'I do not know what weapons World War III will be fought with, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.'
- Albert Einstein.
It's a grim thought, but a fitting way, I feel, for The Pessimist's Guide to Modern Living to hang up its cape after several months of fighting back against those little irritations and niggles which are, undeniable, the most pressing matter concerning a modern-day human being. So, with no further ado, I shall bring this most terrible of elephants in the room (or, rather, the blog) into the forefront. Let us never forget the fact that:
WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE
Now that that is well and truly out of the way, the time has come to tackle the real reasons behind the fact that
WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE
and decide how exactly we could avoid this fate. You know, the one which means that
WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE
So, let us proceed.
It's a dark story which begins over sixty-five years ago when a German-Jewish scientist, one Albert Einstein, discovered that E does indeed equal M timed by C doubled. I mean, God only knows how he worked that out, but I assure you, thats exactly what my reliable sources have told me it equals, and they're all as believable as Orson Welles' blackface portrayal of Othello. Anyhoo, this formula managed to create a giant mushroom of smoke, dust and flame, which swept through the Japanese locales of Hiroshima and, later, Nagasaki, destroying everything in its wake. Thus was born what is perhaps the most significant invention of the modern age - the nuclear bomb. It says a lot about the excitement this invention generated - here was something to finally put an end to the carnage of the present conflict, but the excitement was not to last. Already, a certain darkness, over-confidence and - dare I say it? - frivolity came into being. Yes: frivolity. Naming the most deadly weapons in the history of time 'Little Boy' and 'Fat Man' is, at least to my mind, particularly sinister, as if denying the seriousness of what these relatively small objects were capable of doing. Regardless, World War II, having already raged for six years, was drawn to a close with the final surrender of the Japanese, and peace reigned across the globe.
Or did it?
My inate pacifism could produce an entire series of essays musing upon the nature of warfare and destruction. In fact, almost all fiction I write has something to do with conflict or devastation. For as long as I can remember, my creative writing has been undeniably against organised carnage, totalitarianism and civilian murder and for democratic socialism, peace and human-wide unity. I could go on for a million words discussing the righteousness of these nuclear attacks, but I am well aware my questions would generate some rather fierce debate: how can I suggest the mass murder of civilians with a weapon against which it is impossible to fight back could be unjustified, when if the War had continued more soldiers would eventually have succumbed to the might of the Japanese army? I sometimes wonder myself, but I cannot shake the feeling that we're constantly missing the key argument in this decade-old debate. J. Robert Oppenheimer recognised it when he infamously declared 'now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' The dropping of these bombs may have been a speedy resolution to the carnage of the trenches, but it cannot be denied that the device which ended the destruction of 1939 to 1945 will forever be a shadow hanging over God's green Earth, having bought us extra time before destroying us all. Even the frequently recited moniker of 'World War III' is unlikely, because how will there possibly be a war when there won't even be a chance to have a fight? It's a pretty disturbing thought, isn't it?
After the War, terror and alarm spread like wildfire. Tensions between US/USSR relations began to tighten, eventually reaching a point where we all almost died (or, in the case of most of our readers, were prevented from being born) - the Cold War, which 'raged' from 1947 to 1991, brought the world to the brink of destruction. We had seen what nuclear weaponry could do, so, naturally, utter disbelief was all that could be expressed at the fact that these terrible things actually began to be widely manufactured. What commenced was a long drawn-out period of political and military anxiety with the USA and its NATO allies sitting down frowning fiercely at the Soviet Union and the communist world, each leader with his finger poised unwaveringly over the big red button which would launch a swarm of devastation which would undoubtedly engulf the world and bring us all back to a world something like the one out of Terminator. Neither side had the guts the press the button, but neither side, likewise, had the common sense to kiss and make up.
