The doomsday prophecy

The Doomsday Clock appeared in 1947 at the beginning of the nuclear arms race. Everyone was reeling from the photographs of the vapourisation of Hiroshima.

It was thought that atomic war would wipe out everyone on earth. This almost happened when I was a young man, culminating in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis which the top page of Google informs us was a     “direct and dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War.”

I didn’t need to go to Google to find this out. It was a defining moment in my life, and the lives of my friends. Women then were refusing to have children because they didn’t want them to live in a world of fear and probable atomisation.

The Doomsday clock about nuclear annihilation, is a simple illustration of the fact that life on Earth had been around for billions of years but that Clever Old Man had developed a system that could switch it off with an hour-long firework extravaganza.

Now it has been extended to global warming, virus pandemics, and more or less anything that the media have decided makes a good story. The clock has been advanced to two and a half minutes to midnight. By Scientists. Let’s think about this a bit.

Added to all this is the US abandonment of the arms limitation agreements and the re-investment in missile development. We see NATO creeping closer to Russia, and the absurd attempts by the US to bring Ukraine into the operation. Is this why the clock has been moved?

No. It is Donald Trump.

On the top page of Google (again) we see that     the Guardian, Telegraph      and ‘Science’ blame the movement of the clock hands on the election of Mr Trump.

ABC seems to think it is global warming. But global warming, even in worst case scenarios (and I have myself followed this and made my own calculations) wont wipe out life on Earth, except indirectly by creating resource wars which might go nuclear. And a virus pandemic would always have some survivors.

Total nuclear exchange would not: so that is what we are dealing with. It is a very real possibility. But not because of Donald Trump. What I see in the election of Trump, and in Brexit also, is a spontaneous creation of civil society, in countries which have seen their lives ruined by globalisation and what has been called ‘the new world order’.

What I see in Mr Trump is an independent flamboyant showman, along the lines of an earlier US President Andrew Jackson, a man who also despised and tried to destroy the US establishment. I have a lot of time for people like this, being a version myself; I watched the media system doing their uttermost to paint Trump as a madman.

Trump clearly thinks outside the system of smoke and mirrors that passes for western media news, the constructions on the web and TV and newspapers which are increasingly spun and slanted with nonsense and demonstrable lies about the state of the world.

Finally: one thing. The real Doomsday clock passed midnight long ago. The mad race to extinction fuelled by the market-forces laissez faire western system created a monster: a system which is not really controlled by anyone, but drives itself with only one imperative-to become richer and more powerful, so as to become richer and more powerful.

The monster has no soul; it was not constructed to look after life on the planet. Following nuclear fallout, and nuclear energy accidents, Depleted Uranium, and now fracking, background radioactivity continuously increases. The fertility rate is falling. IVF is advancing. Cancer is an epidemic in real terms.

This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.

 

This article has been
excerpted from: ‘Beware the Trumpocalypse! But Can We Believe the Doomsday Clock?’

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org