Imagine if before each match of the World Cup that the FIFA World Soccer Federation made an appeal over the loudspeaker asking all the fans in the name of the future of soccer to tell officials of their government to demand Americans stop threatening the future of the World Cup with nuclear war.
Excitement! Exhilaration! The World Cup! Star footballers and tens of thousands of soccer fans from around the world in Moscow! Who, while in Moscow for the World Cup, is going to remember that Moscow is a prime target for multiple nuclear missile delivery systems constantly poised for near instant launch? Probably few, if any. We imagine the World Cup represents a time out from nuclear worry, but for the nukes aimed at Moscow, there is no time out. Moscow remains targeted for nuclear annihilation, as it has for more than 70 years.
Within a few years of committing war crimes beyond description by atom bombing the civilian population of two Japanese cities in 1945, Americans were threatening the Soviet Union, Korea, China and Vietnam with nuclear attack at various times until 1960. That was when the Soviets acquired their own nuclear weapons. Then the era of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) began. During this period of shaky safety for all of us, ever more powerful nukes and delivery systems were created threatening all life on Earth with a horrible death.
Why are there no demands that Americans stop targeting Russia and China with nuclear tipped missiles that would murder millions upon millions of people, destroy the earth’s atmosphere, and bring death to even more millions outside the countries targeted?
Why are there no demands that Americans explain just why they are doing this? Institutions of higher learning in Europe and the United States have simply accepted the status quo of planning for nuclear war with lip service for a weak and formal opposition to the nuclear programing of Americans. For some time now it is first strike or preemptive strike that is almost openly discussed in televised discussions, but there is little public interest in why nuclear war planning games are continually played by military leaders and military ‘experts,’ played always with the possible or probable end to life on earth as only a side issue of lesser importance than who shall win a nuclear war itself.
Why is there no spokesperson for the Third World asking by what right do Americans threaten all of Africa, all of Latin America, all of Asia with a possible horror of extinction as they prepare for nuclear war against Russia and China? Americans would have no credible response to such a severely condemning question.
Diplomats of all nations seem to have a gentlemen’s agreement not to complain. You’d think such long-term insanity would bring forth someone of distinction, some famous person to lead and awaken a public demand for an end to American threats of a first or preemptive strike. On 27 July 2017, a news headline read, “US Admiral Would ‘Nuke China Next Week’ if Trump Ordered It.” Imagine! Out of the blue, the Commander of the US Pacific Fleet boasts about ‘nuking’ China! ((Newsweek, 27 July 2017.)) The Chinese said nothing. Even though China has been cooperating with US economic sanctions against its neighbor and fellow communist North Korea, Americans designate China as an enemy. What about the rest of us.
Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark wrote an angry forward for the book To Win a Nuclear War: The Pentagon’s Secret War Plans, by astrophysicist Michio Kaku and Daniel Axelord. He used the Freedom of Information Act to documented the many times Americans have threatened to use their nuclear weapons.
Ramsey Clark wrote:
The consistent underlying psychology of the United States, which has held the lead in nuclear war capability capacity throughout these 40 [now 70] years, should be understandable to anyone who is ever known a violent neighborhood bully. The government of Americans means to have its way through the use and threatened to use of superior force. It will lie. It will deceive. It will kill. It will escalate the threat and use of force to the highest level it dares. It will bluff, dangerous as that can be. It will do whatever is must to dominate. It does this in the face of the fact that its very preparation for a nuclear war may destroy all life. American war planners busily devised strategies for crippling the Soviet Union with revealing names like BROILER, FROLIC, SIZZLE, SHAKEDOWN, DROPSHOT, and VULTURE. The number of Soviet targets to be destroyed grew in number from 20 cities in December 1945 to 200 cities in 1949 and to 3261 total targets by 1957. The number of times the use of nuclear weapons has been contemplated by Americans is unbearable.
What is to be said of leaders with the mental acuity and moral perceptions revealed by these disclosed words and deeds? They are at best enemies of life without understanding. Psychologically, they disconnect all feeling for the beauty of the planet – a rose, an impala in motion, a baby’s hand, a Confucian analect, a Bach cantata, a parable of Jesus, pilgrims bathing in the Ganges, a crowd watching a soccer game in Rio, the subway in Moscow, the skyline in Manhattan. They cannot think or feel about the human meaning of what they do.
