Requisite sacrificial representation

Time for a Remedial Global Nuclear War? (Part #11)

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If nuclear warfare is to be envisaged as a remedial process, as argued above, careful attention is required as to how it is to be presented and rendered attractive -- namely how it is to be packaged and marketed.

Reframing collective human sacrifice:  Sacrifice has long been a central feature of religious ritual, most notably among the Abrahamic religions (Blair G. Van Dyke, Elements of Sacrifice in Abraham's Time and Our Own, Religious Educator, 10,, 2009, 1).  The question is whether it is now a vital prerequisite for sustainable global civilization (Fundamental Need for Human Sacrifice by Abrahamic Religions, 2018).

As noted above, it can be argued that any piece of major legislation requires human sacrifice before arguments proposing it are perceived to be credible. This can be recognized with respect to elaboration of international agreements. Missing however are databases documenting the number of deaths which have been required in the case of each agreement -- in order to offer indications for vital future agreements.

Senicide: There is a long tradition of senicide in village communities in many cultures around the world where it is recognized that there are "too many mouths to feed" in a family. A family would achieve this by leading an elderly relative to a mountain or similarly remote and rough environment to die, not by means of suicide but by dehydration, starvation, or exposure. It may also be referred to as "granny dumping". It may be imposed on the elderly or framed as an honourable and voluntary form of euthanasia.

The process is of obvious relevance in aging societies, especially where abortion is already considered acceptable (Stephen G. Post, Euthanasia, Senicide, and the Aging Society, Journal of Religious Gerontology: 8, 1991, 1; Raimund Pousset, Senicide and Old Age Killing, an overdue discourse, 2023). With "Spaceship Earth" under transformation into a liferaft, the issues are readily highlighted in a thought experiment (Resource Insights from Plus or Minus 12 People on a Liferaft, 2014).

To the extent that governance may be responsive to the insights of artificial intelligence, senicide may be presented as a logical possibility (Xiaoling Xiang, et al, Modern Senicide in the Face of a Pandemic: an examination of public discourse and sentiment about older adults and COVID-19 using machine learning, The Journals of Gerontology: Series B, 76, 2021, 4). An understanding of "civilizational euthanasia" is unfortunately confused with deprecation of genocide.

From this perspective are current references to an "aging society" effectively misleading -- if not deliberately so? Do they deliberately avoid recognition that it is global society which is effectively approaching senility, with indications of dementia? This is indeed suggested by the many references to the "insanity" of global governance -- if not to its leaders specifically, as exemplified by many decisions..

Collective self-grooming? It is one thing to package warfare against others -- implying a quick resolution through eliminating the enemy. It is another matter to frame the highly probable sacrifice required by the process, given the response of the enemy and unforeseeable side effects. The requisite crafting of the enabling narrative might usefully seek inspiration from historical processes of mass suicide, whether in Aztec culture, the iconic Jewish suicide at Masada, or the Cathars (10 Largest Mass Suicides in History, WorldAtlas).

Understood as a grooming process, inspiration is available from kamikaze pilots, engagement in trench warfare (with the capacity to go "over the top"), and the jihad of suicide bombers (Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms: the militarization of aesthetics in Japanese history, 2002). It is of course the Cathars who framed the cathartic experience which global society can be considered to be unconsciously seeking through nuclear catastrophe.

It could be asked whether the global self-grooming process bears any resemblance to the Jonestown massacre of 1978 in which a community of 918 people committed "revolutionary suicide" through the consumption of poisoned Kool-Aid. Could global civilization explore the honour to be cultivated through "collective seppuku" (Honour Essential to Psycho-social Integrity, 2005)?

Martial music? Music has traditionally been a major feature in mobilization for warfare, as with the role of "war drums" in many cultures. The iconic role of the bagpipe has long been noted, as presented by Miguel Ortiz:

... until 1996, the British government considered the bagpipes to be a bona fide weapon of war... In fact, when they were captured in combat, bagpipes were not inventoried as musical instruments like drums or bugles. Rather, they were listed as weapons along with sabers, rifles, and munitions. During WWI, roughly 2,500 British soldiers served as pipers and crossed No Man's Land armed only with their bagpipes. (Bagpipes used to be classified as weapons of war, WeAreTheMighty, 3 September 2022).

