Editorial:


Lesley Pocock,
Chief Editor, Publisher and Managing Director
medi+WORLD International
Email: lesleypocock@mediworld.com.au



Dumb and Dumber

With nuclear armaments in the headlines as we go to press it is worth mentioning that we still have the stupidity of mass killing machines on this planet and in particular the sort of killing machines that can wipe out millions of innocent humans and many more millions of other life forms in one direct hit; but also in the longer term, dangerous war toys that speed up the end of liveability for all current life forms on this planet (apart from, apparently, cockroaches who must have a superior intellect).

The total stupidity of this situation defies belief and sense – but it is the never ending pattern of life on earth. It is nearly 2020 and we still live, and are forced to live, like barbarians.

Are we not yet at a point of development where none of this is allowable or tolerated? We teach school children not to be bullies but we tolerate bullies at national dictatorship level and let them do what their mad minds dictate. Of course they manipulate the weak minded and cowardly humans to get their way. Something needs to be done about that as well. Stupidity is not really the basis of any successful civilisation.

Unfortunately, speaking the truth is all the decent and courageous people of the world can do, but truth is a powerful weapon and the pacifists’ only sword. Brutal idiots hate the truth – it is the only thing that they cannot fight or manipulate, though they try very hard to deny and conceal it.

Women worldwide have this past year had the courage to speak up against eons of assault and degradation, via the #Me too movement. School children have had the courage to speak up against those who claim their so-called rights to carry ridiculous personal killing machines.

Of course many others have laboured these same points, but they are eternally drowned out by the bellowing and rantings of the brutal and ignorant, or the mute responses of the impotent and apathetic, all of them cowards.

I have written on the Business of War previously (MEJB, January 2017 Volume 12, Issue 1). Sadly, business is what it is all about - putting personal power and wealth before the lives of fellow humans and the world.

Weapons of war have always been in the hands of despots, dictators, would be dictators and those with fanatical political or nationalist leanings. None of these warmongers have ever ‘leaned’ towards the protection of humanity as a whole and protection of the planet that we all dwell on.

If the world’s wealth was not wasted on highly expensive apparatus to kill, torture, disfigure and rob innocent people, then the children of the planet, those who needlessly die every few seconds due to poverty related causes, may be allowed to live their lives, rather than have them sacrificed to some mad man’s ego.

If no-one had weapons of war there would be no war – surely that is a better and far more sensible deterrent than building bigger and even more destructive killing machines. Unfortunately war is rarely about lawful claims – they can be settled in the justice systems– it is about gross mental health issues related to hatred, bloodlust and obsession with money and power.

Nuclear weapons are the most ludicrous of the war toys of the angry and deluded men who control them. Even more ludicrous is the fact that it is 2018 and this is still the status quo. We can cure complex illnesses, we have put a human on the moon, we can peer into the far reaches, indeed into the origins of the universe, but we just cannot behave decently, intelligently and fairly or deal effectively with these war-mongering miscreants within our midst and those who support them.

Dumb and dumber.