Choices and Consequences
“War is a racket.” Major General Smedley D Butler
War is a racket, but it’s also a choice. All wars are wars of choice. The aggressor decides how he begins, and his enemy decides how they respond. At no point is it all down to fate or destiny. This is as true now as it ever was.
The local conflict ignited by Gavrilo Princip in June 1914 became a World War which extinguished the lives of twenty million because the great powers of the day, Germany and Britain, chose to make it one.
It is not popular to say so but if Britain – the pre-eminent world power of the time – had stayed out of it then world history would have been very, very different. Without World War One there would probably have been no Russian Revolution and no Holodomor (in which an estimated 5 million starved to death). More importantly, without World War One there would have been no Versailles treaty, that thing more than any other, which prepared the ground for Hitler. When the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, remarked at the start of the conflict in August 1914, “the lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime” he did not realise the chain of cause and effect that was being unleashed.
But in war, once the die is cast it is very hard to go back, so World War One was followed by another war of choice, World War Two. Though Hitler undoubtedly was committed to expand his Reich into Eastern Europe and Russia, there is plenty to suggest that he knew that war with Britain would be too much for him.* But instead of coming to some accommodation with Hitler, Britain, still just about the global superpower in 1939, opted to respond with a war of choice. I know, this is even more unpalatable than saying that the First World War was a war of choice, but it is no less true. A European War was a disaster. But a World War, which is what the British response in 1939 and 1940 helped create, was a catastrophe. And not least for the country over whom the war was fought, Poland, which was then comprehensively sold out and subjected to four decades of communism for its trouble. The Empire that British soldiers supposedly fought to defend was bankrupted and for the second time that century the flower of youth was slaughtered under the banner of defending freedom. Of course, people always say that with Hitler it was different, because of the Jews and the concentration camps. But were these the same concentration camps invented by the British in the Second Boer War (1899-1902)? Were these the concentration camps run by the Nazis with brutal efficiency using American made technology? And were these the same Jews for whom evidence of their plight was known as early as 1942 or 1943, and when anti-Hitler elements within Germany sought help to rise up against the Fuhrer and sue for peace the Allies point blank refused to help?* Hitler was indeed the maniac we all know him to be, but that fact does not absolve many, many others from their responsibilities for the protracted death and destruction brought about in those years. Hitler’s choice to invade Poland was a dark act, but it was compounded when the Allies categorically refused to consider anything less than total war. This tells me that war is not a struggle between good and evil. It is an insanity, a contagion which humanity has still not yet discovered a cure for.
The point is not to bow down in front of tyrants. It is that once the rubicon is crossed, once the choice is made to go to war, forces are unleashed within man’s psyche which cannot easily be stopped. With rare exceptions, war begets more war, and does not come to an end until the horror and the madness have burned themselves out. Contrary to the history we have been taught, the delineation between good guys and bad guys disappears once war breaks out. The British philosopher and peace activist Bertrand Russell said it better than me:
“War does not determine who is right, merely who is left.”
War is a matter of consciousness, which is why so few people can grasp the futility of it. Enlightened, awake and aware people do not kill other people. They co-operate. And if they can’t co-operate then they communicate. And if they cannot communicate then they stay away from each other. One more time for those at the back; war is a low vibrational activity, conducted by fools and egged on by maniacs. Anyone who claims to be spiritual, but in the next breath tells you about the vital need to defeat Putin urgently needs to adopt a new spiritual practice, because a full-scale war with Russia is a war where there can be no winners.
Prior to 2022, most informed people knew that Ukraine was one of the most corrupt places on earth. While this does not, in any way, validate Putin’s actions, it ought to make us think twice about why civilisation is being sacrificed on Ukraine’s altar? Putin is undoubtedly a bad guy, but here’s another unpalatable truth, which 8 out of 10 spiritual people will bypass before breakfast; the world is full of bad guys. It always was and it always will be. What you have to make sure of is that war doesn’t turn you into one of them, which it does the moment you take sides. Once you kill, life is over for you, not them. The souls of those who cheerlead for that killing are marked, and that mark is not easily erased.
