Clear and Present Dangers (and Opportunities)

Situational Awareness in Election 2022

Eisenhower’s Farewell Address - January 17, 1961     Kennedy’s American University Address – June 10,1963

“There comes a time in human affairs when we must seize the bull by the tail and stare the situation squarely in the face.” – Attributed to W.C. Fields - 1880 – 1946

By James Heddle, Mary Beth Brangan - EON

Warmongers’ Worst Nuclear Nightmare

Reviewing our decades of work on election protection for our piece Those Ignorant of History…, brought home to us the inseparable linkage between our election integrity work, and our parallel reporting on nuclear energy and weapons policy and the quest for peace and nuclear abolition.

A recurring nightmare makes advocates of the permanent war economy (PWE) wake up screaming in a cold sweat, chewing on their security blankets, and losing control of their excretory functions. It goes like this:

They find themselves trapped in a world in which the following inexorable sequence of terrifying events occurs –

·       Democracy Breaks Out, Based on Non-Violent, Informed Mass Resistance, Simultaneously in Nations Around the World

·       Electronic Voting Systems are Replaced by Paper Ballots, Hand-Counted, with Results Independently Verified

·       Peace Breaks Out as a Result of Overwhelming Majority Public Will

·       Nuclear and Conventional Weapons Disarmament Breaks, Out Enforced by Binding International Agreements

·       Opposing Military Alliances Sink Into Desuetude and Dissolve

·       The PWE Breaks Down and Collapses

One can empathize – given their worldview – how threatening such a scenario must be for these folks – however unlikely it may seem.  But, their terror is not baseless.

In a universe based on the Uncertainty Principle, stochasticity happens.

Existential Crisis

The charged domestic and geopolitical atmosphere in which the current US midterms are occurring is dominated by what is seen by many as the most existentially perilous nuclear situation since the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Emerging evidence of US sabotage of the Nord Stream Pipeline adds to the tension.

As Stephen Young of the Union of Concerned Scientists puts it, “The Biden administration’s Nuclear Posture Review is, at heart, a terrifying document. It not only keeps the world on a path of increasing nuclear risk, in many ways it increases that risk. Citing rising threats from Russia and China, it argues that the only viable U.S. response is to rebuild the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal, maintain an array of dangerous Cold War-era nuclear policies, and threaten the first use of nuclear weapons in a variety of scenarios.”

Despite a Biden election pledge to reduce U.S. arms exports, a new report by Quincy Institute says “current US arms policy and practice too often fuel war rather than deterring it.”  The Guardian reports the, “US has increased, not decreased, its weapons sales around the world, including to countries with repressive regimes.” Truthout observes that the, “Arms Industry Sees Ukraine Conflict as an Opportunity, Not a Crisis.”

Given today’s clinically bi-polarized, psyop-saturated environment, it is worth noting that two US presidents – one from each party – both dared to speak truth at a earlier time in our history that bears alarming similarities to our present moment.

Nobody has analyzed and articulated our situation more accurately than Republican President Eisenhower did in his January 17, 1961 farewell address:

We annually spend, on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations. This connection of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience.

The total influence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every city every State house, every office of the Federal government.

We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved, so is the very structure of our society. 

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted.

Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Kennedy’s Fatal Steps Toward Peace

Three years later on June 10, 1963, at a time when US military planners were prepared to destroy the world with a preemptive nuclear strike in order to ‘save it from communism,’ Democratic President John F. Kennedy gave a commencement address to the graduating class at American University in Washington, D.C entitled “A Strategy of Peace.”  In it, Kennedy, defying the prevailing propaganda-induced zeitgeist – and his own security advisors and Joint Chiefs of Staff - pointed out that the only real final victory is the achievement of peace. Citing the Chinese aphorism that “The longest journey begins with a single step,” he laid out a series of steps necessary to de-escalation that still are urgently relevant today.

“First,” he said, “Let us examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief.  It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable – that mankind is doomed – that we are gripped by forces we cannot control.”