A single Trident II submarine can inflict more death than all prior wars in history. Twenty-four missiles, launched while submerged, each with seventeen independently targeted, maneuverable nuclear warheads five times more powerful than the atom bomb that destroyed Nagasaki, can travel 5,000 nautical miles to strike within 300 feet of 408 predetermined targets. Nuclear winter might follow even if no other weapons are used.
No nation or individual can be permitted to possess the power to destroy the world. An imperative need is for an informed and active public struggling for its right to survive.
Why is there no demand that Americans destroy their nuclear weapons which threaten everyone? [This demand would seem to apply equally to all nuclear-armed nations, not just the USA — DV Ed]
In the days just before the World Cup began, there was Western media frenzy over a hyped-up nuclear confrontation between the USA and North Korea. Cosmic insanity! A tiny nation of twenty-five million has its citizens of all ages punished with cruel economic sanctions by the United Nations because it finally has a few nuclear weapons as a deterrent, after having been threatened for years with nuclear destruction. Meanwhile the United States of Americans, which once destroyed every North Korea city and town with napalm and bombs before threatening to use atomic bombs, constantly threatens to use its tens of thousands of nuclear tipped missiles in wars that could end life on Earth. There is never even a polite request for Americans to destroy their vast nuclear arsenal of apocalyptic proportions!
Suppose before each match of the World Cup an announcement was made over the public address system to the effect that the FIFA World Soccer Federation was asking all the fans in the name of the future of soccer to ask officials of their government at all levels to demand that the United States of Americans stop threatening the future of the World Cup with nuclear war, and that FIFA had asked its former Player of the Year Award winner ‘King’ George Weah, who is the current elected President of Liberia and a United Nations Good Will Ambassador, to lead FIFA fans in this effort to end US threats to the future of the World Cup. If this happened, to be sure, many soccer greats, who already had been political and social activists would also lead the fans and the world public in this effort.
Revolutionary Diego Maradona, among the greatest living soccer stars, would draw an awesome amount of dormant anti-Yankee feelings in the world. Maradona once said on President Hugo Chavez’s TV program, “I hate everything that comes from the United States. I hate it with all my strength.” Fidel Castro said, “Diego Maradona is a great friend and noble too.” Maradona has a portrait of Fidel tattooed on his left leg and one of fellow Argentine Che Guevara on his right arm. He attended Venezuelan President Maduro’s final campaign rally in Caracas, signing footballs and kicking them to the crowd. Diego is really outspoken. He told Pope Paul II to sell the Vatican’s gold ceilings and help the poor. ((Eurosport, 14 September 2014.))
There must be hundreds or thousands of professional soccer league players around the world, who would speak out in favor of putting an end to the frightening nuclear blackmail of Americans. Italian striker Cristiano Lucarelli is an open supporter of communism and staunch admirer of Che Guevara. ((Andrea Scanzi, “Lucarelli, il goleador rossoche i compagni non amano più,” La Stampa, 2 January 2011.)) Javier Zanetti is FIFA ambassador for the SOS Children’s Villages project in Argentina, and declares his support for the Mexican Zapatista rebels. ((“Zapatista rebels woo Inter Milan,” BBC News, 11 May 2005.))
Politically neutral players would tend to follow FIFA’s call to rally against nuclear war planning as well, and FIFA’s call to soccer fans would awaken the fans of other sports as well, and then celebrities such a movie stars, musicians and other performing artists, and so on. It is so logical a demand. Western media would try to slander the overseas public awakening as anti-American and try to put the blame on Russia and China, but everyone knows the US was first to make, use, and threaten to use again nuclear bombs. CIA-fed corporate entertainment-news conglomerates would fail to stop a world wide movement expecting the US to stand down its nuclear attack force and negotiate it out of existence.
In the coming multi-polar world with China leading, the shift of world economic power to the East and South will bring an end to hegemony by today’s nuclear giant USA. We know not how and from where a “an informed and active public struggling for its right to survive” will arise and bring safety and sanity to humanity and planet Earth, but it will, and its not all that improbable that athletic sports stars aware of a heightened social responsibility for their roll model prestige, might well be in the forefront of inciting a public awareness of its power to successfully confront an increasingly desperate USA empire in decline.