“But it was too late to save the Great Republic. She was rotten to the heart. Lust of  conquest had long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad had taught her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who had applauded the crushing of other people’s liberties, lived to suffer for their mistake in their own persons. The government was irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich and their hangers-on; the suffrage was become a mere machine, which they used as they chose. There was no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but the pocket.” —Mark Twain

We refuse to admit it, but we humans are in a perilous position. Not being civilized—and as I see it, unlikely to be so in the foreseeable future—we have at least two ways to bring about our extinction: blowing ourselves and pretty well everything else to pieces, or reducing our environment to an insupportable desert. Either way, in the equivalent of the universe’s twinkling of an eye, we could be gone.1

Comprehending the potential of self-annihilation doesn’t come easily. The conventional wisdom is that America is the owner of the largest nuclear arsenal in the world.  Ostensibly, this is the best defense we can buy. But others are also proud members of the nuclear family: Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, Ukraine, Egypt, South Africa, South Korea, North Korea, and Australia, with Iran possibly warming up in the wings. And it is certainly possible that fifty or so other nations may soon join us in this nuclear club. As Jonathan Schell points out in The Seventh Decade, the common heritage of human thought for more than the last sixty years has “defeated every attempt to deliver the world from the danger of nuclear annihilation.”2 Mutually assured destruction keeps us all from dropping the bomb, but it doesn’t stop anyone from building one. How strange it is that our safety depends on how much destructive capacity each of us owns. Is America the safest since we own the most? This is an obsolete concept in a world where a nuclear device may soon be small enough to fit in a suitcase.

With this happy state of affairs in mind, let’s move to the other potential man-made extinction event, the one that is now underway.

As we know, the first law of ethology is “The greater the variety of species, the greater each has for survival.” We are all, in a myriad of ways, dependent upon each other: lions on springbok, elephants on acacia trees, fish on plankton, squirrels on nuts, cows on grass. We all have our survival requirements, which must be continuously met; otherwise, we die out. And this has happened often enough during the 3.5 billion years of life on this planet—itself the best part of 4.7 billion years old—for, as we have seen, at least 99 percent of all life forms are already extinct. So what are the chances for survival of humans since we are so new to this earth and so keen on killing each other?

Our behavior is very likely to create our own extinction by destroying the diversity of life on which we omnivores depend. We destroy things not by accident, as other forms of life may do, but by design. We plow the fields and scatter, but to do so we cut down trees the squirrels and birds need; push the big animals like lions and elephants, as well as our own companions, apes, chimpanzees, and gorillas, off our arable lands into smaller and smaller habitats; and even inflict the captivity of zoos or the cruelty of cages for medical research. We fish the rivers and seas so rapaciously that aquatic life is disappearing to a vanishing point. We have accomplished all this in just a few dozen years. Worse still, as our numbers grow, so too do the rates of extermination of natural animal and vegetable life. Living in the most diverse of environments, we ignore all warnings and pillage the earth as if it can survive us. Well, it can and it will. Unlike us, the earth has the astonishing capacity to regenerate itself. So if the nuclear holocaust doesn’t get us, we can rest assured the destruction of our earth will. We are doing precious little to stop it.

Our nature is to want to believe in hope for a decent future. But “how easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again,” as Mark Twain pointed out. This lie that we the people are in control of our destiny is obvious to all of us if we ever get around to thinking about it. We the people don’t own the airwaves, the media, think tanks, NGOs, lobbies, and certainly not those we vote into power, with the exception of a very small minority that you can count on your fingers. Political power today is centered in the corporate world, just as well-known members of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bilderberg Group are the key decision makers influencing that world. It is these privileged few who control the financial, industrial, banking, and other institutions, such as the IMF and the World Bank. They rule the world through ownership of Capitol Hill, the British Parliament, the European Union in Brussels—democratic sideshows that give these interests the pretext of being bystanders, whereas, in reality, they are the puppet masters. And we the people are their puppets.

Republican and Democratic lawmakers, British parliamentarians, European politicians, government bureaucrats, corporate officials, Ivy League deans, and military generals are all well known to us. There is no conspiracy here. They are out in the open, speaking their minds, yet saying virtually nothing while generally behaving admirably. Nevertheless, they share a common purpose. Through their obsession with buying influence, they have come to control the destiny of all of us around them. And while there is no obvious collective impulse, they are themselves influenced by a common interest: the power of the purse. What money dictates, they will be guaranteed to follow. If they are told to bail out Big Banks, continue war in the Middle East, devastate our rainforests, allow illegal immigration, maintain a drug culture (legal or illegal), it really doesn’t matter to them. That’s business. They are mere spokes in the wheel of fortune, grinding personal liberty and freedom of thought into the vacuum of endless TV claptrap. In that sense, they think they own us—not all, of course, but enough of us. George Orwell certainly got that right.

The Quality of Renewal is Not Strained

It is hard to visualize a turning point, a way out of this global decline. But we don’t have a choice. We must come up with a radical new view. Now that we see our very existence growing more tentative every day, it is time to make the paradigm shift to a far healthier future.

Let me be presumptuous and offer a compelling possibility. I am thinking now of a worldwide revolution inspired by the moral majority of the world’s people: women.

