Article: Our greatest achievement: a third world war within one century

It has not been 100 years since the First World War, and the Third World War is upon us. We have not even begun the preparations for the celebrations of the 100 years since the First World War ended, but we are ready for another one. What an achievement! Does it not feel great, as a humanity, that our history can be so bloody and deadly? What is wrong with us? Are we not in control of our collective destiny? Or do we have a death wish, a secret desire to see this world end?

We are lucky that the Second World War ended with only one side having nuclear bombs. We are lucky that two of those nuclear bombs ended the Second World War. However, the Third World War will begin where the Second one ended, with nuclear bombs all over the place.

We will not be celebrating that Third World War in one hundred years, I can assure you, because there will not be anyone left to celebrate anything. Did you not realise what a Third World War was all about? If not, it is time for you to wake up. The Third World War will be the last one. You can always dream that a few will survive, but it will be so destructive, it is likely that none of us will survive.

The very first time I became aware of war, I was 5 years old, perhaps 4. It was right after the Vietnam War, a war I heard nothing about until I was much older. I had five years of blissful ignorance before I found out that in some parts of the world, people were killing each other by the thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, by the millions, and that, for millennia.

I don't remember many specific events from that early age, however I remember my sister telling me all about war very clearly, as it was so shocking and stunning, I didn't sleep for a week. It might have had something to do with the way she described it to me. She simply said: "War is soldiers coming into our house with guns and shooting all of us dead right here!" As far as I could try to define war today, I find it so perfect a definition, coming from the mouth of a 7 year old little girl, that I will stick with it. This is what war is.

If she had been really bright, and had wanted to frighten me to death, she could have added: Who needs soldiers? One nuclear bomb and we are all gone!

War at its simplest level, is about human killing other humans, and that's it. So the immediate question that comes after that is: why? Why would they do such a thing? What could possess them to kill us all?

Try to explain that to your children, you will quickly realise that, on that topic, they are certainly more mature than you, because nothing in their innocent mind could justify such an action. Unless they were born right in the middle of a war, and then again, they probably wouldn't understand anything about it, they just know that soldiers come and kill their family and bombs are falling everywhere, destroying everything, killing everyone. At that point, I guess the reasons are unimportant, you have to run for your life.

As I grew older and got more educated, or brainwashed, I finally understood, of course, we have to go to war, we have to eradicate them all, they have to kill us all, it is in the nature of humanity to find reasons to go to war and take over power and steal natural resources of others. Or bring them freedom and capitalism, or Christianity, over some other weird and incomprehensible religion which would definitely take away our freedom.

I might have thought at that time that it would also be acceptable for me to kill all my neighbours and steal all their possessions, and convert them to anything I felt like, but it seems that there were many laws to prevent me from doing just that, and if I dared to try, I would quickly rot in a prison for the rest of my life.

Funny how we have all these laws to insure we don't decide to do personal wars against our neighbours, but once the government decides it is time to go to war, then it is permitted and you will be trained to do just that. So, it appears to me that governments are above the law they oblige us to obey.

I never understood wars, I was never able to justify them. Only when I was confronted with the idea that Germans were about to conquer the whole world and decided to attack us, I finally came to term with the fact that you cannot avoid war if your sudden enemy decides to declare war against you. In my mind, before I was even a teenager, I thought there were some barbaric nations out there who still believed in wars, whilst us, as pure and innocent as we were, would only go to war in self-defence.

The problem was that I came to meet many German people, I visited Germany a few times, and these people were as civilised as any of us. In fact, they were the nicest people I have ever met. I had to turn around and ask myself, how could these people go to war? None of them looked particularly threatening.

Then I understood that no nation decides to go to war, governments or a few lunatics decide for them. Unfortunately the population appears incapable of saying no to their governments, and so war is still inevitable at the time of writing these lines.

I also came to understand that my own country has gone to war when we started it, along with our supposed allies including mainly the United States and the United Kingdom. Under the pretence or disguise of humanitarian aid, keeping the peace and whatever, we went there, we killed a lot of them, we got contracts to rebuild afterwards and we took power.

We insured that communism or socialism or some other bad political system other than democracy would not take root, we insured that some undesirable religions would not grow too quickly and take over the world by surprise, unless of course it was Christianity. Subsequently we probably got lots of natural resources for much cheaper, and made a few others quite rich, which was probably ultimately the reason we went to war in the first place.

There are always people fighting these things, seeing through the games our governments play, and yet, their plea is never heard, we always go to war. Millions get out on the streets to denounce it, and yet, it has no impact whatsoever. I find this extraordinary. The population is incapable of stopping the war machine once the government decides to go to war, it is puzzling.

When the majority of the population says no, the government should fall. I think it is in most constitutions, and yet, governments rarely fall or listen to their constituents. It seems that even our political representatives, supposed to talk for us, are powerless to stop their leaders. It is as if our governments are like tyrannies; and democracy, at the end of the day, doesn't count, doesn't work.

Even more puzzling, the PR machines of the governments today are so powerful, they can actually go to war without any good reason, and yet get everyone to accept it as the only solution, and most surprising, they get re-elected at the next elections.

You have to admire such ultimate power, that you can be a tyrant, and yet have everyone love you, give you all the money and carte blanche, to declare war on the Middle-East for no valid reason, and then still love you and re-elect you afterwards (assuming the elections and opinion polls are not rigged, as we all know now that they are).

