Contents
author Cimino
work-in-progress published 20260326
footnoted 20260414
The evil that’s been done
Is still carrying on
Cat Stevens, 1971
Mutually Assured Destruction by a Thousand Cuts: Groundbreaking detective-fiction writer Wilkie Collins anticipated an assured-destruction weapon 75 years before its definitive 6 August 1945 demonstration in Hiroshima, and arguably gratuitous, Nagasaki deployment three days later. Meantime, un arguably—and with or without an active thermonuclear component—is the mutually assured destruction of a survivable climate, should the Great Mobilisation occur too late and too tentatively. photograph Cundall Downe & Co., 1864
While a full-blown World War III was always on the cards, it was also within the realms of the possible that Homo sapiens sapiensas opposed to Homo sapiens, to acknowledge Homo sapiens idàltu, and to avoid the more cumbersome alternative of ‘anatomically modern human being’, and for sheer cussedness could build a global democracy that relegated warfare on any scale to history. In 1945, proximate motivation for abolishing warfare was aplenty, not least the 75 million lives extinguished in the just-ended World War II, and the 2.5 billionthe then global population, not that sufficient thermonuclear warheads had begun to be collectively amassed in 1945, of course lives at stake in the imminently plausible prospect of an all-out, thermonuclear, World War III.
Mutually assured destruction had been conceivable at least 75 years before Hiroshima–Nagasaki. Woman in White author and playwright Wilkie Collins, 1870:
I begin to believe in only one civilizing influence—the discovery one of these days of a destructive agent so terrible that warcapitalised, in original shall mean annihilation and men’s fears will force them to keep the peace.
By launching its second, mass-murderous special-military-operation phase, on 24 February 2022, Russia’s dictator definitively secured the diabolical distinction of ending the half-century-long, Cold War-commencement of World War III. Meanwhile, summarily abandoned by its formerly munificent principal funder, the United States, the fatally flawed fundamentally undemocratic United Nations was finally reduced to tsk-tsking from the sidelines. Unlike the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War, however, the Israeli/us-Iran War has precipitated a global economic crisis. Human casualties of the casually-created crisis will include millions of lives lost or ruined far from the immediate combat zone. Resultant fundamentalist radicalisation will bequeath a murderous, multigenerational legacy—millions will be martyred, and most martyrdom will be non-elective. What’s more, no martyr will be affordedmuch less has ever been rewarded any form of life after death, much less paradise accompanied by the lurid adolescent embellishments cobbled allusion to load of old cobblers—n regard to salacious Western memes—deliberate from post-Quran depictions.
Unilateral and illegal, the inevitable humanitarian and economic crisis precipitated by the Israeli/ us-Iran War is set to be just the latest economic shock that will be wilfully wastedunless, by some obscenely callous calculous, shock-doctrine spoils can be assessed as a good. Aotearoa briefly thrilled the world with its exemplarily demonstration of bubbleisolate-at-home, community-based bubbles—family or other, groups of individuals-based mutual kindness that likely saved considerably more than 20 000 New Zealand lives. What was conspicuously absent, however, was the sharp injection of low-carbon-infrastructure investment that would have ensured wholesome economic activity before, during, and after the crisis. Still signally indispensable is the Manualso known as South Auklandkaualso known as South Aukland isolation hospital that could save many of the up-to 1500 annual influenza and pneumonia deaths when it wasn’t prioritised responding to the current, or next, pandemic. Meanwhile, given the shameless, relentless politicking by all parties since mandatory covid-19 isolation was lifted, it is small wonder that Aotearoa entered the Israeli/us-Iran War on the back foot and without a plan. After a predictable monthdiscounting the United States 22 June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer prelude to 28 February 2026 of don’t-scare-the-horses days of nothing-to-see-here-folks, a targeted fossil-fuel subsidy by-any-other-name was announced.