What might happen if we took into account the ideas, suggestions, insights, and wisdom of such valued brains of (to name just a few) Vandana Shiva, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Helen Caldicott, Michelle Bachelet, Tarja Halonen, Maud Barlow, Mary McAleese, Portia Simpson-Miller, Vaira Vike-Friberga, Marghanita Lasky, Helen Clark, Rutthy Taubb, and the millions of other intelligent women the world over who have so much to offer this world but are so rarely listened to.

“Know thyself” was the foundation of Greek thought twenty-five hundred years ago. Since then we men have been found wanting. The making of the modern world must be less about building bombs and destroying the life forms with which we coexist, and far more about men and women living together in harmony with all forms of life on this beautiful planet, cooperatively using the brilliant resources of all of our brains.

1. Jim Knapton, Defining the Civilized State http://thedebtweowe.com/changing-our-world

2. Jonathan Schell, The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger (2007–ISBN 9780805081299)

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The preceding was a guest post for The End Of The World by author Jim Knapton.

To know more about Jim Knapton’s new book, Changing Our World: Solutions for a Future, visit his website at http://www.ottolinepublishing.com/. You can send him mail at info@ottolinepublishing.com.

If conservatives are supposed to be so intensely concerned with national security, then why aren't they upset that Barack Obama wants a treaty with Russia that will cut the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal to less than 10 percent of Cold War levels?  If something this irresponsible would have been proposed during the 70s or 80s, conservatives would have screamed bloody murder.  But now that all eyes are on the threat of Islamic terror, very few conservatives even some concerned about the potential of nuclear war anymore.  But they should be.  Barack Obama's recklessness could end up resulting in the end of the world as we know it.

Under a memorandum of joint understanding signed in July, deployed nuclear warheads for both the United States and Russia will be reduced to below 1,700 on each side within seven years of signing a new treaty.

The Start I Treaty expired on Friday, and in a joint statement, the presidents of the U.S. and Russia both expressed their desire to work out the final details on a new treaty as soon as possible: "We express our commitment, as a matter of principle, to continue to work together in the spirit of the Start treaty following its expiration, as well as our firm intention to ensure that a new treaty on strategic arms enter into force at the earliest possible date."

So what would reducing the U.S. nuclear arsenal to less than 1,700 warheads mean?

It would mean that that U.S. nuclear arsenal would be less than 10 percent of what it was at the height of the Cold War.  Just check out the chart below....

This kind of radical reduction in the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal is a serious threat to national security.  The massive U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal has been one of the key factors in keeping America safe for the past 6 decades.  Now all of that is changing.  An arsenal of 1,700 warheads is far, far less of a deterrent than an arsenal of 20 or 30 thousand warheads is.

But Barack Obama seems absolutely determined to disarm America.  During one of the first major foreign policy speeches of his administration, Barack Obama openly called for a world free of nuclear weapons.

While most observers dismissed his comments as "wishful rhetoric" at the time, it turns out that Barack Obama was deadly serious.

At this moment, the U.S. nuclear arsenal consists of approximately 2,600 deployed nuclear warheads, with another 2,500 in reserve and 4,000 more that are scheduled to be dismantled.

But now the Obama administration is seeking a deal with the Russians that would reduce the nuclear arsenals of both the United States and Russia to less than 1,700 warheads.

However, there are reports that the Obama administartion views those cuts as only a first step towards even larger cuts.

You see, Obama is reportedly serious about pursuing an eventual goal of completely abolishing nuclear weapons altogether.

The Guardian recently quoted one anonymous European official as saying the following about Barack Obama's approach to nuclear disarmament....

"Obama is now driving this process. He is saying these are the president's weapons, and he wants to look again at the doctrine and their role."

Since when did the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal that has protected America for several generations become Barack Obama's weapons?

The reality is that the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal is the only thing that has been keeping the United States safe all this time.  During the Cold War, the Soviet Union had conventional military forces that were far larger than those the United States possessed.  Without the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal as a deterrent, it is almost a certainty that the Soviets would have invaded western Europe.

But hasn't that threat gone away?

No, it has not.

Russia is back in a big way.  They are nearly out of debt (while the U.S. is deeper than ever) and Russia is quickly modernizing and reorganizing its military.

In addition, China is now a superpower.  There is no getting around that.  China is more of a threat then ever before, and U.S. relations with both Russia and China are becoming increasingly strained.

In addition, Iran is racing towards becoming a nuclear power.  Once they do, they will not be satisfied with just a handful of nukes.  It just seems unimaginable that the U.S. and Iran could have similar numbers of nuclear weapons someday, but under Barack Obama it could happen.

Not only that, but leftist revolutions are sweeping South America.  The whole continent is turning hard to the radical left.  Most Americans simply do not realize the danger that represents.

But besides the massive cuts in nuclear arsenals that Barack Obama is seeking with the Russians, he also wants to disclose to them exactly where all U.S. nuclear weapons are so that the Russians can "verify" that the U.S. is keeping its end of the deal.

Do you know that what means?

It means that someday if the Russians want to hit the U.S. with a surprise first strike, they will know how many nukes the U.S. has and exactly where they are.

That makes a first strike SO much easier.

Once they take out our limited number of nukes they would be able to do with us pretty much what they please.

Please wake up conservatives.  The disarming of America is happening and you are asleep.

If Barack Obama is successful in his attempt to disarm America, it will set up a day of reckoning that will be incredibly painful.  The threat of nuclear war is very real, and anybody who does not think so is in complete denial.  It is time to wake up and to tell Congress that America must always have a strong nuclear deterrent.  If America disarms the results could be disastrous....