WEAPONS OF WAR = MANKIND’S FUTURE

Historians write about the past and try to bring understanding to bear on current actions ala Santayana’s dictum.

Futurists attempt to predict the future to enlarge understanding of possibilities our progeny and our descendants may face.

Looking at today’s world and tracking the events and the powers that have brought us to where we are to provide a platform from which to scan the future, historians and futurists may reasonably conclude that, aside from natural phenomena, even those brought on by man’s actions on earth, weapons of war are certainly among the instruments that will determine mankind’s future on earth if not the key instruments in creating that future.

From rocks and clubs, through the ages of spears and swords and bows and arrows, and then explosive powder used in myriad manners and forms from simple destructive explosions through sophisticated machine guns with huge fire-power and cannons throwing explosive projectiles many miles with deadly accuracy and smart bombs that can penetrate the toughest barriers delivered by aircraft and rockets, up to today’s atomic bombs capable of immeasurable devastation of life and property, we see the growth of control of events and people through weaponry.

Where are we going?

India and Pakistan, each with huge hungry populations, created and maintain, at huge cost, atomic weaponry. In Darfur, rape, maiming, and murder are carried out by men with weapons who themselves come from hungry families. Gaza, destroyed by Israel in retaliation for rocket fire aimed at the civilian population by Hamas, a terrorist group that seized control of the impoverished Strip that is now being fed weaponry rather than food or the tools of reconstruction by sympathetic militaristic regimes in Syria and Iran.

The United States spends a fifth of its annual budget on the military and that is only a part of what is spent on personal arms in the country. Winchester, Colt, Garand, and other arms-makers names have been around for a century-and-a-half and still going strong. Aircraft and ships of war abound. Tanks and trucks, atom bombs and rockets, small arms and weaponry and ammunition of all kinds abound. And these weapons are made available to allies and others around the world, some illegally. All the nations of the world are armed and prepared for war, offensive or defensive, internal and over their borders.

We are going to war. That’s where we are going. That is mankind’s future. Bloodshed and violence will be the leitmotif of so-called “Civilization.”

Why? Because there’s money in it! Lots of money!!