Wuhan Syndrome and the next gen warfare

Is anybody talking about building next generation warplanes, satellite shooters, next monster ballistic missiles, some super-dad of a Nitro, hrdyo or any x y z bomb or any other type of extension to our greed for power? Are there top security meetings taking place to rule the planet? Everything has been pushed to the corner in the face of a common threat. Lesson number one, in the face of irreversible damage to Mother Nature and the over-sweeping forces of globalization, the problems will be common for Homo-sapiens. So stop creating any more among yourself. These are nothing but assumptions, insecurity and virtual fears in the face of imagined boundaries and mind-contrived notions of having different interests and identity. The walls have crumbled now. It’s just one open field. So play the same game for the benefit and enjoyment of everyone.    

Irrespective of the fact whether the patient zero was an inadvertent culinary experiment in Wuhan animal market or some chance, mischance, deliberate, helf-deliberate or any other reason possible pushing the situation to the leaking of the deadly virus manufactured in the Wuhan biological weapon test lab, the result is that it has carried out the repercussions of the scale of a world war three. Wars have changed shapes and context over the millennia. The greed for power, the rapacious urge to dominate, the ever-persistent gluttony for more and more, all these and more that gratify individual and collective ego are itself deadly mutants that have hijacked our creative brains to keep the destructive trait one step ahead of the peaceful use of our logic and reasoning. The main thing is: we have failed to learn to live in peace.

China and its ambitions to be the all powerful master isn’t the only genesis of the problem. It’s a symbol of our collective greed for more and more by killing the aesthetics in mankind in parallel with burning the house, the little planet, we live in. Behind its iron curtail, things have been very shady in China. The strongest in the Chinese society destroyed millions of their own softer lives in the name of an ideology that nurtures the biggest evil in the name of serving the cause of the maximum, i.e., communism. A serpent which is used to eating the weaker ones among its own species will hardly stop at dining in its own house. It will slither out of its hole to gobble up preys outside also. Like they can boil live animals to satisfy the cravings of their tongue, they will hardly listen to any prick of conscience before planning to unleash any suffering on the humanity outside the Chinese borders. This steely resolve is their strength.

Aggression serves in the brute game of the survival of the fittest. But that is where the entire meaning of humanity gets lost. It’s like retracing the steps back to the pre-historic times when our ancestors survived as one of the animals in caves and forests. We could break that vicious loop of the naked game of the survival of the fittest only because we had the power to group and manage things collectively. Contrary to the belief that our reasoning served as a weapon to enable us to reach the pinnacle of food chain and rule the planet, it’s the still more effective soft power of emotions and empathy that served as the basic fuel of our civilizational progress. Use of logic, reasoning and the subsequent science and technology is merely the means to achieve the ends of cooperation and the common goal to excel as a species. With only raw aggression, we would still have been struggling as one of the apes in the forests. We excelled not because we made deadly weapons. We thronged because we could consciously love and were aware of our empathy to contrive things and manage affairs with a larger collective identity. Now with no other species in the arena to compete against, we are carrying the struggle to excel among within the species. So the domain of collective affiliation and identity is shrinking now after expanding to its peak when Homo-sapiens primarily identified with their own species to evolve at all levels. Now the collective affiliations are shrinking within the Homo-sapiens. It now shrinks along the boundaries of nationality, religion, caste, creed, class, continent and many more. Just as we fought against other species, now we create different subspecies of mankind on the basis of caste, class, nationality, ethnicity and religion. It’s the same age old war that we started against other species. To compete at all cost, even though there is hardly any need anymore, leaving it a divided house now at the risk of crumbling down far earlier than anyone of us can think of.

As I look at China’s obsession for more power and clout, I have to point out that I am no supporter of the USA either. They have been doing all that takes in the power game to stay the de facto ruler of the planet. It includes sustaining conflicts world over to weaken nations and encash resources out of conflict areas. However, the saving grace is that they are a functioning democracy. People have a direct role in choosing their head. And the option of choosing a leader still leaves a whole lot of prospects for the humanity. At least, the head of the state is accountable. He has the necessity of going out there before the electorate and get the license of governance renewed again. The leadership in China is not accountable to anybody. And such power sitting on the head of such immense resources is nothing sort of a potential hazard for the masses both within and outside their boundary.

Now, with just 3000 deaths, which is nothing in comparison to their millions of slaughters under communism, they are in a fine position to start throwing the sickened humanity outside Chinese borders with cheap, hardly reliable medical supplies. More business. More money. More clout. They want it at any cost. Their biggest rival is on the knees with the risk of even 100,000 people dying from Corona virus. That is what is most important to the Chinese. They hardly care if there have been collateral damages to their own late-found cronies like Italy, who had become the junior sergeant of Chinese belt and road initiative meant to tie a serpent knot on the world economy. Italy unfortunately served as the launch pad of infecting the entire Europe and the rest of the world in its wake, given Europe’s position in the day to day functioning of the world.

The wars in future will come in different colors than we have got used to see in the past. All of us have the fire-spitting metallic birds, the very same ballistic whales that swim in the seas outside our atmosphere and then dive to strike suddenly, the very same fire and hell spewing nuclear bombs, the same guns, mortars and military arsenal. All countries can kill similarly. So who will take the risk of hitting with the same weapon that lies in the opponent’s holster also? The new weapon is inelegant shrewdness and ingenuity to hit the opponent’s interests in almost invisible, indirect and intangible ways. Corona isn’t a self-evident war. Beyond the estimations of what and whys of it, it is primarily an epidemic. The scourge is visible to the human eyes. Only its tell tale effects are visible. Instead of investing in firearm factories, you invest in setting up stages, where the real motives always stay behind the scene of the confusion. You incubate pandemics. You calculate the reactions, visualize the scenes arriving on the stage later after the silent trigger has been launched in the murky haze of human brains, then you act, behave and respond in the ways where the unsuspecting sufferers hardly believe you to be the real mutant brain behind the chaos. And you draw out advantages, indirectly, out of the things changing to a chaos on the stage. Things indeed appear incidental. While in reality it turns out to be a well scripted act.

