What follows is my English translation of an article by Alberto Conti published on ComeDonChisciotte.org on 5th May 2024.
A predator tends to hide until the moment of the final attack, to prevent the prey from becoming suspicious and fleeing pre-emptively, thwarting the predation strategy.
Conversely, when two competitors confront each other aggressively, they tend to maximise their opponent's perception of their own strength, showing teeth, muscles, claws and whatever else constitutes a lethal offensive weapon, including acting tricks to appear bigger and more powerful than they are. The point of these preliminaries to physical confrontation is to intimidate the adversary in order to prepare him for defeat, or better still to provoke him to flee, which sanctions a victory without a blow.
This has more or less to do with the concept of deterrence, the purpose of which is to convince the adversary that it is not worth facing a physical confrontation with an overwhelming force with lethal or catastrophic consequences.
From the animal kingdom to the human kingdom therefore the step is short, the underlying logic does not change.
The history of the many known civilisations is a history of conflicts, internal or external, of civil wars or wars of conquest and defence, in obedience to the extreme law of force that selects winners and losers, where the possibilities for dialogue and mediation of rivalries, hatreds, conflicting interests, different cultures and world-views are lacking.
However, weapons and modes of combat have changed a great deal over the course of history, as well as sometimes being different even between the same armies fighting each other. From fighting in battle between soldiers bound by a military code, we have moved, in more recent times, to the involvement of entire populations with no holds barred. And this behavioural degeneration paradoxically goes hand in hand with the availability of ever more sophisticated and powerful weapons, including the infamous “weapons of mass destruction”, which by their very nature do not distinguish between civilians and soldiers.
The last two world wars saw the creation of the famous atomic bomb, whose devastating destructive power soon became the symbol, as well as the substance, of the deadliest weapons of mass destruction. Weapons that were subsequently perfected and enhanced so as to leave no chance, not only for the enemy on duty, but also to the entire human species inhabiting the earth's biosphere, irreparably deteriorated and rendered uninhabitable as a “side-effect”.
Since human beings tend to be rational, it is assumed that the use of these “end-of-the-world” weapons would be avoided to the ultimate level of uncontrolled desperation, to the point of the insane suicidal decision of “die Samson with all the Philistines”. However, the research and development of such armaments, with the associated massive production and strategic build-up, has continued more or less secretly among the world's major powers, even in defiance of reasonable multilateral non-proliferation agreements.
This absurd use of public resources, coming from the hard-earned taxes of the taxpayers, can only be justified, if one can say so, in the gloomy and ambiguous light of the concept of “deterrence”, which, as we have seen, derives from the instinctual behaviour of certain animal species, to which even the species “homo sapiens” has been inspired in the 'logic' of unleashing its competitive aggressiveness.
However, the phenomenon that is most interesting to observe is that the possibility of producing and accumulating such weapons in inordinate quantities is the prerogative of the greatest economic powers on the planet, since enormous investments are required in the development of modern technologies dedicated to these purposes, which have evolved thanks to the development of scientific research. But as these technologies are developed, other lesser countries subsequently come into possession of them, further expanding the “end-of-the-world” military arsenal, and thus increasing the possibility, whether deliberate or accidental, that they will actually be used, triggering an uncontrollable global “escalation”.
The icing on the cake is the parallel development of this type of weapons on a reduced or “depleted” scale, hypocritically called “tactical” in military jargon, to indicate the possibility of their free use 'limited' to the battlefield, as if they represented a thousand shades of grey in the hierarchy of military weaponry.
It is actually a harbinger of escalations just as uncontrollable as those guaranteed by the use of top-of-the-line weapons of mass destruction.
It is a bit like when the most powerful bullies in the neighbourhood impose their will through greater physical strength, tending to be imitated by bullies of lower rank, to the point of making the neighbourhood unlivable.
Or as when the most powerful mafia dictates law at all levels, corrupting and polluting civil life, but above all making any civilized confrontation unfair.
In reality, I can think of no similes or appropriate metaphors capable of rendering the absurdity of the political-military practice based on the concept of deterrence, as in force from the post-war period to the present day.
In short, however one spins it, this “deterrence” demonstrates all its grotesque absurdity, like a caveman logic that nonetheless dominates the most advanced technological civilisations in the history of planet Earth, involving its entirety. It is easy to predict that, if humanity comes out of the 21st century alive, it will look back on the times of military deterrence as the darkest and most dangerous times in human history, characterised by an incredible cultural backwardness that makes the Middle Ages with its witch hunts, or the era of slavery and colonialism, and even the worst cases of ethnic and religious racism, which still sporadically torment our contemporary world, pale.
This deterrence is an insane load of rubbish - there is no doubt of it - even though it has been accepted and managed by governments around the world for 80 years, putting peoples' lives at risk, peoples who suffer the consequences of it.
This must be shouted from the rooftops with all the voice in our bodies, until the real power is forced to listen to the voice of the People, and remedy it. At least this is the hope, to win this race against time, our time, all together, in every corner of the world.
No more military secrets about laboratories dedicated to the development of weapons of mass destruction, no more indiscriminate funding of the military-industrial apparatus, no more bullies dictating unipolar rules on a planetary level, no more wars as an instrument of offence to the freedom of other peoples and as a means of resolving international disputes. In the end we always go back there, to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, who knew well what war was, having experienced it on their own skin, just as they knew well what it meant to represent the People and to have a straight back.
If we really cannot abrogate the very concept of deterrence, let us only apply it to our rulers, meaning the people's judgement of their actions, or consensus or whatever you want to call it, regaining true ownership of this judgement of ours above propaganda, especially when it is war propaganda, i.e. the worst of crimes, still brazenly perpetrated as much as unpunished.