It was a period of great cultural significance, of course. The political climate influenced Orwell's classic dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), telling of a totalitarian world following a cataclysmic Third World War very different to Huxley's earlier Brave New World (1932), and from then on the theme has been rammed down our throats incessantly. You can see just how bad the situation was when you realise that of Ian Fleming's twelve James Bond novels, Casino Royale (1953), Moonraker (1955), From Russia with Love (1957), Goldfinger (1959), Thunderball (1961) and The Man with the Golden Gun (1965) each deal with nuclear or Cold War-related themes, as do the films Dr. No (1962), From Russia with Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965), You Only Live Twice (1967), The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), The Living Daylights (1987) and Goldeneye (1995). Likewise, thinly-veiled anti-nuclear propaganda has taken the form through the ages of Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), James Cameron's Terminator series (1984 - 2009), Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) - adapted by Ridley Scott into Blade Runner (1982) - Stanley Kubrick's comedy satire film Dr. Strangelove: or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and many more.
The War ran constantly, alternating moments of relative calm with significant near-apocalyptic moments, such as the Korean War (1950-1953), the Suez Crisis (1956), the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962), the Vietnam War (1959-1975) and the Yom Kippur War (1973); yet, of course, the bomb was never dropped again, and we're all still here; but the conflict remains, hidden from public view but undeniably still there. Political leaders simply haven't learned. Man will not destroy the Earth, despite what we are told about 'mankind being base and evil' and 'humanity being responsible for its own destruction'. It has to be remembered, whenever these arguments are made, how few people actually had a hand in making these bombs and how many throughout the decades (and even at the time they were first produced) have opposed them. We can all rest assured that, should be be alive when the bomb goes off, that we as a species had nothing to do with it. Who created our mutually-assured destruction? The political leaders, of course. As is always the case with them, conflict breaks out through their disagreements, but as always it is the common people who suffer. Nuclear bunkers were built across the country in response to the nuclear threat, but they were of course primarily for the safety of politicians and royalty. The rest of us would have to make do with hiding inside our houses and hoping everything goes okay. That's just the way of the world, it seems. Even the people who worked at the bunkers were disposable, placed there to measure radioactivity in the atmosphere but only given enough provisions to last for a months or so, after which time they would have been forced to step out into the world. 1980s pop group Frankie Goes to Hollywood probably said it best when they released their infamous anti-nuclear hit single 'Two Tribes', from their debut album Welcome to the Pleasure Dome (1984 - my, isn't that a date which just keeps following us around?).
If our leaders could just get into a ring and fight it out, wouldn't it all be a lot better for the rest of us? I'm not an anarchist or someone who truly believes we could necessarily do without our leaders, but I firmly believe all authority figures the world over need to look at their reflections in the mirror and ask themselves just why they keep hovering their fingers over the dreaded buttons because, really, what's the point of it all?
Every year, new wars break out; political reports keep getting worse and worse; and terrorism is increasingly coming to the forefront of society's consciousness. If you listen to the news enough, the all-powerful scaremongers that are the media would have you believe destruction is imminent, but in reality we simply can't tell either way.
I don't actually think it will happen for a long while yet, though. In fact, I feel particularly inclined to side with George Orwell, in fact, who, in 1945 published an essay entitled 'You and the Atomic Bomb', which aptly concludes with the most accurate description of what the bomb really means.
'Had the atomic bomb turned out to be something as cheap and easily manufactured
as a bicycle or an alarm clock, it might well have plunged us back into
barbarism, but it might, on the other hand, have meant the end of national
sovereignty and of the highly-centralised police state. If, as seems to be the
case, it is a rare and costly object as difficult to produce as a battleship, it
is likelier to put an end to large-scale wars at the cost of prolonging
indefinitely a "peace that is no peace".'
It is not therefore, a case of
WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE
But, I feel, rather that
MAYBE IT WILL HAPPEN, MAYBE IT WON'T. WE JUST CAN'T TELL, BUT THERE'S NO SENSE WANDERING AROUND PANICKING ABOUT IT FOR THE REST OF OUR LIVES. WE'VE SURVIVED SO FAR, SO WHY NOT FOR A BIT LONGER. MAYBE THERE WILL BE A GLOBAL ARMISTICE. WHO CAN TELL? NOT I. OH WELL, SUCH IS LIFE. LET'S GET THROUGH 2012 FIRST, SHALL WE?
And if it did happen, it wouldn't necessarily mean the end of the world; the world would most certainly still be there, but after thermonuclear energy had done its work, would it really be a world worth keeping?
William D. Green
No comments:
Post a Comment