A Final Warning by George Orwell

'In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage and triumph: the sex instinct will be eradicated we shall abolish the orgasm, there will be no loyalty except to the party.. but always there will be the intoxication of power always at every moment there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless… If you want to imagine the future; imagine a boot stepping on a human face forever. The moral of this story is.. don’t let it happen.'  

Eric Arthur Blair, (George Orwell) was born in Motihari, Bihar, on 25 June 1903, and died in London on 21 January 1950

Ignorance is Strength-Freedom is Slavery-War is Peace (George Orwell, 1984)

George Orwell: A Final warning (see video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXm5hklbBsA

George Orwell statue 'too left-wing' for the BBC
Rudyard Kipling: critical essay by George Orwell (1942)

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“There is a substantial, politically influential, and aggressive body of American opinion for 

which the specter of a great and fearful external enemy, to be exorcised only by vast military preparations and much belligerent posturing, has become a political and psychological necessity.” George F. Kennan, former US Ambassador to the USSR

“Our enemy is a coarse, crooked megalomaniac who aims to kill us.” - Tommy White, retired US Air Force Chief of Staff

The threat of nuclear annihilation has stimulated us to try to understand what it is about mankind that has led to such self-destroying behavior. Central to this inquiry is an exploration of the adversarial relationships between ethnic or national groups. It is out of such enmities that war, including nuclear war should it occur, has always arisen. Enmity between groups of people stems from the interaction of psychological, economic, and cultural elements. These include fear and hostility (which are often closely related), competition over perceived scarce resources, the need for individuals to identify with a large group or cause, a tendency to disclaim and assign elsewhere responsibility for unwelcome impulses and intentions, and a peculiar susceptibility to emotional manipulation by leaders who play upon our more savage inclinations in the name of national security or the national interest. A full understanding of the “enemy system” requires insights from many specialities, including psychology, anthropology, history, political science, and the humanities.

In their statement on violence twenty social and behavioral scientists, who met in Seville,Spain, to examine the roots of war, declared that there was no scientific basis for regarding man as an innately aggressive animal, inevitably committed to war. The Seville statement implies that we have real choices. It also points to a hopeful paradox of the nuclear age: threat of nuclear war may have provoked our capacity for fear-driven polarization but at the same time it has inspired unprecedented efforts towards cooperation and settlement of differences without violence.. Read more: The Enemy System

Ignorance is Strength-Freedom is Slavery-War is Peace (George Orwell, 1984)

History, War & Conflict

The Twenty-First Century - the End of History?

The Russell-Einstein Manifesto of 1955
Rare First World War documents go online + Unseen photographs

Paul Fussell, ex-soldier, literary Scholar & critic

John Horgan on erasing war from the human condition

Hitler's annihilation of the Romanis 

The military spending map of the world
German Weapons for the World

Annihilation as world religion
The first world war: the real lessons of this savage imperial bloodbath

Banks in front line of nuclear arms campaign

'Military Inc' by Ayesha Siddiqa: The economic stakes of Pakistan's Army 

The Almond Trees by Albert Camus

The conditions under which we exist today in the field of politics are indeed threatened by these devastating sand-storms. Their danger is not that they might establish a permanent world - totalitarian domination, like tyranny, bears the germs of its own destruction. Just as fear and the impotence from which fear springs are  anti-political principles and throw men into a situation contrary to political action, so loneliness and the logical-ideological deducing (of) the worst that comes from it represent an antisocial situation and habor a principle destructive for all human living-together. Nevertheless, organized loneliness is considerably more dangerous than the unorganized impotence of all those who are ruled by the tyrannical and arbitrary will of a single man. Its danger is that it threatens to ravage the world as we know it – a world which everywhere seems to have come to an end – before a new beginning rising from this end has had time to assert itself.

But there also remains the truth that every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning; this beginning is the promise, the only “message” which the end can ever produce. Beginning, before it becomes a historical event, is the supreme capacity of man; politically, it is identical with man’s freedom. Initium ut homo creatus est – “that a beginning be made man was created” said Augustine. This beginning is guaranteed by each new birth; it is indeed ever man: Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism