An emerging alliance of nuclear armed tyrannies threatens the world: Russia, Iran, China (let alone North Korea, Venezuela, etc.). Some say China controls a huge proportion of the African economy. The Iranian tyranny, besets by a well justified rebellion against its terror superstition, has interest to brutalize its suffering population with another tremendous war. Russia is in a parallel situation. So is Xi’s dictatorship, which pretends to go to the Moon, while embracing the Middle Ages.
World wars spread as moods. Moods of pragmatism from tyrants and appeasement from the victims and corruption from leaders entangled. Similar entanglements of devolution into violence can be observed when the Greek city-state democracies fell under the Macedonians, or when the Greco-Roman state and civilization failed, seven centuries later. The pattern of an emotional spread of belligerence was found in many European wars, including WWI and WWII.
WWII started slow and obscure, with an invasion of Manchuria by the Japanese in 1931, fueled by US oil and indifference. Then the mood that aggression paid spread among dictators: Mussolini, Hitler, Hirohito and Stalin got infected by it.
We are facing a similar situation. Dictators love exterior wars, because they justify their ferocious rule. Iran, China, Russia will wage outside wars if they believe they can get away with them, as those wars stabilize them. In turn weakness in the democracies opposed to tyrannies encourage tyrannies as they believe they can get away with waging war. A compounding factor, as in the 1930s with Hitler and Stalin, is that many Western businesses had good deals with the dictators, and that much oligarchic capital from tyrannies found its way to the West.
A world war can be aborted. The time is now. The way to the abortion of worldwide belligerence is to rearm, intervene, and not collaborate with tyrannies ASAP. In other words, do the exact opposite of what was done, or rather not done, in the 1930s.
Patrice Ayme

While aggressing and devastating China and then Indochina for a full decade, the Japanese tyranny was fueled by oil extracted, controlled and sold by the West. Hirohito riding a white stallion. Japan may have killed as much as 40 million Chinese, while suffering neglectable losses… Most of the up to three million or so Japanese who died in WWII died as soldiers… from starvation, as their own military let them starve to death. Bombings, including the nukes, and the famous Tokyo fire bombing, killed less than 750,000 Japanese.
When FDR cut off California oil, the Japanese High Comand had just enough oil to strike Pearl Harbor and make it to Indonesia (Dutch West Indies, with their oil… where the Japanese army killed… 4 millions…)
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