Populist, panicked restoration-of-the-status-quo responses simply dig an unscalable crisis/hole deeper. Only with practice will digging hand- and footholds while simultaneously accelerating the beyond-urgent Great Mobilisation become instinctive for politicians and voters alike. Long since, Aotearoa should have been on a grid-powered-everythingexcepting, that is, data centres dedicated to the gross misapplication of AI-that-can-be grid-powered build-out mission. Pouring billions into motorways might be a great way for political parties to guarantee generous transport-industry electoral campaign funding, but if Aotearoa is to put its back into building a living, breathing, demonstration of how the democratic Great Mobilisation instantly becomes the economy, it would insulate itself from the fickle free-to-wreck-the-real-world market. New Zealand’s economy is a boom-and-bust one, based on its unproductive, ticky-tackyMalvina Reynolds, 1962 property-link to comemarket-with-bits-link to cometacked-onlink to come. Building a grid-powered, standard-gauge rail with trail rail the length of the Land of the Long White Cloud—Aotearoa—would instantly become the steel backbone of the New Zealand economy; a profoundly more resilient economy. Profound democratisation, meanwhile, is integral and a mobilisation given—a dictatorship-busting necessity, not a nicety.
Do As China Does, Not Sells : China is prospering immensely by exporting evs by the billions, while building out game-changing, practicable, grid-powered high-speed rail, and affordable, at-scale grid-powering 4th -generation nuclear power, to mention just two, massively significant low-carbon infrastructure technologies. chart Roosevelt Institute
Given the abject 80-year failure of the United Nations to do so, abolishing war must be re-embraced despite and precisely because of the war unleashed by the rogue, formerly at least putatively democratic United States, on 28 February 2026. In its magnitude, the elective Israeli/us-Iran War will likely totally eclipse the covid-19 pandemic in lives and livelihoods destroyed or diminished. Unlike the pandemic, which precipitated an unprecedentedly rapid practicable remedy in the form of deployable vaccines, at scale, no comparable, heroic, human-condition enhancing weapons are likely to be the product of this megayou say MAGA, I say mega—so’s not to dignify American exceptionalism for so much as a second-atrocity—this depravedly indifferent demonstration of unalloyed demagoguery.
Was the United States to immediately impeach and convict its rogue president and elect a radically reforming revolutionary government in the spirit of the text of its Declaration of Independence—
That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effectbring about their safety and happiness.[capitalisation normalised]
—the days of dictatorships, the invariable precursor to wars, would be numbered. Though, to have the power to lead such righteous global revolution, the us must act while it is still great at something: maintaining its 110-year, near-global monetary hegemony.
With the launching of the Israeli/us-Iran War, the already fiendishly complex Great 3rd Millennium Polycrisis could all too obviously see the chances of salvaging a survivable climate extinguished. If there was ever a time for world leaders to be led by their better angels, now is that time. Whether two millennia of evil-done-swiftly-answered-with-vengeful-retribution can be paused or replaced by the beyond-urgent Great Mobilisation will never be known without some breathtaking act of principled self-sacrifice on the scale of Bob Dylan turning down Ed Sullivan. If indeedindeed, or in deed he were a great man, Donald Trump could promptly pivot civilisation towards righteousor lefteous, even wholesomeness. Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Ukraine could, and yet survive to confound novichok-imperialism. Mojtaba Khamenei could revoke the fatwa calling for the death of Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie and his publishers, but even Yusuf Islam apologising for victim-blaming Rushdie could start a conversation. Cimino, of course, apprehended that few entertaining his preposterous not-the-great-New Zealand-novel premise would give much credence to the Middle East being the crucible in which a global democracy could be alchemised. Nonetheless, Cimino persisted with his hypothesis. A diabolical confluence of Christianlatterly, mostly United States’, Jewish, and Muslim fundamentalism had proved to be an irresistible global coliseum in which unprecedented demagoguery was playing out. This, he argued, could equally be the stage upon which a rational, humane, practicable pathway was coherently articulated, whereby the potentially thermonuclear polycrisis nettle could be grasped. With the world already facing the prospect of an economic crisis on the scale of the Great Depression, selling the Great Mobilisation might suddenly seem less radical; that there is no alternative.
