Has World War III Begun?

Far be it from me to question so august a philosopher as Bernard-Henri Lévy, but he’s all wet regarding the war in Ukraine, which he claims “is nothing less than a battle for the future of Europe, global liberalism and Western civilization.”

Promoting his new documentary film “Slava Ukraini,” Levy (or BHL as his brand is known in France), said, “In Ukraine, I had the feeling for the first time that the world I knew, the world in which I grew up, the world that I want to leave to my children and grandchildren, might collapse.” It already has. 
 

Observed L’Express, the influential French magazine, “Without a doubt, Lévy has never filmed and conveyed distress and death with such harshness and such relentless rawness.”

And yet his philosophical context is not the stupidity and waste of war, but “a battle for the future of Europe, global liberalism and Western civilization.”

That’s not philosophy but political propaganda. Indeed, more than any other putative philosopher, Levy has contributed to the conditions that have generated this slow-motion world war.

In my last column I asked, is the escalating, low-grade world war in Ukraine a proxy not just between ostensible democracy and blatant autocracy, but between America’s soullessness and the nations that orbit it in kind, and an inchoate fear of being engulfed by Western moral debilitation, brutally epitomized by Putin in his unholy alliance with the retrograde Russian Orthodox Church?

Living in San Francisco in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I saw that the USSR would soon collapse, and there was a tremendous opportunity to change the course of history -- if an alternative could be put in place beforehand. At the first stop of a tour of Russians with a now quaint-sounding program, “Soviets, Meet Middle America,” I met a man touted as a leading example of perestroika, Gorbachev’s policy of economic revitalization.

Andrei invited me to Moscow, and I flew there in January of 1990, after gathering a group of partners and enlisting the promise of support from the CEOs of a wide array of prominent Bay Area companies. One top exec, I recall, quipped, “I don’t know about doing business with a fellow going to the USSR in the middle of winter…you know, missionaries get eaten.” Over my head as young man, I nearly was.

I found myself staying in the spacious apartment of Andre and his artist and healer wife Vera. Andrei, who was just learning English, asked a question as soon as I arrived at his home, which was simple as it was profound: “Do we go in a political or economic direction?”

Having inquired into this very question with my partners, and having decided on an economic course, I tested him with my answer. “Can I meet Gorbachev?” “That can be arranged,” he replied.

I didn’t pursue it, but Andrei confirmed his connections in the two weeks that followed, culminating with a meeting with the Soviet Space Agency, Roscosmos. I had met with a senior vice-president of Ford Aerospace before leaving, and on my return Andrei and I met with six VP’s for two hours to lay the groundwork for commercial space cooperation. That was years before the International Space Station, and when space travel was just a twinkle in Elon Musk’s eye.

My premise with both American execs and Soviet apparatchiks was that the USSR was collapsing economically and politically, while the US was collapsing socially and morally, and we could work together to the benefit of both superpowers to build a new market in Russia in an ecologically and ethically sound way.

Our motto in California was, “The best with the best.” I risked everything for this country and humanity, but it was an epic fail. We got the worst with the worst of both nations in Putin and Trump. That history was not a given however, and things could have gone very differently at that time.

Now the question is, can global citizens prepare a true alternative for humankind to change course in the aftermath of this incipient world war?

I fell in love with my translator in Russia, an extremely competent and formidable Muscovite. (In that chauvinistic society men took instructions from her everywhere we went). Through Tatiana I saw that Russians are extremely smart, stubborn and prideful. I also encountered, to my surprise in the atheistic USSR, a profound spirituality, culminating in a visit to an empty St. Isaac’s Cathedral in what was still Leningrad.

“What do we do with it,” the cultural heads of the city asked in seeing how moved I was by the cathedral’s grandeur after standing silently alone under its dome.

I laughed and said: “You’re asking an emissary from your superpower enemy, which with you brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, what you should do with your greatest religious artifact? Just don’t give it back to the Russian Orthodox Church, but make it a place where people from all over Russia can come and feel the human aspiration for the divine.” 
 

They did that, but some years ago Putin gave St. Isaac’s back to the Church, and things went from bad to worse in Russia, and in Russia’s relations with the West.

I met and worked with a man from Kiev on my return to America, and saw that Ukrainians shared the same traits as Russians. They are cousins after all. That's why I see the war in Ukraine as essentially a civil war, even though Putin’s Russia is the clear aggressor.

China is about to indirectly enter the war in Ukraine, and American warnings will be as effective in stopping it from doing so as they were in stopping Russia from invading a year ago. At that point it will truly be a world war, though whether it spreads and nuclear weapons are used is an open question.

War is not simply a continuation of politics by other means; it is, once started, an uncontrollable and unpredictable force. War is the ultimate expression of human disorder resulting in utter chaos, needless death and incalculable waste.

As wrongheaded as Levy is in his World War II, East vs. West warmongering, he’s right in saying, “ideas matter, words can make a difference, decision makers can be convinced and individuals can be a grain of sand that blocks the machinery.”

It isn’t just stopping the machinery of world war that’s at issue however, if that can even be done. It’s about igniting insight within oneself, and preparing for a radical change in course for humanity in the aftermath. At long last, we will be done with war, or war will do us in. 
 

Martin LeFevre

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