The essay "War in Eurasia" by Layne Hartsell, PhD, and Alexander Krabbe, MD, is published in a series with three installments. The third story is presented in today's post.
Korea IT Times Celebrates 20th Anniversary with New Contributors: Global Opinion Leaders Share Insights (July-December)
JULY COVERAGE SCHEDULE
- Morgan Wright, Chief Security Advisor at SentinelOne: "Digital Defenses for Medical Databases"
- Doug Milburn, Founder of 45Drives: "Demicrosoftification: A New Paradigm in Enterprise Computing"
- Emanuel Pastreich, President of the Asia Institute: "Miracle in Ulaanbaatar"
- Jin Hyung Kim, Emeritus Professor at KAIST: "Democratizing AI: Innovation for Everyone”
- Layne Hartsell, PhD, and Alexander Krabbe, MD: The essay "War in Eurasia"
- Eric Jaremalm, CEO of Midsummer: "The virgin market for industrial thin-film solar roofs"
Moving on and up
1. Part One: War in Eurasia: History, Tragedy, and the Path to Peace
2. Part Two: NATO's Role in Eurasia: Power, Conflict, and Security
3. Part Three: Examining the Precipice of World War III
By Layne Hartsell, Ph.D., and Alexander Krabbe, M.D.
World War III
An open evaluation of the perspective of the Russians is needed. Putin is one of a number of leaders who have pointed out the fact of the risks in the region now that NATO has expanded six times towards Russia since the end of the First Cold War; and yet, many intelligent, educated people in the West have turned the deadly situation, becoming an existential threat, into a morality game and caught up in a negative personality cult. Aside from the fact of constant war of Europe against the world for more than 500 years of expansion, of all of the current conflicts today, there are two major wars with nuclear power plants in the middle and then nuclear-armed states on various sides.
Much of the war in Ukraine has been fought in the east near the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear
Power Plant, the largest in eastern Europe just above the Azov Sea. The other is located in Israel near Dimona. Such a scenario was not supposed to happen; “nowhere near” is the position of the nuclear scientists concerning war and nuclear power plants. By the time of Fukushima (2011), there were five meltdowns within 35 years of 80 years of the atomic industry compared to the expected risk of 1 meltdown in 2500 years.
The nuclear scientists have been taken aghast by the technology they created as they said at the World Energy Congress in Gyeongju, South Korea in 2013 “Fukushima will always be a shadow over this industry.” However, miscalculations in the current wars could make Fukushima small. Recently, there was a drone “mishap” over the Zaporizhzhia plant with both sides blaming the other. Then, a leak of German military officers discussing Taurus missiles for Ukraine left German Chancellor Scholz “reeling”, the Financial Times reported. Considering what Nazi Germany did to the Russians, such actions by Germany are seen as a severe provocation and should be understood by Europeans as a threat to their own security.
The world community suffering from nuclear trauma, both physically and mentally from devastations such as Fukushima, Chernobyl, and Hiroshima, and then current risk, is another insanity that is becoming normalized. Add this insanity to a general blatant disregard of what climate scientists say and we find the larger normalized insanity of civilization. If it all were to get out of hand then it would not matter much who is to blame – we might feel “right” but only for a very short time.
We were thinking that we would like to survive and for others to survive as well along with uncountable numbers of other species. We have also been primarily concerned about young people in Ukraine (and Russia)who we thought were almost certainly going to be sent to their deaths to be ground up in a war machine that favored the Russian state. We watched in horror from a drone video as a Ukraine soldier jumped from the back of an armored vehicle towards a fellow soldier. As he landed an explosion occurred and we watched as he dragged himself back to the vehicle, leg in shreds tangled to a foot in a boot – landmine.
These kinds of facts and trajectories seemed to not have any sway in the international dialogue, except for a few realists such as Professor John Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago, an expert in political science and international affairs. Others claiming morality, or veiled self-indulgence, pounded the tables for war at many cafés and pubs and churches, making it almost certain and socially acceptable that a loss of hundreds of thousands of men and women and children in Ukraine would open up another kind of “lebensraum” for investors and mining companies for an omnicidal strip mining of the land. We have to have our reality distortion field to create EV cars and gadgets because we are going to save humanity and the Earth.
The other consideration, that seems to be lost on many, is that if Ukraine were to be able to somehow “win” and force the Russians back with severe losses,and a weakening or risk of the implosion of the Russian state, would also present a severe existential threat as more than 7,000 nuclear weapons have to be dealt with as the country breaks apart. Russia, Eurasia and Transatlantic are different than nuclear-armed South Africa, though nuclear weapons were also a major concern at the time of the end of Apartheid.
Then, there was the utterly insane statement that was repeated widely that if Ukraine had kept its nuclear weapons, then it would not have this current problem with Russia. That is true, but only because Ukraine would likely not exist today, and neither would we. Clearly, many of the idealistic moralists understand nuclear deterrence but cannot see the picture they themselves adhere to that is now escalating in Eurasia as NATO involvement increases. Whatever morality many have, we satirized it in our second article on such faulty reasoning when it comes to actual living reality. Such moralizing and inaction look like a cover for cowardice. Cowardice will have to come to terms with what cannot now be brought back.
