operation which implicitly condemned aggressive maleness by putting the male organ on the chopping block.
Few things frighten and infuriate men as much as a threat to the family jewels. Of course, circumcision is a procedure involving the penis, not the testicles, which are often referred to as the family jewels, but the penis is in close proximity to the testicles and both the penis and the testicles are organs that only men possess.
It is quite possible that the Jewish practice of circumcision aroused hostility among gentiles. Indeed, an examination of anti-semitic stereotypes shows that Jews were often thought of as sedentary, hypochondriacal, unathletic, and fearful of combat. Actually, this stereotype is so deeply entrenched in our culture that many Jews have ascended to stardom by poking fun at themselves and their allegedly cowardly, unmanly and effete dispositions. Consider, for example, Woody
Allen, the consummate schlemiel and all-around weakling (Recall his performance in “Annie Hall,” where he is a grown man who is afraid of household insects and lobsters); the late Gilbert Gottfried, who often played the part of a stereotypical Brooklyn Jew who was imprisoned by fears and inhibitions like a tiny piece of meat encased in a Chinese wanton wrapper; and Jerry Lewis, who was the hysterical, sissified Jew next to Dean Martin, the debonair, dark Italian who exuded machismo and glamour.
More ominously, the alleged effeminacy of Jews was not only a shabby, cheap theme in American comedy; it might also have been one of the psychic instigators of the Holocaust as Hitler characterized Jews as a people who induced other people to fight for them because Jews, in the Hitlerian Weltanschauung (world view), were too afraid and unmanly to fight.
Similarly, the West’s embrace of feminism and homosexuality may terrify and infuriate the East as homosexuality is considered a status in which virility is compromised. The East may be doubly enraged because although they may believe that they are more manly and courageous than the West, the West is so much wealthier.
(This rage might be akin to the rage that Muslims have often harbored against the West: Muslims may find it an outrageous irony that although their religion and ideology are, in their view, ideal and the only worthwhile path in life, the West is wealthier.)
Although the East has harbored hostility to the west for a long time, the East may now have an additional, deep-seated psychological fear and hatred of the West rooted in the primordial and profound male fear of castration and/or effeminacy.
C) The Rejection of Class Conflict Propels Us Back in Time to an Era in Which Ethnicity, Tribe and Religion were all important.
During World War One, Lenin, in a letter to his landlady, wrote that French and German workers should not be fighting each other. Instead, French and German workers should rebel against their respective rulers which compel workers to kill each other while their rulers get fat through war profiteering.
Marxism shattered the mystique and majesty of national identity. Workers learned that their class identity was more important than their national identity and that war, therefore, was a sado-masochistic meat grinder and the cardinal sin of Europe. (Of course, Europe’s churches, the self-appointed arbiters of sinfulness and saintliness, were drunk on romantic memories of glorious and bloody crusades and lacked the honesty to realize the centrality of war in life’s nauseating vulgarity.)
The hatefulness of Hitler, and Communism’s fierce effort to defeat Nazism, made Socialism very popular in Europe at the conclusion of World War Two. (The CIA feared that communists were so popular that they would win elections in Italy and France, and the Agency intervened in both countries, at the end of World War Two, to obstruct a Communist triumph at the polls)
Before the optimism of 1945 gave way to the depressiveness induced by the cold war, there was a brief span of time when people were enthusiastic about attaining a world defined by brotherhood. For example, in 1945, when Russian soccer players came to Great Britain to compete, Englishmen and Russians exulted in feelings of friendship and unity. A popular Israeli song, “Tzena, Tzena, Tzena” contained, in its English version, lyrics which dreamed of a great celebration attended “by people of every nation.”
However, starting in 1979, when Margaret Thatcher seized power in Great Britain, and in 1980, when Ronald Reagan took the White House, socialism lost its luster in a world increasingly under the sway of Hollywood productions of ever-increasing stupidity, such as “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.” The denigration of the working class ethic may have reached its most gilded and grotesque apotheosis in “The Devil Wears Prada,” a movie in which beautiful, brilliant women willingly enslave themselves to a boss who has all the arrogance of the Dowager Empresses of the Manchurian dynasty.
More importantly, economic life changed, unions lost power, and the economic history of the western world underwent a seismic shift as wealth, for the first time in centuries, stopped flowing from the elites to the bottom but rather returned to the manor houses of the feudal states of what pretended to be the Democratic West.
The denigration of class consciousness sparked the revival of ethnic identities. This is not an affliction which only infects the political right. The left also forgot about class consciousness and became utterly enamored of identity politics, which had wormed its way into the royal courts of academia like a latter-day Rasputin.
In international politics, the new preeminence of ethnic identity is the ideological underpinning of a third world war.
D) People want to believe in something, and the demise of so many belief systems prompts them to bow down to the state and its ghoulish, gargantuan wars.
The late John Mc Cain, a republican presidential candidate and a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, often waxed sentimental and philosophical about the importance of finding something bigger than oneself to believe in.
Many people have apparently agreed with Mc Cain and can’t bear the prospect, voiced by John Lennon in “Imagine,” of living in a world with no countries and “no religion too.”
However, people find it hard to believe in religion. Scientific knowledge has increased dramatically in the past few hundred years. However, there has been no corresponding increase in philosophical or religious knowledge. Years ago, religion and science could have been viewed as two houses, on opposite sides of the street, of equal size. Now, the house of science has become a skyscraper scaling the upper reaches of the stratosphere while the house of religion is a doddering, decrepit shack in its dotage. For example, Genesis may suggest that the world is 6000 years old, but carbon 14 dating, and other technologies, suggest that the world is several billion years old.
Until recently, the demise of religion was only felt abstractly, i.e., people knew that religion seemed quaint but it did not change the way they lived their lives. However, nowadays people act upon their repudiation of religion, and many Jews eat Pork, and many Catholics get divorced, etc.
Of course, there has been a so-called revival of religious identity, but that revival, on closer examination, is really a revival of national and ethnic identity: A) Jews returning to Judaism do so not out of love for G-d but because they hate anti semitism and want to augment the security and status of Israel; B) when Muslims shout “G-d is Great,” they are really shouting we Muslims or we Arabs or we Iranians are great; and C) when New York Catholics tried to revive Catholicism in the wake of 9/11, they plastered the NYC subways with posters pleading with Catholics to “come home,” not to come to Jesus, and the use of the word home connoted family and a religion based not upon universal ideals but rather upon ethnic and national tastes, e.g., come home to a Christmas eve of seafood and a Christmas Day of lasagna, etc.
As already discussed, most people no longer believe in socialism. However, they don’t believe in capitalism either because it is hard for anyone to exalt and laud a rat race. Also, they don’t believe in hedonism as its benefits wither away as one ages. Finally, people don’t believe in themselves as our increased scientific knowledge provides more and more evidence of our innate frailties and rebukes free will by showing us the heavy handedness of our genetic blueprint.
And so the little, little people worship the state. And the worship of one’s own state leads inexorably to the castigation of other states just as a child’s veneration of his Father goes hand in hand with his denunciation of his friend’s Father.