Killin' by the Million

Are we on the brink of destruction? Some twentieth century authors and film makers seem to think so. International literature throughout the twentieth century has seen great apocalyptic literary works that have reflected the times in which the people of the millennium lived and still live within today. These works reflect a fear within those people of the century that watched in horror as the power of human imagination created machines that could take war to destructive levels that would have challenged the most vivid imaginations of Dante, and Jules Vern. Humans in every country on the planet have seen wars were casualties were counted by numbers that would have exterminated the entire specie had these wars occurred in earlier periods of human existence. Power mongers continue to create weapons and rhetoric that will inevitably march the human race toward an end that is defined only in religious scripture and fiction. These mongers of wealth at any price shout from the highest lecterns of righteousness while ignoring the fact that the devils they rail against are the very same men that they look at each day while scrapping a razor across their faces. They have become the very devils they so ardently preach against. Devils that have been seduced by a drug that is more fatal and more addictive than even the most captivating elixir and they gladly sacrifice their brethren to get it.

In October of 1962 the Soviet Union placed material on the Island of Cuba to build missile bases. These bases were designed to facilitate nuclear weapons. In response to this threat, President Kennedy blockaded the island and refused to allow Soviet ships access to Cuba’s ports. This event known to the world as the “Missiles of October” placed the arsenal of the United States against the Soviet Union’s; either arsenal at the time counted their nuclear weapons in the thousands. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed and the situation was defused. I learned of this event when I was a child from my Grandfather and as I grew older I dreamt that it happened. The war began and humanity was left on the edge of extinction.

Growing up in the 1960’s and 70’s I often dreamed of what it would be like if some fool started launching atomic, or biological weapons. I was a child that lived in a neighborhood with few other children, so I often passed my time alone and away from an abusive home life. I dreamt of being the last alive, and having to survive alone. At the time I had no idea of all the work and danger that would be involved in such a situation, so I did not fear it. I dreamt that I would survive on canned Spaghetti O’s and drive around in abandoned armored vehicles running over everything and anything that should be in my way. I never realized that the nightmares of my later life, after I had seen the realities of war would be affected by my childhood fantasies as they are now.

Today I often dream that the worst has happened, and that my wife and a few faceless others are the only survivors of apocalypse, but instead of eating Spaghetti O’s and running over stuff we would be forced to defend ourselves against a world that had lost its sanity and structure.

There is no more running water conveniently piped into your home. There is no more natural gas, or electric other than generated power from internal combustion engines; which cannot be used for lack of fuel and the noise they produce. The noise would attract attention, and attention in such a world is dangerous. Scavenger gangs roam the streets un-checked by law enforcement killing anyone who dare to oppose them. People are burned and tortured for crimes against (insert theology here) or for race differences, and political affiliations. Food is no longer available in markets and must be hunted in areas far from where the cities that once towered over the land with spires reaching the heavens.

Those few wretched souls that yet dwell in the massive labyrinths of shattered cities are not dashing men in razor sharp safari outfits like Charlton Hesston in Omega Man, but scavengers adorned in shredded rags, remnants of lost textile technology. With no food, law, or infrastructure they feed upon one another rather than help each other survive. Those that show the weakness of charity are the first to be destroyed. It is a nightmare that I have had for many years, the result of having been born in a time when “Great Men of Power” conscript subordinates to produce technological nightmares to be used to murder life forms by the millions. A nightmare born of a child with a vivid imagination and later of a soldier that has seen the twisted blackness that is the face of a human reduced by death and left to rot in a gutter of a destroyed city. The stench of such a thing is un-definable and permeates the senses with a horror via sight and smell that remain forever embedded in one’s memory. There is no escape, there is no forgetting, and no one can tell you how to remove the images from your mind. Images that those who have sent you to commit murder never see outside of the comfort of a closed room via a television screen. They may see replications, but they do not taste the air, and smell the fetid waste that is rotting or burning human flesh. These horrible images are missing from Hollywood versions of “I am Legend” originally written by Richard Matheson and other such apocalyptic creations. Although the author’s intent is real enough, but there is no way to convey smell and taste via a book, or a movie.

