Gorbachev: ‘It All Looks as If the World Is Preparing for War’

by Darius Shahtahmasebi, The Anti Media:

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists announced on Thursday of this week that the Doomsday Clock now stands at two-and-a-half minutes to midnight. This spine-tingling announcement suggests that existential threats now pose a greater threat to humanity than they have at any time since the height of the Cold War.

“This is the closest to midnight the Doomsday Clock has ever been in the lifetime of almost everyone in this room. It’s been 64 years since it was closer,” said Lawrence Krauss, a theoretical physicist at Arizona State University and the chair of the Bulletin’s board of sponsors.

Now is the time to panic — or not, depending on your level of resolve (or apathy).

Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the Soviet Union and author of The New Russia, wrote an article published in TIME Magazine entitled “It All Looks as if the World Is Preparing For War.” In the article, Gorbachev notes:

“Today, however, the nuclear threat once again seems real. Relations between the great powers have been going from bad to worse for several years now. The advocates for arms build-up and the military-industrial complex are rubbing their hands.”

Gorbachev is not overstating the threat of global warfare. In an interview with Prism magazine, retired Army General Stanley McChrystal issued two warnings that, as noted by Foreign Policy magazine, are “hair-raising” to say the least.

“A European war is not unthinkable,” McChrystal explained. “People who want to believe that a war in Europe is not possible might be in for a surprise. We have to acknowledge great power politics; we can’t pretend that they are gone.”

McChrystal admits the U.S. made vital mistakes in speedily invading Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as “paying a high price” in Syria. As he has observed:

“In the case of Afghanistan, immediately after 9/11, in terms of military action we should have done nothing initially. I now believe we should have taken the first year after 9/11 and sent 10,000 young Americans—military, civilians, diplomats—to language school; Pashtu, Dari, Arabic. We should have started to build up the capacity we didn’t have. I would have spent that year with diplomats traveling the world as the aggrieved party,” McChrystal stated.

Now that the world is headed down the path toward a possible world war, McChrystal acknowledges the unthinkable is to follow: the erosion of our civil liberties, which will directly impact on ordinary civilians.

“We are beginning an era in which our ability to leverage technology to track people and control populations is going to create a lot of tension; I think we are going to see a lot more population control measures. We are going to have to give up a lot more of our precious civil rights than most of us imagine because we want security,” McChrystal added.

Speaking to Republican policymakers in Philadelphia, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May stated that Britain and the U.S. will no longer invade sovereign foreign nations “in an attempt to make the world in their own image.” Such an ambiguous statement makes it unclear whether this means Britain and the U.S. will still invade sovereign nations for other reasons, especially in light of May’s statement that “nor can we afford to stand idly by when the threat is real and when it is in our own interests to intervene.”

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