How Dems Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Trump Derangement Syndrome harnessed to normalize threat of nuclear war.

More so than any other director, Stanley Kubrick understood how humans obscure their dark, aggressive, tribal, and predatory emotions from themselves. Many people go through life with the smug self-assurance that they are “nice guys” and “nice girls,” and would never harm anyone, express an immoral sentiment, or participate in a corrupt enterprise. Indeed, they often indulge in self-congratulatory emotions about holding all the right opinions and signaling all the right virtues.

This blind spot to one’s own capacity for doing terrible things—especially under certain circumstances—is one of the reasons why humans don’t learn from the catastrophes of the past. In the American context, we review the horrors of history and think, “Only Germans or Japanese or Chinese or Russians or Turks would commit such atrocities. We Americans would never do that.”

I believe that Kubrick’s greatest, most disturbing, and most comical masterpiece is his 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Virtually every scene manages to be hilarious, terrifying, and true to life at the same time. The titular character, Dr. Strangelove (born Merkwürdigliebe) is apparently a former Nazi rocket scientist who works for the Department of Defense. In the film’s climactic scene, he explains to the bewildered President and Joint Chiefs of Staff that the Russian “Doomsday Machine” — a system of nuclear weapons connected to a gigantic computer programmed to eliminate human decision making — may seem strange and surprising to the guys in the room, but is in fact a system he has already analyzed and described in a study he was contracted to perform for the Rand Corporation.

Note that Dr. Strangelove, played by Peter Sellars, is precisely the sort of weirdo that I wrote about in my earlier post of today (Weirdness of Pandemic Industry Leaders).

Dr. Strangelove strikes me as a perfect representation of the lunatics who now infest Washington. Driving past the Pentagon this morning on my way to Washington Reagan airport, I got the same eerie feeling I used to get whenever I walked by the Narrenturm in Vienna—an 18th century insane asylum.

Narrenturm

Pentagon

I was still pondering these thoughts on the flight home to Dallas when I read the following passage from Jeff Childers’s column of yesterday titled KNUCKLEHEADS. He begins by quoting a recent New York Times report about how Donald Trump is fear-mongering about the elevated risk of nuclear war with Russia.

Mr. Childers then offers the following analysis of this Times report—an analysis that I regard as terrifyingly true.

Pause for a moment and consider how profoundly ironic that the Times spent two full years on daily doomsday prophesying —over a moderate flu season!— just to suddenly reverse fifty years of its anti-nuclear activism and wave away the clear and present dangers as though looming nuclear disaster was more made up than covid.

I needn’t offer any evidence of this self-evident fact, but I will anyway. (Lawyer’s habit.) As recently as January —before Russia’s expanded nuclear policy and before Iran attacked Israel twice— the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its iconic “Doomsday Clock” at 90 seconds to midnight. In the Atomic Scientists’ scheme, midnight is no bueno. It’s game over, finito, plug pulled. In their own words: “the deteriorating state of the world … is ... the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.”

To take the Times’ story at face value, we must assume that mendacious reporter Michael Gold is blissfully unaware of the Doomsday Clock, and that Gold honestly thinks Trump is stitching together the threat of nuclear annihilation out of whole cloth, as a political prop, rather than Trump reiterating what some of the smartest people alive believe to be an established fact.

Reporter Gold didn’t even bother asking any experts to agree that Trump’s World War III claims were exaggerated. What do nuclear strategists and international relations scholars say about the current risks of global conflict? The Times just expected us to take their word for it.

The lack of experts quoted for the article, and the omission of context like the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, reveals this disturbing article isn’t journalism at all. It’s a psychological operation.

The Times sought to paint the prospect of global thermonuclear war as merely a hyperbolic political cartoon. But don't be deceived; this article was not actually intended to chide Trump for fearmongering. Or at least, that wasn’t its main objective. The article was a psyop, intended to teach the Times’ liberal readers what to think about the Biden Administration’s nuclear brinksmanship. The writer wants readers to conclude that nuclear red-lining is not, in fact, an altogether new and disastrous development, but that our leaders' pugilistic dancing across Russian red lines is sound policy.

In other words, this article was not meant to associate Trump with fissile fearmongering. It was the other was around. It was meant to associate concerns about nuclear war with deplorable former President Trump. The Times knows its readers hate Trump and reflexively hate and doubt whatever Trump thinks. So if they mock Trump for his WWIII concern, most liberal Times readers will line up and clap like trained seals. Haha! World War III! Like that could ever happen! What a moron!

In other words, the Times is trying to close the Overton Window on criticism of U.S. military policy. Anyone who questions whether the Administration’s military policy is sane will be just like Trump.

Why do they do this kind of psychological manipulation? There are several reasons. It desensitizes people to real escalations in military policy. It discredits any opposition to new military escalation in advance. It makes Biden warmongering look reasonable when contrasted with Trump fearmongering. And it controls the narrative by masking legitimate concerns over Biden foreign policy decisions.

Though I have never met Mr. Childers or corresponded with him, I perfectly share his perception that Trump Derangement Syndrome is being used to normalize the elevated risk of nuclear war with Russia.

When I was growing up, we were taught that the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 happened because Soviet Russia attempted to install nuclear-armed missiles in the strategically favorable location of Cuba, just 1000 miles away from Washington D.C. This action, we were told, would provide the Soviets with a nuclear advantage that the Kennedy Administration simply could NOT accept.

It seems to me that only Trump Derangement Syndrome can explain why so many Americans who lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis are now so comfortable with Washington’s longstanding and constant provocation of Moscow in Ukraine—the northeast border of which lies just a few hundred miles from Moscow.

We are told that Vladimir Putin is a Hitlerian character bent on dominating Europe. At the same time, we are told that he would never use nuclear weapons to achieve his dangerous and monomaniacal scheme. While these two propositions perfectly contradict each other, this doesn’t seem to bother millions of Americans one bit. I guess they think of Putin as a rational madman.

The contradictory notion of a “rational madman” reminds me of the strange case of William C. Minor, MD, who, for many years, contributed perfect entries to the Oxford English Dictionary. Unbeknownst to his editor, Dr. Minor was submitting his lovely work from an insane asylum, where he was an inmate thought to be suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

Though Dr. Minor was indeed an extremely troubled fellow who committed murder and cut off his own penis with a pen knife, the quality of his scholarship for the Oxford English Dictionary suggests that he was a man of great intellect. Were he alive today, I would greatly prefer his company and even counsel over that of many people I frequently encounter who are regarded as rational.

We live in strange times.