The winds of catastrophe are stirring

There is a confluence of dangerous events occurring that have the potential to trigger global catastrophe at the end of the lifespans of the generation that endured human civilization’s greatest one. They are nearly all gone. Eleven years from now, it is estimated that there will be less than 1,000 American veterans left out of 16 million that served in the Second World War. Today, there are slightly more than 100,000 alive from a war that killed 400,000 Americans, and defined an era that came to be known as the “American century.”

During it, the United States became the most powerful nation in world history, and the guarantor of the international order that emerged in the aftermath of the destruction of the Axis powers. Since then, the world has seen the greatest expansions of prosperity and freedom in the annals of human history. Though there remains great injustice and inequality there has never been a comparable 80 year period of progress — ever.  The expansion of human rights and dignity, democracy, international cooperation coupled with stunning scientific, technological and medical advances are astonishing when judged against the sweep of human history. The pace of progress, change and the disruptions that come with it are continuing to quicken. They have have taken us to the brink of a new age of artificial intelligence and powerful machines that will be able to think, decide, act, and perhaps kill. We live in an era in which the genetic foundation of human beings can be altered in a laboratory, and where space will become a frontier for economic development and exploitation. 

The United States has been a clumsy and unwise hegemon at times. It has blundered and made costly errors that include interference in the sovereign affairs of too many countries with a heavy hand and three tragic wars — in both Vietnam and Iraq, which were wars of choice, and one in Afghanistan, which was a war of necessity that drifted into an experiment, and then defeat.

Yet, for nearly 80 years the United States has played a singular role, despite all of its many flaws, in holding back an inexorable tide that has risen higher across each century of human existence. It is a tide of death and suffering caused by war. 

There are two generations of Americans that have led the United States since 1961. Joe Biden is the only member of the “silent” generation to reach the White House and the first president in history to take back power from a younger generation — the “baby boomers,” whose parents were part of the generation born between 1901 and 1927.

Generationally, those Americans were part of a cohort that stands out. They are unique among the named generations that are inevitably shaped by the seismic events that define epochs of history, cultural transformations and war. 

Their children are the “baby boomers,” who were defined by the 1960s, the Vietnam War, civil rights movement, peace movement, assassinations and Watergate. They were the largest generation in American history. The “millennial” generation eclipsed them in size and dwarf the younger generations named “Z” and “Alpha.” There is only one American generation that is called “greatest.”

 The “greatest” generation was the name of a book that told the story of America’s oldest living generation by the legendary Tom Brokaw, NBC Nightly News anchor and recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The name stuck. It became the moniker of an entire generation that included within their numbers plenty of arch segregationists. Yet, it fit because the events that defined their lifetimes included the greatest economic crisis in world history, the greatest war in world history, the greatest rebuilding in world history, the greatest economic expansion in world history and the most sustained era of global peace in world history. The Second World War remains the greatest catastrophe in human history. As an event, it stands at the edge of living experience and history. Soon there will be no eyewitnesses to the landing beaches, concentration camps, naval battles and air war left. There will be no living humans who are devoted to making sure there is no catastrophe that exceeds what happened to humanity in the 1930s and 1940s. 

There are two facts of this moment that are indisputable. 

First, the United States is burdened for the first time since secession with a political party that is utterly, fundamentally, and absolutely incapable of governing. It is a hive of corruption, madness, malice, incompetence, grift, fraud and irredeemable dishonesty. It is led by a rogues’ gallery of unfit, self-interested, proudly ignorant, and despicable cowards, who have abandoned every previously stated principle and piety with acts of servility, cowardice, arrogance, duplicity and submission.

Second, the 15th century was deadlier than the 14th, as the 19th century was deadlier than the 18th, 17th and 16th. The momentum of human suffering and death was driven by the Industrial Revolution through the birth of the atomic age, and the dawn of an era in which mankind possessed the power to cause its own extinction and trigger its own Armageddon.

The 20th century cannot be forgotten because it was so lethal and demonstrated the savagery of which human beings are capable. It was a century of unequalled blood thirstiness and madness during which the greatest horrors and crimes ever recorded were committed. When it ended, two nuclear powers stood at the brink of destruction for 45 long years. They fought against each other in vicious proxy wars all over the world, but the deadly momentum of warfare that killed more people in the next war than the last was held back. Ultimately, the Soviet regime, built on the principles of totalitarianism, crumbled against the superior system led by the United States. There was even a book that proclaimed we had arrived at the “end of history.” Francis Fukuyama, its author, was celebrated and acclaimed. Today, it looks like a boast reminiscent of the arrogance of the White Star Line that played along with the hyped rhetoric that declared, “Not even God himself could sink this ship.” The collapse of the Berlin Wall was so sudden that it took on the trappings of the miraculous during the moment of excitement, liberation and possibility. Perhaps the most stunning achievement since its collapse might be the fact that for multiple living generations it seems like it never existed at all.

The first global war began in August of 1914. There was no comparable event in human history to which it was comparable. It killed 16 million people, and among them were 116,000 Americans in a spasm of violence between 1917-1918. The war destroyed the Austro-Hungarian empire, Ottoman empire,  defeated and humiliated Imperial Germany, redrew the boundaries of the Middle East and Arabia and beggared the British and French empires. The horror of trench warfare and the protracted stalemate triggered a search for meaning in the cause within the democracies whose societies were being shattered by the losses. The cause became a “war to end all wars.” Nobody in the moment could imagine worse. How could they?  

The next war would start slightly more than 20 years after the “war to end all wars” ended. The Second World War would kill more than 85 million people around the world. Most historians label its beginning as September 1, 1939, and end on September 2, 1945. The truth is that the killing began in the mid 1930s with aggression by fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan. The world looked away until it was too late. 

When the Second World War ended, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, a highly decorated veteran of the First World War and the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, accepted the surrender of the Japanese Empire aboard the battleship USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay at the beginning of the atomic age. Unlike the unconditional surrender of Germany, which was done in private, the surrender of the Japanese was the most listened to global broadcast in history on that September day in 1945. MacArthur’s comments were divided into two parts, separated by the signing of the surrender documents by the defeated Japanese representatives and victorious Allies. 

Here is what he said during the first part of the ceremony:

We are gathered here, representatives of the major warring powers, to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored.

The issues involving divergent ideals and ideologies have been determined on the battlefields of the world, and hence are not for our discussion or debate.

Nor is it for us here to meet, representing as we do a majority of the peoples of the earth, in a spirit of distrust, malice, or hatred.

But rather it is for us, both victors and vanquished, to rise to that higher dignity which alone befits the sacred purposes we are about to serve, committing all of our peoples unreservedly to faithful compliance with the undertakings they are here formally to assume.

It is my earnest hope, and indeed the hope of all mankind, that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past -- a world founded upon faith and understanding, a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish for freedom, tolerance, and justice.

After the surrender document was signed MacArthur delivered an address that spoke to the realities of the new era during which mankind held the power of extinction over the entire planet. 

Here is what he said:

Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won...

A new era is upon us. Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war. 

Men since the beginning of time have sought peace. Military alliances, balances of power, leagues of nations, all in turn have failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. We have had our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. We have had our last chance. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our matchless advances in science, art, literature and all material and cultural developments of the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.

There are few words that have ever been spoken that are more profound. They should be considered at a moment when public character has been disintegrated in a vat of MAGA acid, and one of America’s two political parties has been seized by an extremist cause that combines recklessness, stupidity, malice and dishonesty into an ideology of nothing that could cost everything. 

There is a simple question that deserves contemplation. Is humanity’s most deadly event in front of us or behind us? Has the centuries-long escalation of violence come to its end, or will the 21st century become the deadliest of all? 

The world is interconnected, and it seems to be spiraling. 

The war in Ukraine is intensifying.

The Netanyahu extremist government in Israel has incited chaos, and provoked what might become a third intifada.

Military strikes were launched against Iran, which has become the principal supplier of weapons and drones to the beleaguered, yet lethal Russians.

The United States Marine Corps opened its first new base in 70 years with the establishment of Camp Blaz in Guam. Should war come with China over Taiwan, they will be the first American ground forces in the fight in much the way the 1st Marine Division was against the Japanese on Guadalcanal.

As reported by NBC News, a four-star US Air Force General has made clear in a memo the urgency for American forces that he thinks war might come in the Taiwan Straits in 2025.

Iranian warships are currently visiting Brazil.

More than 100,000 Americans will be killed by Mexican cartel-produced fentanyl in 2023. 

There have been frivolous and corrupt eras before this one. They all ended. Most ended suddenly. Films and literature memorialize those last fleeting moments of peace before the storm that washes away the excess, and restores human memory about the meaning of war, death and suffering. 

I believe that MacArthur is correct about the linkage between human survival and human character in an era in which there are weapons that could extinct civilization in the hands of people who don’t remember — and don’t appreciate — the greatest catastrophe in human history. We are at a dangerous hour. It is made more dangerous by the collapse of character across the whole of the elected leadership of the Republican Congress.