“For, in the final analysis,” Kennedy said, summing up his vision of inter-dependence, “our most common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.’

The President and Nikita Khrushchev had established a secret, backchannel exchange of letters (initiated by Khrushchev) lasting over two years. Both were under pressure from their militaries and intelligence agencies pushing for nuclear war. Kennedy once said to his brother Robert Kennedy that, because of their long correspondence, he and Khrushchev had come to have more in common with each other than with their own bureaucracies.

Then as now, the prospect of ‘peace breaking out’ was seen as a dire existential threat to what Columbia Professor Seymour Melman famously and accurately termed the permanent war economy.  A U.S. News headline screamed plaintively, “If Peace Does Come – What Happens to Business?”

While their backchannel dialogue and the ‘Peace Speech’ eventually led to the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the passage of the Limited Test Ban Treaty ending atmospheric testing (signed by both Kennedy and Khrushchev), and to a temporary reduction in Cold War brinksmanship, it was not well received by the American permanent war establishment or their Soviet counterparts.  Widely viewed and read in the Soviet Union, it was largely ignored and blocked by US media.

It is a matter of historical record that, within months, Kennedy was murdered by elements of his own government, and within a year, Khrushchev had been removed from power.  The Cold War continued for another 25 years.

As James Douglas points out in his book, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, “President Kennedy’s June 10, 1963 call for an end to the Cold War, five and a half months before his assassination, anticipates Dr. King’s courage in has April 4, 1967, Riverside Church address, calling for an end to the Vietnam War, exactly one year before his assassination.  Each of those transforming speeches was a prophetic statement provoking the reward a prophet traditionally receives.  John Kennedy’s American University address was to his death in Dallas as Martin Luther King’s Riverside Church address was to his death in Memphis.”

Mark Crispin Miller further explains in a recent article, “Thus the coup in Dallas was meant not just to eliminate that wayward president, but also to enable some precautionary measures to prevent the people’s choice from ever getting in the way like that again. Beyond JFK’s obstructiveness, in other words, the deeper problem was America’s electoral democracy—the system that allowed the people to elect him, and would then have enabled them to re-elect him, and then elect whomever else might work on their behalf—like, say, Bobby Kennedy in 1968. Nor was it only Democrats who might get in the way: Eisenhower also wanted friendlier relations with the Soviets….”

Both the presidents’ speeches, in their contemporary climate, were considered treasonous in many circles, just as today those pointing out that the US/NATO’s encircling of Russia, precipitating a ‘Fuck-the-EU’ coup, and infiltrating, funding and arming Ukrainian Nazi elements, and sabotaging a vital pipeline might fairly be seen as aggressive provocation for Putin’s defensive invasion, are labeled and libeled as traitorous Putin Lovers.

Situational Awareness as Spiritual Practice – Getting Beyond Truth Hesitancy

The inconvenient and ‘politically incorrect’ truth is that our electoral democracy is even more vulnerable to manipulation today than it was back in the days of Ike and JFK.  Denial of that truth, and the attempted criminalization of patriotic skepticism, exacerbate the problem.

In our work, we aim to balance optimism without denial with evidence-based pessimism without certainty.

Systems theory teaches us that, when a system is ‘very far from equilibrium – such as this one clearly is – small inputs that would have little effect on a stable system, can precipitate massive systemic shifts and transformations.

Though the current system may seem terminally un-reformable, we believe it is important to keep in mind that, in a stochastic universe, no outcomes – either negative or positive from our point of view – are inevitable or certain.

This seems like an opportune time for us all to commit to persist in working for change with the idea that knowing the truth can, indeed, set us free.  

Let’s begin by following Fields’ sage advice and ‘seize the bull by the tail and stare our situation squarely in the face.’

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Mary Beth Brangan and James Heddle co-direct EON - the Ecological Options Network. The EON feature documentary SOS - The San Onofre Syndrome will be released later this year.