In the 80’s a made for television movie called “The Day After” attempted to show the horrors of post nuclear war but even that movie glossed over the real horrors of such an event. The reality is; what little life that survives the initial attacks would soon die of issues related to nuclear radiation. These Issues would include flash burns which cause your skin to fall away in sheets in addition to radiation sickness that eats at your body at the atomic level while you die slowly and painfully, but not before witnessing your loved ones literally fall apart before your eyes. Often times we hear of people speak of war as if it were a game; it is not, it is hell, death, and injustice.

War is too often romanticized by people that are enamored by ideas of love, honor, and sacrifice but have never seen a battlefield. The First Duke of Wellington once said; “Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won”. (Wellesley) Arthur Wellesley (the Duke’s given name) said this as he surveyed the carnage of Waterloo after Napoleon suffered his final defeat. On that day nearly one hundred thousand men died on the fields of Belgium for the vanity of very few monarchs that numbered less than one percent of one percent of the total population of the day. The Commander of the victorious side did not compose poetry; instead he spoke of carnage and the horror that is war. The battle closed the book on an era of war that took millions of lives across the European, Asian, American, and African continents. Napoleon started out as liberator, and ended up as just another greedy man willing to destroy to attain his goal of global dominance with the high ideals of the French revolution forgotten and replaced by dreams of empire.

    Unfortunately the lessons of history are continually glossed over by the next generation, so humans continue to make bigger and better mistakes without heeding the lessons of our predecessors so the world would once again be brought to yet another terrible war.  This time it is the 20^th Century and once again it’s Europe.  Now men have automatic weapons, aircraft, and poison gas.  The war propaganda spoke of the “War to end all Wars” while the great powers of Europe destroyed one another by the tens of millions.  The war would end with an oppressive treaty that would ensure another war, and two revolutions.  One revolution would bring the Werner republic into power in Germany, and the other would strike fear into the hearts of power mongers around the world.  Communism had taken hold within the largest country in world…Russia.

World War Two once again advanced the efficiency of killing. Now aircraft are capable of dropping bombs weighing several tons and capable of destroying entire blocks in the blink of an eye.

Mobility is improved by the internal combustion engine and the steam turbine so great distances are no longer protection against invasion. The great powers of Europe would see atrocity and politics taken too impossible levels of efficiency as the fanatical men of Germany would march people to gas chambers and industrial ovens. On the many fronts of the war Blitzkrieg (Lighting War) would see great masses of tanks and aircraft leave swathes of destruction in their wakes and one country (Russia) would see from twenty to thirty million of its men women and children parish. By the end, the United States of America would unleash a terror on the Empire of Japan that would literally shake the world. Robert Oppenheimer the creator of this technological nightmare would become so distraught with himself that he would quote a famous passage from the Hindu Holy book; Bhagavad Gita which reads: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one. I have become death, the destroyer of worlds.” (Oppenheimer)

Ironically the man that gave the world its worst nightmare would later be accused of being a communist. Although the debate continues even today about Oppenheimer’s involvement with the communist party it cannot be denied that he suffered emotionally for his creation. In the nineteen fifties, and sixties hardly a day passed that something was not said about the power of the Soviet Union, and the United States nuclear arsenals…two “Superpowers” facing each across oceans and fences around the world staring down the barrels of mutual destruction. The internal demise of the Bolshevik government of the Soviet Union has done little to decrease that threat. The population of the world still lives at the mercy of men who hold their fingers over little red buttons that can spell the end for every living creature on land. But hey, we can always look forward to another apocalyptic masterpiece, hopefully the author will be someone like Richard Matheson, and not Robert Oppenheimer.

Wellesley, Arthur. http://www.napoleonguide.com/aquotes_welli.htm accessed April 2009

Oppenheimer, Robert. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jrobertop101189.html accessed April 2011