by Fernando Caracena ©Fernando Caracena 2023
I am amazed by how self-contradictory people's opinions and actions are. A large number of the group that advocate taking cap pistols away from little kids also are in favor of shipping very powerful weapons to feed one side of a war against a thermonuclear power. This is choking on a gnat and swallowing a camel for sure. In my opinion, there are other massive contradictions that suggest that we are educating our children in the wrong direction. We are turning out a large ignorant, logically challenged generation that is very susceptible to manipulation by cleverly pitched propaganda. See the interview of of one propaganda expert, Prof. Mark Crispin Miller of New York University (NYU).
Logic is a critical ingredient in human thinking, which is necessary if the human race is to survive in its next phase of development. In our thinking, we need to couple logic with a keen sense of proportion.
Guns kill and cap pistols frighten and perhaps send the wrong message to our kids that we want to rear properly. OK, if you believe that, then you should logically oppose the proliferation of thermonuclear weapons. The killing potential of thermonuclear weapons is huge and an existential threat to humanity that can wipe out our whole species in a very short time. Logically,we should demand that our governmental representatives and spokesmen take steps to have nations give up these horrible weapons of mass destruction. A crazy gunman killing a dozen people at a big box store or supermarket is certainly a tragedy that we should take steps to avoid. But a couple of nuclear bombs dropped on urban centers reduces the number of people killed by crazed gun shooters to an almost infinitesimal level by comparison.
The first atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed over a hundred thousand people. I know that the loss of every single human life is a tragedy, but we must not let Stalin's statement stand, that mass killing is just a statistic. A hundred thousand people killed is a hundred thousand human tragedies.
Since that mass killing of over one hundred thousand Japanese, we have continued to develop much more deadly bombs, which use the normal atomic bombs as fuses to ignite thermonuclear reactions and produce explosions on much more massive scales than ordinary atomic bombs. See the table of energies released by the explosions here. Not only that, but the bombing results in civilian casualties, which these days would be in the millions.
Read "The Devastating Effects of Nuclear Weapons" for the gruesome details of the existential threat to humanity of thermonuclear nuclear wars. Couple that with the current politician's playing chicken diplomacy with nations that have stockpiled megatons of thermonuclear destructive potential in an effort to prevent such a war by pursuing a strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). Diplomacy which is supposed to offer a peaceful and logical way out of destructive confrontation between nations is presently being used in a frivolous, illogical way.
A secondary effect should this diplomatic game of thermonuclear chicken fail, is that it would accomplish a complete reversal of any effort to prevent global warming by producing a severe cooling of the planet called nuclear winter that would result from a thermonuclear war. And the Doomsday Clock put out by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the closest to Armageddon than it has ever been. Meanwhile the sheep may safely in their illogic and ignorance.
The United Nations (UN), which was advertised as a forum to achieve wold peace and disarmament through rational discussion, is now another layer of government instead. Its mandates sometimes distort legitimate statements into calls for irrational actions in areas, which may not agree with the best thinking with its expert practitioners. The UN becomes instead a forum for posturing and increasing the voice levels for threats of war. The result is a loss in credibility of all levels of government. A sense of proportion and logic demands that we hold politicians' feet to the fire to consider the people's safety and security as top priority and abandon their MAD strategy. Governments plus MAD makes me favor anarchy over rule of MAD law.
To the gun control people I say, "First get the governments to disarm themselves of the weapons of mass destruction and then the public at large may be inspired to voluntary give up personal weapons." Meanwhile the governments of the world are setting a very bad example of promoting and maintaining world peace. In acting as they have over the last decade, the logical results will be a progressive loss in their credibility over time.
There is an old Spanish saying (see discussion on Quora by Lucas-Villar, author): "Debajo de mi manto, al rey mato" , which means “Underneath my cloak, I kill the king"... it is a metaphore that indicates that no one and no rule governs your inner world except yourself. Under your cloak—that is within your mind—you can even kill the king, which means you can do everything… killing the king represents the greatest crime, so if you can do that, you can do everything. The expression is used to call people off when they tell you what to think, or want, or prefer."
Another way that the above Spanish sentiment is expressed is "Viva Yo!" See the article in Euro Weekly News Media: 'Trying to explain ‘Viva Yo’.
Perhaps the Viva Yo sentiment described above, follows from the life experiences of Spaniards surviving the Spanish Inquisition. If you want to read a historical novel that conveys the the horror of the madness that took over Spain during this period in history, look at
"Torquemada" by Howard Fast.
There are also videos about the Spanish Inquisition to watch: 1, 2. The first of these is in an info-cartoon form. The second is a drama having human actors. The Spanish Inquisition was a big motivator for y ancestors to leave Spain, even those who were not of Jewish descent. Another result of the Spanish Inquisition is that it brought Spain down rapidly from its pinnacle of world power to third world status now reversed. So you see that the sentiment of “Underneath my cloak, I kill the king", is well earned by Spaniards through their own experience. So what is the logical connection with the current state of civilization?
If the hellish distortion of society has infected one successful civilization, such as in Spain, and brought it down fast, in the process destroying many innocent lives, it can happen again. We have seen it in history. We see parallels of it happening now. It is logical to examine present circumstances and determining if it is beginning to happen again, but this time globally.
Speaking of threats to humanity that have happened in the past, form which we should prepare to defend ourselves in the future, there is the question of the Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) vulnerability of our power and communications grid. An intense solar flare, The Carrington Event, happened on Sept. 2, 1859 that caused sparks to fly through the world's telegraph network. A repeat of such an event would take out our power and communications grid. It could take down the whole of modern civilization and could cause the death of billions of people. More discussion about our vulnerabilities to the failure of our critical infrastructures will follow in future posts.