This world has become a very sad place to live in, and as long as a strong overhaul of the political system is not accomplished, then we will continue to go to war to serve the interests of a few rich people and corporations.

I was brainwashed for most of my youth and teenage years, I thought I was living in the best country in the world, that I could be proud of my flag, that we were respectable people, we had a democracy, we had freedom. What more could you ask when you read all the horrors of history?

I thought humans had evolved, we were not like in the past, we were now more clever, intelligent, reasonable, self-defence kind of people, even though the Second World War was not even 30 or 40 years behind us at the time. And the worst part of all this, is that most of the population is as blind now as I was when I was a kid. They still believe they are living in a democracy and that terrorism is not government sponsor terrorism in order to go to war.

War pays, it is an industry all in itself, and a lot of people get rich over it. If only the whole population could benefit from it, if only suddenly the price of petrol and other resources were to fall down dramatically all over the United States, after taking control of all the Oil in Iraq. However, this is not happening, the prices are going up and up and will never go down. In fact, these wars are ruining the country, the debt is so large now, we are entering the worst economic crash in history. These wars made for profit don't even profit the population, and so there is really no justification for them.

Pre-emptive strikes cannot be justified either, let the first bomb fall over our country before annihilating the whole of the Middle-East. And twenty lost souls succeeding in destroying two towers in New York, in the most suspicious circumstances, does not count either. A place being blown off, or five, or twenty, in the well referenced archives of our own government sponsoring terrorism, is too suspect to start wars.

"My first world war, this is so exciting!" War is not a game, none of us really understand it, we are not there witnessing the hundreds of thousands being bombed and dying. And yet, on the charts of every video game store all over the Western World, all the games are war games of shoot them up. I wondered about that for a long time, how it is that these kids love these games that are so boring, without a plot or story to them, but filled with tanks, helicopters, soldiers bombing everyone, etc., and now I feel it must be part of an American and other governments' ploy.

They are usually so quick to move on to protect the poor fragile mind of their children, and yet, they let them be exposed to such violence with impunity, when the word "f*ck" or "sh*t" in a film or a television series is automatically beeped. Dear me, what would we become as a nation if our lovely children were to hear "sh*t" or "f*ck" on TV, and yet, let them all kill soldiers and civilians in video games all day long. It makes no sense.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against these games being sold and played by children, I would not want that to stop, we should have the right to play these games. I however question how and why the market is saturated with these games to the point that no other games at all reach the charts. I am also puzzled by the fact that no government listens to the crying parents who want this carnage to stop, whilst they otherwise move so quickly on less important issues.

I think the governments in the Western World have been preparing a whole new generation of warmongers, who will find it natural to go to war and kill mercilessly without thinking twice about it. After all, the reality these days is just like the virtual world of a video game. Does it matter if your victims are real instead of virtual, is there really a difference? Perhaps not.

So we've been prepared for quite a war, it is coming very soon, I would think we are all ready now. Iran is next. The Third World War is looming over our heads. And once again we will all be powerless to stop it. The people will say no, go and march in Trafalgar Square and Westminster, Washington and Parliament Hill in Ottawa, and yet, we will go to war, because it is in our nature, and because the government said so.

I have rarely witnessed love and compassion in this world, I witnessed a lot of jealousy, envy and anger. If there is a God, you can be certain that we will all burn in hell, there is no question about it. Whether you are filled with compassion and love or not, does not matter. If you haven't done anything to stop wars, or even if you have not been successful at stopping them, then you can be most certain that you will burn in hell. (Is my fear mongering working? No? I don't understand, it works so well when the government does it.)

War is a reality of our species, it has always been, it will always be, no matter what we could do to avoid it. Power, money, religion, are all still very popular, and they are all responsible to some degree for wars. I cannot see wars being eliminated any time soon, and I am not certain what could ever ensure that there will never be another war in this world. Unless we were already all living in some sort of global Big Brother State without the chance to breath or think, whether we were aware of it or not. Even then, as long as one nation would still want to resist that state of affair, we would still have to go to war.

Shame really that the United Nations failed to prevent wars, and will fail again. Could have been our last hope, but now we know that illegal wars are of no consequence, and crimes against humanity only count for leaders from the enemy countries.

It is a question of time before the next World War, it will always be just another question of time before the next World War, no matter how many World Wars there will be. Are we all ready for that? In a sense, I think we are, in other ways, I feel we will never be.

It has been a while now since the last significant war, even though at the moment we are at war with Iraq and other States supposedly harbouring terrorists. I believe the Third World War is overdue and will be upon us any day now. I don't feel sorry about it, I don't feel sad, as I feel it is in our nature and it is unavoidable. Whatever the reasons, whatever how badly we do not want it, whatever people will do to try to prevent it.

There is no democracy in this world despite the illusion of it, the population is powerless to stop their leaders and to prevent the next World War. The third one within 100 years, there is really no hope for people like us, we never learn. We'll just have to, once again, learn to survive it all, if we can this time.

This article is an excerpt of the book "Destructivism, The Path to Self-Destruction", written by Roland Michel Tremblay. It is available online for free on his website, it also contains all his previous political articles:

http://www.crownedanarchist.com/destructivism.htm

Roland Michel Tremblay can be contacted at this email address: rm@themarginal.com