By Donald A. Collins | 9 July 2017
Church and State
My last two articles dealt with the dangerous effects of the population explosion presently on going and its direct relationship to how male dominated religions exacerbate that growth and the threat to human survival.
My two headlines may have seemed extreme: “Has the population bomb already exploded? Human survival: a drama in four acts?” and “Male religious bias could doom Planet Earth”. In the latter case, of course, I was referring only to human survival since many other forms of life would doubtless survive even a nuclear holocaust.
My main point really had to do with how male dominance has brought us to the edge of survival already. Two articles which appeared in the Summer 2017 issue of The American Scholar (TAS) underlined this point of view.
In one piece entitled “Dishonorable Behavior” we learn that while some males are sexually assaulted in the US military, women are being assaulted far more often, with frequently no true reprimands for the guilty.
TAS tells us, “In the spring of 2013, when DOD leaders testified before Congress as it searched for solutions, Donald Trump tweeted: ‘26,000 unreported sexual assults [sic] in the military—only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?’” Tweeting his way to another high example for our children to emulate?
Later in this same article we learn that,
In early September 2016, in the midst of the presidential campaign, candidate Trump stood by his tweet as “correct.” A month later, he defended more of his words, this time his boast about groping women at will, as “locker-room banter.” It’s worth quoting the relevant part of Trump’s 2005 conversation with Access Hollywood host Billy Bush, as transcribed by The Washington Post: “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. … You can do anything. … Grab them by the p—y. You can do anything.” For these words, the nominee offered the quintessential nonapology: “I apologize if anyone was offended.” The implication is that we ought to recognize such “banter” between men for what it is and not take it too seriously. Some observers dismiss scrutiny of such talk as symptomatic of an unwarranted political correctness. To them, it is a verbal performance that has no real import and no ultimate bearing on a speaker’s behavior.
With such sterling examples of high level male concern about women’s safety, dignity and status, one can hardly ignore my earlier contentions about how powerful religious influence keeps women in lesser status in so many aspects of their lives.
The cover story entitled “Our Nuclear Future” in this same Summer 2017 issue of TAS begins by saying,
This summer, for the first time, there will be a negotiation under the auspices of the United Nations on the convention banning the production, possession, and use of nuclear weapons. The United States and Russia, as well as other nuclear states, are expected to boycott the talks in the hope that they can delegitimize the effort. Instead, both countries are engaged in major modernization programs. The United States is committed to replacing its entire triad of nuclear-armed missiles, submarines, and bombers at a cost that may exceed a trillion dollars over 30 years. Russia has announced the revival of myriad Soviet-era nuclear weapons programs, including new intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles, a new heavy intercontinental-range ballistic missile, nuclear-armed trains, and an underwater drone with a thermonuclear warhead that is designed to detonate in a port in a city like New York.
An outstanding recitation of nuclear history is offered by Jeffrey Lewis, a scholar at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and the host of the Arms Control Wonk podcast. Lewis documents the escalating levels of nuclear devices produced since WWII, showing how even the most valiant efforts to deescalate have failed. The current threat posed by North Korea seems to offer no good options for resolution to the policy wonks who constantly bombard our mass media with constant references to statements mostly by male leaders of “not taking the military option off the table”.
Lewis tells us:
Today, nine countries have nuclear weapons. They are, in the approximate order in which they acquired the bomb, the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea.
Collectively, these countries possess more than 10,000 nuclear weapons, most of them of the thermonuclear variety, many times more destructive than the simple fission bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To put this in perspective, the most common nuclear weapon in the U.S. stockpile, the W76, has an explosive force of about 100,000 tons of TNT (100 kilotons)—five times the size of the implosion device dropped on Nagasaki. The largest nuclear weapon ever tested, the Soviet Union’s Tsar Bomba, exploded with a force of 57 million tons of TNT (57 megatons).
Talk of things such as stockpiles, megatonnage, and the throw-weight that missiles can carry are a regular feature of the discussion of nuclear danger. Such grim accounting may seem inadequate and antiseptic, but it represents a feeble human attempt to make some sense out of our nuclear predicament, to impose some order or pattern on this enormous capacity to commit collective suicide. The inadequacy of statistics to convey the full horror of nuclear weapons may actually be an advantage—it creates a kind of psychological distance that allows us to survey this current predicament without falling into hopelessness or despair.
The United States and Russia possess the bulk of the world’s nuclear weapons, the warheads in their respective arsenals numbering in the thousands. Still, these numbers are much reduced from Cold War peaks, in which at different points each country had as many as 30,000 nuclear weapons in a bewildering array of options to arm bombers, missiles, and artillery pieces, and even to serve as landmines.
His main point now is urgently clear: There NOW are no more nuclear options. Nuclear weapons must never be used again. It would mean the annihilation of so much of civilization that recovery might be impossible. Read Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel (and subsequent film) “The Road” which describes life after such an apocalypse.
The answer to this dilemma lies not only in stopping senseless male generated behavior, but in the recognition that we are at the edge of an abyss which too few people male and female seem to recognize could arise quickly from multiple aberrant sources since there are so many nuclear devices extant and too many male leaders who still regard nuclear deterrence as a viable philosophy.
One might conclude that violent male retaliation is almost a religion judging from the gun violence that pervades in the USA. We are told that there are now 350 million guns in the possession of our citizens, more than one gun for each of us. I don’t hear much about women using guns except on rare occasions to fend of male attacks.
Let me repeat something truly scary! That the USA and Russia are not going to this summer’s UN meeting about banning production, possession and use of nuclear weapons speaks volumes for the real prospect that a holocaust could exist almost by inadvertence.
As you read above, “The United States and Russia, as well as other nuclear states, are expected to boycott the talks in the hope that they can delegitimize the effort. Instead, both countries are engaged in major modernization programs. The United States is committed to replacing its entire triad of nuclear-armed missiles, submarines, and bombers at a cost that may exceed a trillion dollars over 30 years.”
Therefore, urgently uniting for women’s freedom from male domination becomes an even more urgent option than disclosed in my two recent articles. Women are the traditional nurturers, the birthers, the facilitators of home and harmony. What is urgently needed are screams of concern about these no longer incipient nuclear dangers from the few female leaders who have a voice on the world stage such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel or British Prime Minister Teresa May. How about American women leaders such as Senator Dianne Feinstein or Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi? Do any of them really understand the issue? We already presume our President will be too busy flying to Mar Lago or one of his other estates to go to the UN meeting. The time to put this threat at the top of the world’s agenda is now!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC., has spent over 40 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013.
From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013
By Donald A. Collins
Publisher: Church and State Press (July 30, 2014)
ASIN: B00MA40TVE
Kindle Store
Back in 1991, the NGO Don Collins founded in 1976, International Services Assistance Fund (ISAF), co-produced a TV quality 22-minute film called “Whose Choice?” which Ted Turner arranged to broadcast on September 21, 1992 in prime time on his then independent Turner Broadcast System (TBS). Other outlets such as PBS and several of its affiliates Collins and his colleagues contacted then refused to run it because of its forthright treatment of the abortion issue, arguing for all women’s right to choose not to have a baby. ISAF has made a new edition of that DVD. The purpose for reissuing this 3rd version of “Whose Choice?” was simply to show the historical urgency that attended those times, still blocked and attacked over 40 years after the Roe v Wade decision in 1973. This video is available for public viewing for the first time.
Jeffrey Lewis – Multinationalize the Fuel Cycle
Professor Paul Ehrlich: Can a collapse of global civilization be avoided?
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