From the beginning, unfortunately, and today tragically, the march to escalate the war with Russia was much larger than the saner, realistic voices. We are left wondering. Most media framed the conflict in terms of a cartoon or black-and-white movie, including “free speech absolutists” on social media. This propaganda is not unusual, and in fact, dates back 100 years to Wilsonian Idealism and the manufacture of consent for dangerous escalation and war to ‘bring in modernity.’
However, today such toxicity can spread immediately due to digital media readily available and only delayed by sleeping and waking patterns across the globe. Today, this treacherous media machine that creates Disney-like fantasies has reached proportions, and subtlety, unimaginable to propagandists such as Bernays and Goebbels. Such a media should be met with open reasoning and sensibility and democratization; but as of yet, has not, as still another strain of technician moralists have gotten a hold of a social media company and are obsessed with a fairly irrelevant culture of woke, while their own extreme right-wing, ultra-capitalist movement, aware of slavery, plunder, and genocide in American history, wants to double down.
One of several tech barons wants to create a “tech colony” in California and do “ethnic cleansing” in Silicon Valley, “a succession call” reported the New York Times, in an apparent attempt to get rid of a communist apocalypse, created by extreme capitalism. This very real techno-utopian fantasy of a “tech-governed city with citizens loyal to tech companies” is playing out on a land that supported the Ohlone Indians, who are of course not mentioned.
Other techno-utopians went to Puerto Rico and when confronted by indigenous people about Columbus and now another wave of dominance, were told “You're going to be a part of it whether you like it or not” of our civilized society of “superheroes from all over the planet that are like the wizards…” making things happen. Such civilization is undoubtedly a more vicious strain of “…the blessings of liberal institutions…and the blessings and advantages of enlightened civilization” that U.S. General Nelson A. Miles spoke of in July of 1898 to a ‘backward’ society of ‘primitives.’ Woke, with a big “W”, is indeed a threat to the Constitution and democracy as they are only jealous of the fact that the other business faction controls the U.S. Government and gets to cast a less dark shadow of politics on society. The assumed right to outrage is quite extraordinary.
Keegan writes “Within five weeks the world was at war,” intended to be a terrifying way to open a tome on how the reality of the comfortable cowardice of linear thinking on the trajectory of conflicts in the real world can quickly move into exponential escalation. It is this overall sense of threat due to multiple international conflicts, militarism, and war around nuclear reactors that we have called the Specter with its potential existential threat of culminating in the use of tactical nuclear weapons and subsequent thermonuclear war.
Our are not simply the concerns of regular members of society, a physician and a science researcher, but are a matter of concern at the highest levels of government, particularly the UN and China, both stating that nuclear war is unwinnable and that current conditions are alarmingly increasing existential risk. We suspect that the only way out of the war now is to cede the previous Minsk II area to Russia, which will then set up its own “neutral” region, militarized and in control of important minerals. Likely, instead of that, the war will continue to escalate as the West and East maintain confrontation. This situation is, of course, a colossal failure when the West and Russia along with the world community could have maintained territorial integrity by de-escalating threats in the region and worked on integration with Asia into a better ecologically centered civilization, one which Asia, particularly China, is far out ahead of other countries.
Today, as Ukraine loses ground, such as in the city of Avdiivka, where the retreat was so rapid that virtually all of the hardware, technology, and weapons ended up in the hands of the Russian army, and as presidents in Europe are speaking of putting NATO troops in Ukraine, it is past time for a response from citizens. The description of Keegan’s book ends with a very human sympathy for the soldier, a reflection on industrial-scale war,“individual efforts history has not recorded—‘the anonymous millions, indistinguishably drab, undifferentially deprived of any scrap of the glories that by tradition made the life of the man-at-arms tolerable.’" And yet, those glories are what people naively accept, again and again, as incentives to go to fight wars that in reality are not their own.
While it is always difficult to see what is going on in war, we can gain some perspective on what is happening and we can act. As the US and other governments have sent $100s of billions in funding, hardware, and support for what amounts to a business operation parading as democracy, Ukraine is losing as could have been predicted and as a contingency NATO is preparing troops for deployment and doing their best to turn the Russian state into the “good guy.”Russia, no different in coveting the region, moves likewise. As nuclear drills are underway in Belarus. We ask when will there be a movement against another world war that looks to have begun?
About the Authors
Layne Hartsell, Ph.D. USA (雷恩∙哈特塞尔 - 마이클 레인 핫셀) - 3E: Energy, Economy, Environment – is a research fellow at the Center for Science, Technology, and Society, Department of Philosophy, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, and Research Professor at the Asia Institute, Tokyo/Berlin. Past affiliations: assistant professor, convergence studies, Sookmyung Women's University and Research Institute for Asian Women - Asia-Pacific Women's Information Network Center in Seoul. Research professor, Sungkyunkwan University and the Advanced Institute of Nanotechnology, Seoul/Suwon. Lecturer at Mahidol University, Siriraj Medical Center, Department of Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics, Bangkok. Researcher at the University of Virginia College of Medicine, Charlottesville. He is a member of the board at Korea IT Times.
Alexander Krabbe, M.D., Germany, is a pulmonary specialist and physician for internal medicine and peace activist in Berlin. He was a citizen journalist at OhmyNews International in Seoul from 2004 to 2009 and is currently a research fellow at the Asia Institute in Berlin/Seoul.