Not that the rest of the super-power aspirants won’t do the same. They will definitely try the same. It’s only about who can be more deadly. It is not about choosing the best. There is hardly any option for that. It is simply about ‘who is a lesser evil’. And democracy is always going to be a lesser evil. With the next generation warfare, a closed secretive form of government is most qualified to succeed, where there is no specific battleground, no specifically outlined cause, no tangible target to grab. All you know is that you have to weaken the opponent at any cost and draw advantages out of that. You can do anything you want, simply because you are not answerable to anyone in the domestic population.

The motive has been the same historically. But the ingenuity of human brain was only limited to swords, and later modern weapons, where there were cuts and bruises on both sides. So if China sacrifices its own 3000 people, it will take it as its share of casualties in the new version of warfare. If with the stage-managed loss of such lives, they can bring down the entire planet on its knees, wreak havoc with its economy, suspend all other forms of military competence in the rival camps, they will take it gleefully. In the conventional warfare, you cannot even win a local battle in lieu of such number of casualties.

Deadliness is now sneaking into the domain of intangibles. Like this virus is invisible. You don’t get alert like you can do on seeing a snake. To forge out such an invisible enemy, you have to be very ingenuous in approach also. In fact, that is primarily the investment to launch the campaign. It’s about breaking all boundaries of ethics, because even in a bloody conventional war including the nuclear weapons, which are pretty conventional as of now by the way, even with your numerical and technical superiority, you give your enemy a chance to fight and die to uphold their own belief, values and position. Like in villages, the feuding farming families may unleash their fury on each other. They may murder, they may do whatever we have known as routine in terms of violence. But still there are boundaries, almost unbreakable, which even the worst enemies avoid. Their animosity seems to melt away beyond the broadly recognizable contours. All farmers have their crops under the open vault of skies. A major portion of their economic interests lies open to any kind of risk imaginable. That is the domain where mine and yours merge. You want your enemy to be decimated, but you want all farms free of fires because there is something, a voice of conscience that stops you. Your own sense of ego cuts you down in your own eyes if you think anything like that. It belittles you. Those are the open skies, the rivers, the lakes. You avoid that and decide to fight a bit on the tangible stage, where there are chances of you suffering also. But you take that as an offering to the Goddess of your ego. A Chinese type of next-gen warfare has the capability to breach any such false sense of curtailment by one’s ego. They are capable of doing anything in the name of innovation. Heart has no say. The calculating part of the brain has swiping powers, simply because their secretive system of governance allows the maximum chance to groom such a capability. Here the farmer will simply go out and cut his crop, leaving a portion of his own to be seen as burning with the rest, and light the fire. That’s it. You can defend your military installations, your cities, your borders, but limitless breaches are there in the porous and open realm of air, water and forests, the things lying there in the open like farming fields lie there only at the mercy of a sense of conscience, a self-accepted boundary, making them safer than the missiles hidden in deep bunkers.

This Chinese syndrome isn’t an outcrop in abstract. It is the recipe born of the collective fire of modern humanity’s misguided sense of achievement, in grotesque dehumanized values which put human interests before anything else on this little planet co-shared by millions of other species. Just cause and effect man! Like in a weakened immune system, the disease has to start somewhere, here also it happens to get into effect from a system of governance most suitable for the evil-effects of our unsustainable practices to be carried out. So taming China is just a partial solution. In the absence of systematic overhaul of the overall value system, we will have a new version of the Chinese kind new gen warfare and stealth somewhere else. It’s just a symptom. And treating symptoms never fully cures the root cause of a disease.  

As we go into a global lockdown, it’s the time to think and ponder. The things discussed above are mere symptoms of a bigger malady: our collective greed at the level of our species. What is the use of wreaking havoc without limits to greed and create trillions strong economies, if you have to spend trillions again to ward off the consequences, as the roof of the cave over our head, where we have been mining, caves in? Can’t we be happier with less, and that less will be still more than what we will be left with after spending on emergency solutions to save ourselves from plethora of cascading problems.

Rest man rest! Pause. Hell won’t break lose if you pose for some time. You will still have the same little gob of earth circling around the sun; you will have the same days and night, same weather systems. In fact, you will have a better version of everything else, as the sand raised by your hooves settles down while you take a rest for some time. Ask anyone, the skies are clearer than ever in recent decades. Delhi has AQI like any Nordic capital. Can you believe it?! Ozone layer is replenished. Birds appear to chirp more enthusiastically. See, what can your hiatus bring to this little home of ours in just a week! Use the Wuhan syndrome and the resultant Tsunami for forging a better future. Catastrophe has no limitations. It takes millions of years to make, and a few chaotic moments to break. It will take China a bit of time to realize its mistakes. And realize they will some fine day, I am sure. Meanwhile, if rest of the world mends its ways, the Chinese next gen warfare and the value system of their ill-conceived competence will become irreverent. Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent noncooperation will accomplish what super-nukes cannot do. Make it all versus one, but in a nonviolent compassionate way. Just don’t cooperate with the Chinese version of hegemony and dominance at any cost.