As another October approaches, the beautiful season of colors begins here in New England, call it October’s Surprise Party. The turning leaves with all their colors come to announce the earth’s glory, the possibility of peace and happiness for all.
Yet as the month transpires and November nears, I think we might expect what for many will be the unexpected, as Bob Dylan reminds us with “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Listen: “I heard the sound of a thunder that roared out a warnin’/I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world.”
A Black Swan event or the expected?
And if that hard rain does fall, it won’t just be those ravishing leaves that will be pounded down and die. First comes the beauty, then the dying follows, as every fall decrees. And while nature always brings the rebirth of spring, in their hubris, humans, thinking they are gods, have devised a technological solution that can bring all life to an end for good – nuclear weapons.
That their government is provoking their use by waging a war against Russia via Ukraine and backing the Israeli Middle East slaughter and genocide is not a thought that most Americans choose to entertain as they blithely go about their lives. Such lucidity is deemed too depressing.
Dylan wrote that song in the summer of 1962, 62 years ago (a symbolic number by the way), shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis that October when nuclear annihilation was avoided at the last minute when John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev came to their senses.
Today we are even closer than ever to a nuclear war, as those who closely follow such events tell us. Scott Ritter, the former U.S. Marine and UN weapons inspector who tried to stop the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 by reporting that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is one. He is joined by a host of lonely voices crying out their warnings: ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern, journalist Pepe Escobar, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the late Daniel Ellsberg and Randy Kelher, the author James W. Douglass who has been writing and demonstrating (with his wife Shelley) against nuclear weapons for nearly half-a-century, peace activist and former CIA officer Elizabeth Murray, et al. (my apologies for limiting the list). Many of these irenic and fatidic voices warning the world of the closeness of nuclear war have appeared on Andrew Napolitano’s illuminating Judging Freedom interview show. Their voices are easily available, for now.
Ritter, who is being hounded by the U.S. government, has just written an article, “Life Pre-empted” whose opening line reads as follows: “If you’re not thinking about the end of the world by now, you’re either braindead or stuck in some remote corner of the world, totally removed from access to news.” [my emphasis]
He is right, although contemplating our nearness to nuclear war no doubt gives most people such a serious case of the megrims that they turn away. It is understandable but must be resisted if the world is to avoid disaster. A world-wide antinuclear movement is necessary, one that links the dangers of the U.S. aggressive Ukrainian proxy-war against Russia with the U.S./Israeli genocide of Palestinians and its expanded war throughout the Middle East together with the U.S. provocations of China.
Even the corporate mainstream media are here and there starting to recognize the growing danger of nuclear war. Of course, they blame Russia for this, as they do for everything, even as most of the world correctly points the finger at the United States.
For it is the USA together with its NATO lap dogs that have brought us to this point, as they have spent decades surrounding Russia with troops and missiles and waging a war to conquer Russian via Ukraine. For those who don’t know this history, they are in for a big surprise if Russia responds and the nuclear missiles fly, as Pepe Escobar recently tweeted about a statement by Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev, the former president of Russia and presently the deputy chairman of its Security Council:
IT’S THUNDERBOLT TIME Medvedev Unplugged does know his Latin. But then Russian educational standards are in a class by itself, as I never cease to learn here in Moscow. Commenting on the update of Russia’s nuclear doctrine, Medvedev noted, “This change in our country’s guidelines for using nuclear weapons, in and of itself, may cool the ardor of those of our opponents who have not yet lost their sense of self-preservation. As for the dim-witted, only the Roman maxim remains: caelo tonantem credidimus Jovem Horace’s Odes. AnRegnare …” All of us who studied Latin know that comes straight from Horace and it goes straight to the point: thunder out of the sky reminds everyone that Jupiter rules. Medvedev’s metaphor is a beauty: the only way the “dim-witted” – Hegemonic and the vassal swamp – will learn is when the Russian Jupiter releases a thunderbolt.
Let us hope it doesn’t come to that. But the danger of a nuclear war has increased dramatically as the Biden administration continues to up the ante with its support for Ukraine and Israel. If it approves the Ukrainian request to use U.S., British, and French-supplied long-range missiles for strikes deep inside Russia, all bets are off. And the world awaits Russia’s ally Iran’s response to the current Israel bombing of Lebanon and the killing of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement, a war crime of another government that believes there will be no repercussions for their actions.