Once Werealludes to Once Were Warriors, Alan Duff, 1990 World Leaders: Once a globally pioneering leader in hydroelectric power generation and distribution, Aotearoa trashed its legacy—and that of its laboriously constructed rail network—when it went all-in on road transport. Regardless of how many evs flood the roads, the young, the elderly, and the non-wealthy need grid-powered public transport, and bulk/heavy freight can only be intelligently and economically transported by rail. While not quite in the 50-countries-importing-more-than-their-primary-energy walk of shame depicted here, in 2024 Aotearoa nevertheless imported 43%. To compare like with like, the 2023 percentage should be displayed, however that value is not readily discernible in the pertinent New Zealand government report. underlying chart Ember | typography, new zealand data and label Mahurangi Magazine
There are, of course, always alternatives, although it suited iron-lady Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal-fundamentalist agenda to decree otherwise—just as it suited her, and her conservative-fundamentalist base, to pontificate but not act upon, climate. From the pathetically piecemeal to the desperate, nations are scram-cobblingwhy not! together measures to shore up their respective neoliberal economies. Virtually all of that hastily contrived expenditure is futile, but worse, will only dig the hole humanity’s in deeper . A handful of crack, up-too-speed polycrisis analysts could have a preliminary great mobilisation guide for governments prepared in a week—such, in a halfways-rational world, would exist already, detailed, nation by nation, and continuously updated. Unlike the not-fit-for-purpose Sixth Assessment Report of the not-fit-for-purpose United Nations’ not-fit-for-purpose Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, this, living, guide to the galaxy would thrill readers—nor need it be utterly devoid of whimsyor irony. When the final synthesis report was eventually released, in March 2023, some of the critical research behind the 2021 IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, by 2026, was already a desperate decade out of date. Meantime, media coverage about more recent findings, by the time such work sees the light of day, typically prefaces the report as grim/alarming reading, whilst hastily assuring readers that there is still time to reduce carbon emissions if the world acts quickly. Sadly, the only actions of significance that are taken quickly are warlike, overtly or covertly, or the shoring up of capitalism when the war in question threatens the global economy. Conceptually, were all members of the human race saintly and informed, the free or lightly regulated market would need no government. Life for the individual saintly soul, however, would be frantically complicated. Every purchase would require a profound, encyclopaedic understanding of the implications. Every individual would need to be as accomplished as polycrisis polymath Adam Tooze, and even he can get some big-picture puzzle pieces wrong. Then there’s the small matter as to how humanity might conceivably plan a practicable and humane way out of the fossil-fueled swamp it’s mired itself in, and keep the trains running on time—or at all. On balance, the abolition of warfare appeared to Cimino the best prospect for the cessation of Middle East hostilities.
Short-lived Hard-Won Triumph of Nuclear Diplomacy: Painstakingly crafted, the Iran Nuclear Deal Framework signed by Security Council foreign ministers plus Germany and Iran on 2 April 2015, appalled Netanyahu, who prevailed upon Trump to subsequently trash the putative vicious-sanctions-ending step towards Middle East peace. Here, framework architect Javad Zarif shares centre stage with European Union foreign minister Federica Mogherini, awaiting the arrival of Alexey Karpov of Russia. image us Department of State
Then, Foreign Affairs published precisely how Iran should end the 2026 war. Breathtakingly courageous, breathtakingly erudite, and breathtakingly generous, former foreign minister of Iran, m Javad Zarif, lays out a roadmap whereby Iran would “take the win” and:
for instance, commit to never seeking nuclear weapons and to down-blending its entire stockpile of enriched uranium to an agreed level…
Titled How Iran Should End the War , Cimino instantly perceives that Professor Zarif ’s colossally courageous 2500-word proposal could prove to be signally responsible for ending the Israeli/us-Iran War. It takes him a few minutes to apprehend however, that equally, the Zarif proposal could end the Israeli/us-Iran War, World War III, and ultimately all wars. Profoundly humbled by the proposal’s brilliance and humanity, Cimino praysa strictly secular prayer for its success, and that it proves to be the sea change that sees the abolition of warfare on the 2020s horizon. While much of humanity may have been rendered too fatalistic to begin to believe that warfare might be abolished, Cimino imagines that that was likely also the case when abolitionists confronted a 5000-year historynot to mention how many thousands, pre-historically of slavery. Sadly, Netanyahu’s ability to play Trump—the world’s greatest demagogue since fellow malignant narcissist, Mussolini—like a fiddle will all to likely see further diabolical escalation of the Israeli/us-Iran War, denying Trump the option of declaring victory and walking away from the holocaustplease note small-H holocaust. Use of holocaust—as in the genocidal, not burnt-offering sense—in other than the context of the Holocaust is deliberate the rivals-in-evility pair have so casually unleashed. Currently unknowable is whether Netanyahu or Putin seize this opportunity to demonstrate the first tactical use of thermonuclear warfare, beyond the threat to do so.
