The new global threat has arrived, and just in time.
As all effective propagandists know, it’s not sustainable to keep drumming the same doom catalyst through the 24-hour news cycle forever. Especially when your promises of mass death never quite materialize. Eventually the human livestock will start to experience apocalypse fatigue and run out of fucks to give about your narrative.
And so, with the Covid hysteria dying down, it behooves the sociopathic elite to choose a new global threat and to focus all media attention on that threat. Refresh the citizens’ fear reserves. Get those cortisol levels pumping again. And use the resulting panic to further their agenda of absolute control over the world and its people.
Not every world event is an elite conspiracy, Starr!
True, not every world event is planned and carried out to further an elite agenda. Russia has been casting its covetous gaze toward Ukraine for a long time. There is no shortage of blame to go around, and that blame falls squarely on NATO-aligned nations as much as it does on Russia itself. Putin is an authoritarian dick, and so, I assume, are his counterparts in the Ukrainian government. (The world, in case you haven’t noticed, is pretty much entirely run by authoritarian dicks.)
With such a long build-up and so many interwoven complicities, it’s unlikely that this conflict was planned for the express purpose of creating fear in western minds at this moment. Nonetheless, it is advantageous for the powers that be to seize upon the Ukraine crisis as the newest in a long line of calamities to induce fear. Fearful minds are pliant, and the ruling elite want nothing more than to shape them in support of their own despotic goals. Not all major events are conspiratorial, but all major narratives gracing your newsfeed are constructed and framed to benefit a conspiracy of elites.
This is not to say that what’s happening in Ukraine isn’t horrific. Of course it is. War is always horrific. It’s just that it’s a bit ironic to hear the American president (and other American politicians) wail about “threats to democracy” and “respecting Ukraine’s sovereignty,” when just a brief glance at recent history will illustrate where the U.S. actually stands on meddling in the affairs of other countries, from interfering with their elections to boots-on-ground invasions to bombing cities. It’s okay as long as it’s the US doing it.
And why, when there have been dozens of ongoing conflicts around the world over the past—well, forever—is this all of a sudden something we are supposed to sit up and pay rapt attention to? Why are we getting non-stop coverage of Ukraine when the media couldn’t muster even a semi-occasional update on the state of affairs in Yemen over the past decade? Why is this being reported as a potential World War III, when the United States used the “Mother of All Bombs” in Afghanistan in 2017, and no one over here even heard about it? Is it only a world war when most of the fighting is in Europe? I don’t get it.
But seriously, what are the chances that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine spirals into a nuclear World War III?
In my opinion, it’s highly unlikely. Mutually assured destruction is a strong nuclear war deterrent. Much stronger than, say, economic sanctions. Ukraine might have given up its impressive cache of nukes in 1994, but if Russia were to use nuclear weapons, it would undoubtedly be risking return fire from the US, the UK, and France.
But in what loony bin scenario would Russia decide to use nuclear weapons on Ukraine? The whole reason Putin and his predecessors have always wanted to return Ukraine to the post-Soviet fold is because of its abundant natural resources. Ukraine is a breadbasket. It’s the whole reason the Soviet Union subsumed it in the first place, and a big part of the reason why the Holodomor happened.
Likewise, no world leader is going to send its weapons flying at Russia in retaliation for the Ukraine invasion. Ever wonder why there have been no nuclear attacks since the first bombs the US dropped on Japan during World War II? It’s because other world powers quickly beefed up their own nuclear arsenals soon after the technology was invented. Any subsequent use of nuclear weaponry would have ensured the demise of the user nation as well as its enemy. World elites are nothing if not protective of the land and resources they see as their domain, and painting missile targets on that domain is not at the top of their list of defense strategies.
But wait! It has just come to my attention that a *small* nuclear war might be a good thing, according to HuffPo.
That’s…hilarious. And written long enough ago to have been acted upon by now. But I’m not buying it. Even to “alleviate” their pet doom catalyst of global warming, the elite will not initiate nuclear war—small or otherwise. It all comes down, again, to the potential destruction of resources.
And besides, Bill Gates already improved upon that idea. Turns out we can get the same sun-dimming, life-strangling effect from a little nanodust sprayed into the atmosphere. No need for large scale material resource destruction.
So if you’ve been plagued of late with nightmares of mushroom clouds and radiation sickness, relax. Bloviating political speeches aside, it’s extremely unlikely to happen. Kind of like a coronavirus with a 20% kill rate.
And, on the off chance someone in power does get a little too antsy with his finger over the nuke button, the fact is there’s nothing any of us plebs can do about it. At least nothing immediate. That may not be a comforting thought, but it is a liberating one.
So let’s not hunker down under our desks and waste the next two-or-however-many years of our lives consumed with this fabricated fear porn. Let us instead adopt a consistent, principled stance on warmongering—that it is always evil and never worthy of our support. Let us turn away from the dystopia that is modern geopolitics, while always keeping a skeptical eyebrow raised at the tyrants’ disaster narratives. Let us each individually go about our lives with as much agency as we can muster. We will practice joy, we will create good things, and in doing so, we will work each day to free ourselves from dystopia’s grip.
Thank you for reading!
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-Starr
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