Music is noted as having played a significant role in military operations in Iraq to enable participant disassociation from the inflicted destruction, as noted by Lisa Gilman:

This article examines how American troops use music to navigate complex associations of place during deployment... describing using music to psychologically remove themselves from an environment. Technological transformations coupled with the particularities of war make musical listening especially salient in the day-to-day existence of contemporary American troops during wartime. Examining relationships between musical listening and place with a focus on the memories of veterans who were deployed to the Iraq war yields insight both into the critical role that music has for many contemporary troops involved in the physically and psychologically demanding context of war and to scholarly understandings of how music can operate in complicated processes of location and dislocation. (Grounding the Troops: Music, Place, and Memory in the Iraq War, Volume: French journal of popular music studies, 10 January 2013).

Society has avoided eliciting music to enable credibly coherent global governance (A Singable Earth Charter, EU Constitution or Global Ethic? 2006). Is now the time to elicit music in support of remedial nuclear war?

From MAD to MAP? The strategic creativity enabling development from 1962 of the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) posited that a full-scale use of nuclear weapons by an attacker on a nuclear-armed defender with second-strike capabilities would cause the complete annihilation of both the attacker and the defender. This is based on the theory of rational deterrence, which holds that the threat of using strong weapons against the enemy prevents the enemy's use of those same weapons. Once armed, neither side has any incentive to initiate a conflict or to disarm.

The primary application of this doctrine started during the Cold War (1940s to 1991), in which MAD was seen as helping to prevent any direct full-scale conflicts between the United States and the Soviet Union while they engaged in smaller proxy wars around the world. Proponents of MAD as part of the US and USSR strategic doctrine believed that nuclear war could best be prevented if neither side could expect to survive a full-scale nuclear exchange as a functioning state.

With this historical precedent, very little would seemingly be required to adapt the theory to ensure a Mutual Annihilation Pact (MAP). The merit of this alternative, as a collective variant of the suicide pact, would be to enable a refreshing new approach to the sterile pattern of dialogue between strategic opponents. Each would give the other an optimum amount of information to ensure successful annihilation. In particular this could include insights from enthusiasm for "town twinning" (or "sister city") initiatives. Pairs of individual cities could exchange precise coordinates in order to facilitate missile targetting -- in the spirit of suicide pacts on a smaller scale.

More provocatively illustrative of an alternative spirit is the classic exchange between English and French armies, cited by Voltaire:

Suite de la guerre de Succession d’Autriche, lors d’un siège mené par les Français près de Tournai. Le commandant de la compagnie de tête des gardes anglaises a lancé : "Messieurs des gardes françaises, tirez". Le commandant des gardes françaises lui répondit : "Messieurs, nous ne tirons jamais les premiers. Tirez vous-mêmes" ("Messieurs les Anglais, tirez les premiers", L'Histoire en Citations)

Social responsibility? Less evident is the inspiration recently offered by the unquestionable worldwide pandemic narrative of "doing the right thing" by others, as clarified by Consolato M. Sergi and Alexander K. C. Leung (Vaccination: a question of social responsibility, Journal of Preventive Medicine and Hygiene, 62, 2021, 1):

We want to emphasize that vaccination is not only a personal choice, but an issue of social responsibility, international development, and institutional commitment that need to be expressed with integrity.... Social responsibility is an ethical context where either an organization or an individual must act for the benefit of society. In this context, social responsibility has a task to allow an individual or a governmental or nongovernmental organization to perform in the best interests of the community at large. In the setting of individual social responsibility, it is mandatory for advocating political or social issues that can help others, e.g., advocating for policies targeting domestic and family violence in post-conflict communities. In this context, an egocentric view of parents choosing their children not to be vaccinated without consistent data should be considered irresponsible from a social point of view.

Whether collective uptake of this process will engender fatal consequences on a large scale is however only a matter of speculation at this time. The planned coordination by the World Health Organization of a more effective approach to worldwide vaccination may demonstrate otherwise.

The focus on individual social responsibility is however far less convincing in the light of the questionable outcome of past promotion of corporate social responsibility.

Asteroid collision with Earth? Irrespective of the possibility of nuclear war, remedial or otherwise, many of the issues highlighted are usefully brought into focus by the prediction of an asteroid colliding with the Earth. Considered a near-certainty in some form, planetary defence against that possibility is a focus of asteroid impact avoidance. The most recent warning indicates a probability of such a collision in 2046 (Olympic pool-size asteroid has a 1-in-600 chance of impacting Earth, 9 March 2023).

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