The American public’s problem is not really ignorance of Latin (that is a symptom of a much greater ignorance), but being unable to recognize the truth about its leaders’ insane aggression and nuclear gamesmanship. A knowledge of the Roman and Greek Classics reminds us that evil is real and tragedy descends on those who surpass the limits. The tragic flaw – hamartia – is not part of the American lexicon. Disney World talk is.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently issued a warning to the US/NATO that Russia’s nuclear policy has changed as a result of US/NATO/Ukraine’s attacks inside Russia. “Aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, with the participation or support of a nuclear state, is proposed to be considered as a joint attack on the Russian Federation,” he said. As a result, he added, “We reserve the right to use nuclear weapons in the event of aggression against Russia and Belarus.”
But the Biden/Harris administration’s idiot leaders push the nuclear envelope thinking Russia is bluffing. In their desire to conquer Russia, they have lost all reason and continue on a trajectory that started long ago but has now hit a crisis point.
For those who think this war against Russia will come to a peaceful conclusion, I refer them to a series of articles in the propaganda organ of the U.S. “deep state,” which is really very shallow and obvious – the journal Foreign Affairs ( January/February 2023) – the mouthpiece for The Council of Foreign Relations. There you will read articles promoting the destruction of Russia, regime change, and the removal of Vladimir Putin, etc. All justified by America’s God-given right to rule the world. One article by Robert Kagan, the neoconservative adviser to Republican and Democratic administrations and the husband of the infamous Victoria Nuland, a central figure in the 2014 US-engineered Ukrainian coup d’état, is laughable, but that it is taken seriously is a sign that the ruling elites are so deluded and intent on never stopping to try to destroy Russia that they will claim anything, no matter how contrary to obvious facts. They just make things up to fit their narrative.
In “A Free World If You Can Keep It,” Kagan writes, presumably with a straight face, the following: “Similarly, Putin’s serial invasions of neighboring states have not been driven by a desire to maximize Russia’s security. Russia’s never enjoyed greater security on its western frontier than during the three decades after the end of the Cold War. . . . But at no time since the fall of the Berlin Wall has anyone in Moscow had reason to believe that Russia faced the possibility of attack by the West.” [my emphasis]
This crap is so laughable if it weren’t so dangerous and delusional. If Kagan actually believes what he is saying, which I doubt, then he is dumber that a rock. Since the end of the Cold War, US/NATO has, contrary to their promises, continually moved east, surrounding Russia right up to its borders with troops, bases, and missiles aimed at Russia. Clear provocations and threats that Russia has been complaining about for a long time.
***
So October approaches, the month of Halloween, actors, and masks. Gore Vidal got a laugh when years ago he referred to Ronald Reagan as our “acting president.” But we’ve had six acting presidents since and their acts have left millions dead and wounded around the globe, including thousands of American troops. The American electoral system is a horror show, a spectacle in what Guy DeBord called “The Society of the Spectacle.” Many Americans have acquiesced in this ongoing tragedy, playing their parts in this deadly charade. The ghosts of all these victims walk among us, and they will haunt us until we come to life by admitting our own complicity in their deaths. The show must not go on, but it will, as long as we keep acting our parts.
The Classical scholar Norman O. Brown so well describes our stage set: “Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again. All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.”
So many Americans mask themselves from this savage truth in a futile, face-saving, phony performance. The act is wearing thin. It is time to see through the illusion that a world war is not in the making, unless vast numbers arise from their sleep and oppose it.
It is not just our “leaders” who perform at the Devil’s Masquerade Ball, which is the charade we call American Exceptionalism or The American Way of Life. I think of how all persons are, by definition, masked, the word person being derived from the Latin, persona, meaning mask. Another Latin word, larva, occurs to me, it too means mask, ghost, or evil spirit.
The living masks light up for me as I think of ghosts, the dead, all the souls and spirits circulating through our days. The murdered ghosts demanding retribution, and the spirits of the brave and truthful ones urging us to oppose the killers.
While etymology might seem arcane, I rather think it offers us a portal into our lives, not just personally, but politically and culturally as well. Shakespeare was right, of course, “all the world’s a stage,” though I would disagree that we are “merely” players. It does often seem that way, but seeming is the essence of the actor’s show and tell.
Who are we behind the masks? Who is it uttering those words coming through the masks’ mouth-holes (the per-sona, Latin, to sound through)?
October’s surprise party is coming.
“I heard ten thousand whispering and nobody listening,” sings Dylan.
Reprinted with the author’s permission.