When in the decade of the Nineteen Sixties, I started
thinking seriously about the state of the world, I came across articles that
were predicting the disintegration of the old Soviet Union .
The consensus at the time was that if and when such moment will come, the world
will go through its most dangerous phase.
The argument used to explain that reasoning went something
like this: When the leaders of the Soviet Union
will see their empire start going down the drain, they will not want to go
alone, but want to take the world with them. Possessing the terrible weapons
that they do, they will think about lashing out at the world with everything
they got, and the chances are high they will do just that.
Well, it happened that a few decades later, the Soviet Union disintegrated, but its leaders did not lash
out at the world as predicted. On the contrary, they asked the U.S. and Europe to help them restructure their
system of governance, and specifically asked the United States to help them get over
the difficulties that may pop up if they cannot secure the radioactive material
they stored in many places around their vast empire.
Now, several decades later, I read an article that came
under the title: “There's no easy living with nuclear-armed North Korea ” and the subtitle: “Pyongyang 's nuclear threat is built upon
Russian and Chinese technology.” It was written by Peter Vincent Pry, and
published on September 18, 2017 in The Washington Times. And so, I asked
myself: Have we gone back in time?
The problem with people who come up with ideas such as
these, is that they project onto others the evil they see in themselves. They
speculate that the other guy will do what they would have done, were they in
the shoes of that other guy. This is a reality that applies to situations on
the world stage as much as it does in more mundane settings, such as the
playing of office politics, for example, or the bullying that goes on in a
schoolyard.
This kind of behavior has consequences that can get serious
at times. It does not always happen that pressure put on someone by excessive
speculation will motivate him to respond negatively, but it happens often
enough that speculators must be told to cool it once in a while. That's because
it can happen that the victim of speculation will become the evil he is
suspected of being. If and when this happens on the world stage, the result can
be catastrophic as when the allies distrusted Germany and imposed on it the
Treaty of Versailles. The humiliation that resulted was such that Germany became
the very thing the allies were trying to prevent.
From the available evidence, it looks like excessive
speculation about North Korea
has already forced that country to abandon the path taken by the Soviet Union,
opting instead for the one taken by Germany . The question to ask before
Korea is pushed over the edge, is how much influence the false prophets of
doom, such as Peter Vincent Pry and others, will have on the foreign policy
wonks and the military strategists in America?
The leaders of North Korea can still be pushed enough to
decide that it is better to lash out now and be destroyed, rather than be
destroyed having taken no one with them. If this will come to pass, history
will place the blame on the leaders of North
Korea but will not let the leaders of America off the
hook either. History will most certainly blame the latter for precipitating the
tragedy of war by cornering the North Koreans, giving them no alternative but
to lash out at their enemies as well as those who supported them.
Doing their job, the historians of the future will try to
figure how that situation came to be, and how it developed to become the
tragedy that it did. They will find that the speculative streak is common to
all of us, but like everything else, it can be abused and turned into a
destructive tool by some of us.
Those historians will also find that endless speculation was
mixed with the Jewish haggle to form a potent weapon the Jews have used to get
things done their way in America .
In time, speculation as a weapon was imbued so widely into the American
culture, it began to distort it. The worst part is that the habit is so
addictive, those that catch it cannot easily get rid of it.