The West desperately needs a reconnection with reality. Our society has unquestioningly, and with a total lack of self-awareness, adopted the luxury beliefs of human rights, democracy and equality while ignoring the fact that our very existence as a technological industrial civilisation teeters precariously on a knife edge. Anyone who believes that the main issue of the 21st century is how to redistribute resources and opportunities, in an equitable manner, to oppressed minorities, needs to take a long walk off a short cliff. The issue – the only issue - is how does the human race survive?
The answer to this is through tolerance which means that Putin and his demands will have to be accommodated, somehow, in part, in some way, sooner or later. I am only saying what any sane person already knows. Either we take an uncomfortable stretch toward a negotiated peace now, or we do it later, when we have laid waste to half the planet and killed hundreds of millions in the process. Will it get that bad? I don’t know. But it could, and we are nearer to that fate now than we have ever been, mainly due to the imbeciles running the show.
Accusations that I am somehow carrying water for Putin here aren’t going to register I’m afraid, because I know what others have forgotten, that war is neither a joke nor a computer game, and that the presence of nuclear weapons on both sides makes this an existential risk. If Putin tells his people that “we must defeat the West” or if Western leaders tell us that “we must defeat Putin” be sure to recognise that there is no “we” here. In the event of a nuclear exchange, government officials and the super-rich will be spirited off to underground bunkers. In the event of a full-on ground war involving Western troops it will be ordinary men and women who will do the fighting and bear the suffering. The ghouls who run foreign policy and zombie generals who run the military have no skin in this game and do not care for the off-the-scale-level-of-suffering that further escalation of this wholly avoidable war will bring.
This is a particularly dangerous time. Putin has been released from the repressive restriction of his Personal Year 4 and will now be feeling bolder and more expansive in his Personal Year 5. The Manchurian Candidate-cum-President Biden is desperate for something, anything, which he can showcase as a win and the arrogance of European leaders has rocketed off the chart. The normally peaceful voices of the UN are missing in action and Twitter (the toxic soup in which policy makers and leaders swim daily) is chock full of pro-war voices. The Fog of War has already descended, and it is no longer possible to discern truth from lie amid the incessant media propaganda that is pumped out by both sides. This is Peak Insanity. Either we are going to turn back from the brink, or we are going to prove, beyond any doubt, that humans aren’t really that advanced after all.
War is the last refuge of the scoundrel, but the urge for peace is a sign of higher consciousness. Ignore all those who parrot the simplistic mantra of Russia Bad, West Good. The sign of an enlightened society is not that it defeats its opponents in battle, but that it finds a way to neutralise human beings more destructive impulses, peacefully, working those elements round to a more peaceful point of view, steadily, over time, through trade, exchange, involvement, co-operation and dialogue. This could have been done at any point since the Maidan Revolution in 2014. Instead the US, NATO and EU continually poked the bear, and only now are surprised by its response. But there’s still time. Time to see that where this is going there can be no winners.
Lower consciousness is the problem, so higher consciousness is the answer. If enough people can become consciously aware of the fact that IN A NUCLEAR WAR THERE CAN BE NO WINNERS then the resultant shift in consciousness will bring about new choices, with better consequences. But this can only happen if enough people actually look, with serious eyes, and stop pretending that everything will automatically be ok. The highest vibration is not positivity, it is truth. And the truth is that in a nuclear war there can be no winners. Repeat this phrase, to yourself, and to others, over and over again. And maybe, just maybe, it’ll seep through far enough to halt this madness. There are no guarantees here, but what I do know is that continuing on the current path can bring nothing good. We are all to blame here. We became too arrogant, too comfortable, too sure of ourselves, too convinced of the inevitability of progress. And, above all. as the wise Russian, Aleksandr Solzhenitzyn said, “We forgot God. That is why all this has happened.” We can only hope that enough of us can make the re-connection in time. Like everything, this work begins with yourself.
* Plenty of evidence about Hitler’s intentions towards, and private thoughts about, Britain can be found in Hitler’s Table Talk, compiled by Hugh Trevor-Roper and Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer.