Workaholic Designer of a Workable World: A latter-lifetime mission to transform the United Nations system by polymath geographer Joseph Schwartzberg, aside from encouraging un Parliamentary Assembly adherents, appears to have left the United Nations singularly unmotivated to address its fatally flawed, profoundly undemocratic structure. Should the escalating Israeli/us-Iran War will finally convince the world that the United Nations was unfit-for-purpose from day one, its replacement, drawing on his vast body of work on the subject, deserves to be Schwartzberg’s legacy eternal. image Ed Dahl
Rather than reforming the United Nations , the edifice deservesthe United Nations deserves to be replaced, in honour of the good-actor UN founders and their good-actor UN successors, not excluding the good-actor IPCC climate scientists, in a cleft stick to be defunded and replaced, this time by an organisation not blatantly compromised from its inception. Prior to the 1945 founding of the United Nations, the term United Nations meant the Allies, of wwii. Coined by Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, but ahead of Pearl Harbour and United States’ entry as a combatant, the term signalled Roosevelt’s determination that his country’s support for the struggle was for sovereign nations, and not for empires. A month after Pearl Harbour, the Declaration by United Nations treaty formalised the Allies commitment to an-all-for-one-and-one-for-all agreement to defeat and not individually settle for separate peace deals with any of the Axis empires—Germany, Italy, or Japan.
Putting veto into the vernacular, the structure of the Security Council that guaranteed its abuseof UN Charter purposes and principles Article 1.1: To maintain international peace and security… all-too-predictably relegated the putative global peacekeeper to policing freedom fighters and the likes of bit-player warfare adventurism. Be that as it may, the fundamentally undemocratic underpinnings of the institution, and its unworkable consensus ethos—the same insistence-upon which rendered the un ’s ipcc recommendations fatally fossil-fuel-interests compromised—doomed the organisation from day one.
After 80 years of proven unfitness-for-purpose, there is still no plan for replacing the deeply flawed forum, although a United Nations parliamentary assembly long sinceProposals for a parliamentary assembly within global organizations date back to at least the 1920s, when the founders of the League of Nations considered plans to include a people's assembly as part of the League's structure. Ref: McCarthy, Bill (March 2005). Democracy in the United Nations, UN Chronicle, p. 34. Wikipedia link broken could have constituted a step towards full democratisation. In 1945, the leader of one tiny Pacific nation played an outsized role in shaping the new body. Had Peter Fraser, New Zealand Prime Minister 1940–49, prevailed in his vehement opposition to vesting the power of veto in permanent members of the UN Security Council, the Cold War would likely have been averted, and Great Power support for wars of liberation and separatist secession, to mention just two of the many excuses for warfare. Despite the unforgiving tectonic underpinnings of the current, Israeli/us-Iran War, peaceful the negotiation might yet snatch victory from the jaws of mutual defeat. Not beyond the realms of possibility is for a New Zealander the humanity of Fraser, or the only prime minister of comparable, compelling stature since, Kirk, to emerge, to deploy every last parable from the diminutive dominionwhile technically still the Dominion of New Zealand, Aotearoa de facto became a sovereign nation, concurrent with the formation of the United Nations, as plain New Zealand’s creation story—of the world’s last created, last discovered, last colonised habitable landmass. As the world’s first full democracy, this astonishingly serendipitous product of tectonic resurrection—terrible Indo-Australian–Pacific plate collision—has an unrivalled opportunity to lead the abolition of warfare with beyond-urgent Great Mobilisation.
Abolition of the abomination that was slavery, in the 19th century, is now totally taken for granted, just as the abolition of warfare will be in late 21st - and 22nd centuries, goodnesssubstitute Alah, Atua, God etc., to ethnicity, taste or faith willing. It took World War II to put Woodrow Wilson’s bastardised League of Nations out of its miserable existence. Rather than chance full-blown World War III to terminate the United Nations, better the people elect their own replacement for it without further delay.
