We as spiritual beings or souls come to earth in order to experience the human condition. This includes the good and the bad scenarios of this world. Our world is a duality planet and no amount of love or grace will eliminate evil or nastiness. We will return again and again until we have pierced the illusions of this density. The purpose of human life is to awaken to universal truth. This also means that we must awaken to the lies and deceit mankind is subjected to. To pierce the third density illusion is a must in order to remove ourselves from the wheel of human existences. Love is important but knowledge is the key! |
George W. "Nuke 'Em" Bush. GWB issues nuclear holocaust threat By Ann Rose Thomas March 10, 2002-Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. And so it would be easy for me to throw my hands up in the air and say, "I knew Bush was going to start issuing nuclear threats! I'm not surprised at all!" I mean, come on. Who could have been surprised by the L.A. Times' revelation that the Pentagon is developing "contingency plans" for the use of nuclear weapons against seven nations? It's not as if we haven't had huge flashing neon warning signs blinking on and off right in front of our eyes for the past few months. In December, Bush decided that we no longer needed to observe the ABM treaty that had been in place for 30 years because it really wasn't in the best interests of the U.S. and besides, he looked into Putin's eyes and saw the Caspian Basin oil reserves . . . er, rather, Putin's soul. In February, Undersecretary of State John Bolton made the (rather moot) point that the Bush administration is not comprised of gentlemen by announcing that the long-standing gentlemen's agreement of limiting consideration of a nuclear attack to countries which possess nuclear weapons was highly overrated; we don't, Bolton opined, need to be bound by such silly proprieties. Bolton's decision probably made a great deal of sense to the kind of people who felt that the best way to "git" bin Laden was to nuke Afghanistan; after all, why would we want to nuke a country that could nuke us back? That's no fun-it's like beating up the class nerd without the help of your six best buddies! And recently, we've been treated to vague warnings of nuclear threats, and told not to worry about the government's continued operation should the unthinkable happen-the 'shadow government' ensured that the executive branch would carry on. I don't know about you, but when I contemplate a nuclear war, my trepidations aren't eased by the thought of a few pointy-headed politicos running about issuing orders to the melting masses. If you want to get right down to it (and who doesn't?), we didn't even need blatant warning signs; the biggest warning sign of all is Bush himself, who's having the time of his life after-to use his catchy little slogan for the recession, the WTC attacks and the war- "hitting the trifecta." But setting hindsight aside, the embarrassing truth is that I was surprised. Not because I thought George W. wasn't capable of such monumental stupidity - anyone who waves at Stevie Wonder and temporarily forgets that Japan was our enemy during World War II can hardly be expected to grasp that nuclear weapons aren't just fancy versions of daisy cutter bombs-but because I thought the people who are really calling the shots weren't capable of such monumental stupidity. There's a fine line between idiocy and insanity, of course, and so it may be that the Bush administration is merely insane instead of stupid. But in the long run, it doesn't much matter whether it was stupidity or insanity that brought about the decision to present nuclear holocaust as a viable option, because in the long run-as they also say-we'll all be dead. Rabid right-wingers, who've been chomping at the bit to restore Cold War mentality to all aspects of our political system, are predictably sanguine about the "contingency plans." Jack Spencer of the Heritage Foundation is quoted by Reuters as saying that this is "the right way to develop a nuclear posture for a post-Cold War world." This is but one of many quotes that we will no doubt hear over the next few days in support of madness. Those of us who think that any attempt to revive the nuclear arms race is perhaps not so nifty will be treated like frightened little children (hopefully, they'll have the common sense not to "reassure" us with claims that Bush can be depended upon to make the right decisions regarding nuclear attacks, since that would be sure to strip us of the last vestiges of equanamity and cause us to run shrieking in terror). On the off chance that my own quiet shrieks of terror are being read by the sub-literate, let me offer a few brief explanations for why I was dismayed to hear about the Pentagon revving up the nuclear war engine. First and foremost is the language of the "contingency plan" package. There are three contingencies which could precipitate unleashing hell on earth. The first contingency is, and I quote, "against targets able to withstand a nonnuclear attack." In other words, if we're going after a pocket of al Qaeda fighters who just can't be killed by conventional means, we've got the green light to just drop a nuclear warhead on them. If we decide that an actual invasion of Iraq by U.S. forces would bring about too many American casualties, and bombing just isn't doing the trick, we can nuke 'em. And so on. The second contingency is that a nuclear attack can be used in retaliation for a nuclear, chemical or biological attack. Just speaking for myself here, if my country turns into an atomic wasteland or we all drop dead from smallpox, I'm not going to be terribly reassured by the promise that a lot of other people are going to be slaughtered, too. My first priority is to ensure the safety of my family and friends, but if the unthinkable happens and they all cease to exist, that doesn't mean I want the rest of the human race to be obliterated as well. I've read many comments by the survivors and descendants of survivors in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but nowhere have I read a regret that Japan wasn't able to play tit for tat. The third contingency is the one you won't hear mentioned too often by the hawks who think that the best way to prevent a nuclear war is to escalate the probability of its happening. We can send out the nukes "in the event of surprising military developments." What does that mean, exactly? One could try to spell out various matching scenarios, but on this one I'm going to trust my gut reaction-it means whatever the hell Bush & Co. want it to mean. And speaking of gut reactions, therein lies another explanation for my unease. To put it in the simplest terms possible, the likelihood that nuclear war will end life as we know it is somewhere in the neighborhood of 99 percent. Perhaps I'm being an alarmist; perhaps it's only 97 percent. Regardless, common sense tells me that once we break the taboo of a nuclear attack, all bets are off. There are seven countries listed in the "contingency plan"-China, Russia, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya and Syria. The inclusion of Russia, our fearless leaders tell us, should not be interpreted as a suggestion that Russia is our enemy. Russia is our friend! After all, Bush and Putin recently issued the following joint statement: "The United States and Russia have overcome the legacy of the Cold War. Neither country regards the other as an enemy or threat." So there you have it-Russia's not a threat. But just in case, we're going to develop a plan to nuke them back to the Stone Age. And this, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with the rising tensions over the fate of all that oil in the Caspian region. After all, you haven't heard anyone on CNN talk about the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, have you? And if CNN's not talking about it, it must not be important. According to the Los Angeles Times, the "contingency" report makes it quite clear that nuclear weapons should be viewed as a "tool for fighting a war." Remember that the next time some eerily calm regressive patiently explains that nuclear threats make a dandy deterrence to actual war. Whether they're a good deterrence or not is irrelevant when the Pentagon isn't viewing them as such. While I was surfing around on the Internet looking for information about all things nuclear, I came across a collection of Haiku written in 1998 by third-year students at Nagasaki Oshima Junior High, Japan*, in response to the nuclear testing going on in India and Pakistan. There's nothing like a heartfelt plea from a child to make you realize how stupid we adults can be at times. One of the students, Noriko Takaoka, wrote the following: Nuclear weapon When used It's terrible Hiroshima, Nagasaki We know this. There are so many reasons why an escalation of any type of nuclear threat (if I had the time, I'd also address the section of the "contingency report" that discusses building handy, portable nuclear weapons to be used on the battlefield) is a really, really bad idea that it's impossible to list them all. Impossible . . . and unnecessary. We may not know this as well as the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I pray that we never will. But we know this. We know this.