Are we on the verge of a global hot war?

SÜLEYMAN SEYFI ÖĞÜN,  AA  MONDAY, 04 JULY 2022

The last NATO Summit made our public more interested in terms of Türkiye's reservations about Sweden and Finland's membership applications and it’s perfectly understandable since this was one of the most critical items on the table at the NATO Summit. However, NATO's conceptual shift was overshadowed by this issue.

I'm not going to go into details. But it seems that after Biden came to power, the world was set on a dangerous course. With the slogan "America is back", Democrats in the U.S. rolled up their sleeves and got to work. NATO, which was weakened during the Trump era, was brought back into focus. Russia and China were subjected to comprehensive policies of hostility. Dissenting voices from the EU have been suppressed. Using the Russia-Ukraine war as an excuse, the EU joined NATO with the help of the current shortsighted political elites. At the last NATO Summit, this process has been deepened by large-scale armament programs involving Pacific powers such as Japan and Australia. According to some, the world has come back to the conditions of 1914. Many observers say that a new Cold War climate has been ushered in. Actually, this finding doesn't seem all that accurate. The Cold War was built on its own norms and codes in order to mutually eliminate the risk of a possible hot war. What is happening today, on the contrary, represents a rapid departure to a hot war.

In my previous columns, I pointed out that this was the necessary result of a systemic crisis linked directly to capitalism. This systemic crisis spans the whole world, starting from the U.S. and including China. The question is: Will the world find a solution to this problem? Let's ask it another way: Will the will of human beings be able to stop this course despite the imposition of deepening material necessities?

Now let's ask the following question: In terms of material conditions, the present state of the world can be compared to 1914. Can we say the same things in terms of non-material conditions?

Christopher Clarke's famous book “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914” explains humanity being in a state of denial as it grapples with the somnambulism syndrome as the war is raging. Against such a possibility; This is the state of semi-consciousness called "Nope, no it cannot be". Before the Russia-Ukraine war, he asked Ukrainians in the street, “Will there be a war?” The majority who were asked the question by reports answered, “No, how can such a thing happen? We and the Russians are brothers”. And then we saw what happened next.

The state of sleepwalking in the face of the possibility of war can be explained by the reflex of dismissing this possibility from the mind. This reflex indicates that humanity has no desire to fight. But it's also a childlike reflex. Just as it is childish to believe that when things go wrong in the economy, the "invisible hand will step in" to eliminate imbalances, it is just as childish to believe that when the possibility of war arises, invisible logic will step in and eliminate this possibility.

The lords of the militaristic economy and military strategies are, of course, always prepared for war. Political strategists, on the other hand, are two-sided. On the one hand, they are prepared for war; On the other, they make an effort to avoid this possibility. The sleepwalking public, on the other hand, does not believe that war will break out easily in their daily hustle and bustle. But one spark is enough to turn everything upside down.

What is frightening today is that the political spheres, strangely enough, do not care about commenting on the possibility of war and excluding it. The recent NATO Summit makes this clear. What has been done develops on the axis of preparation for war, simply by adding fuel to the fire. It's a purely political eclipse. In 1914, the global left had developed a right-wing anti-militarism. Today, the left is experiencing the most disgraceful phase in its history. Its ties with the working classes are severed. Leftist ideas work as a "middle-class opium." It is consoled by cultural and environmental issues, which they have turned into an object of pity, and detached themselves from their social and economic contexts. These disconnections of context eventually resulted in warmongering in the Greens. Considering the current loss of rationality, I can say that the war has broken out forty times so far. The only reason that stops this is the looming threat of nuclear weapons. I'm not so sure about that anymore. The most advanced stage of insanity is the state of utter madness. The latest NATO Summit indicates that we are on the verge of something quite similar…