If humanity collectively deserves to survive, and acts commensurately—with the arrestalong with the literal arrest of architect of that phase, and his prime emulator of its thuggish special-military-operation phase, by its urgent, deliberative, radically democratic mobilisation—World War III , will prove to have been the war to end all warsthe common-use improvement on the original, eponymous H G Wells title: The War That Will End War.
To be further edited…
Profoundly Inspired: m Javad Zarif—source of Iranian thinking behind the concept of regional control of the Persianor Arabian, but if Persian was good enough for Nasser and his lifelong Iranian wife… Gulf to bring an end to the Israeli war on Palestinians and deliver a just peace in the Middle East involving fossil-fuel-funded reparations for a century of genocidal Western colonialism culminating in the Israeli/us-Iran War. Largely responsible for the superbly just 14 July 2015 Joint ComprehensivePlan of Action, promptly reneged upon by the United States, Dr Zarif risked his life recently by publishing a just plan to end the current, treacherously launched, Israeli/us war. image Al Jazeera
Abolition of warfare in the Middle East Synonymous with warfare, if warfare were to be abolished there, in the Middle East, warfare could be abolished every i.e. worldwide, and by rational extension, barring some astoundingly improbable fluke, any extraterrestrial civilisation similarly blighted by Earth-like warfare will never be known to, much less be influenced by, Earthlings—to benefit by their abolition-of-warfare successwhere i.e. worldwide, and by rational extension, barring some astoundingly improbable fluke, any extraterrestrial civilisation similarly blighted by Earth-like warfare will never be known to, much less be influenced by, Earthlings—to benefit by their abolition-of-warfare success. Hanging in the balance is whether the Middle East can lead civilisation to salvation via the abolition of warfare necessary if the beyond-urgent Great Mobilisation is to stand a fighting chance of salvaging a survivable climate. Setting aside the social and economic costs of what history might record as the Secondor Third, should the Great Recession be retrospectively reclassified, when the counting is done Great Depression, the appalling carnage of the Israeli/us-Iran War, the Gaza Genocide, Israeli invasion of Lebanon must surely motivate humanity to collectively demand the just addressing of grievances, and the isolation of the initiators and belligerent perpetrators of war.
If the profoundly inspired, 11–12 April 2026 Pakistan-facilitated peace conference had been followedeither after the impeachment and conviction of the incumbent or 7 November 2028—whichever comes first by the election of a profoundly inspired us president and congress, the Abolition of Warfare and the Great Mobilisation might have proceeded in lockstep. Whether or not those two, profound enlightenments had then occurred in time to save Homo sapiens sapiensas opposed to Homo sapiens, to acknowledge Homo sapiens idàltu, and to avoid the more cumbersome alternative of ‘anatomically modern human being’, and for sheer cussedness and theirwas planning to write ‘her’ fellow species, before realising that ‘their’ works in its pre-LGBTQ-correct usage anyway fellow species, from extinction is moot. If the end times has been anthropogenically predestinedword-choice wholly motivated by desire to pay tribute to Cimino’s inspirational English teacher Beryll Hooten, who had a quirk for predestination, so be it, but nor should that condemn remaining generations to live and die warring like 2020s savages.
To be continued…
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Hypocrisy on the high-seas piracy It would be a gross exaggeration to suggest that Sir Keir Rodney Starmer had grown a pair. To be charitable though, Starmer’s insistence that the United Kingdom won’t be bullied into joining the shooting part of the Israeli/us-Iran War shows a semblance of gonadal growth. Neither this belated display nor the European Union’s condemnation of Iran’s Hormuz chokehold indicate the remotest self-consciousness of how they are abetting Netanyahu’s Greater Israeli project. Both the uk and the eu are complicit in the mother-of-all, Israeli/us you-hold-’im-while-I-hit-’im mega-genocidal masterplans. Having once built herselfher, being Britannia into a global colonist/ superpower on back of industrial-scale piracy, the United Kingdom in particular is guilty of monumentally ironical hypocrisy waxing holier-than thou over Iran’s asymmetric retaliation targeting Arabian neighbours from where the United States has unleashed unprecedented quantities of munitions to create damages already demanding 270 billion in reparations. Suddenly, apparently, against a genocidal backdrop, rule-of-law freedom of navigation is the thing the uk and the eu must most earnestly defend…
To be continued…
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