"The Armageddon Ritual" - Commentary by Tony Seton

The Armageddon Ritual

Back 25 years or so I was hired by the Psychologists for Social Responsibility in New York to write a piece about how the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were at each other’s throats. I wound up writing a fifty-minute teleplay called "The Armageddon Ritual." It wasn’t what they thought they were getting so it didn’t go anywhere. Perhaps they didn’t think there would be an audience for five people trapped in an elevator arguing over the Cold War.

The essential issue was that we were two very different societies – Mother Russia, Uncle Sam; the bear, the eagle; encirclement, containment. This was several years before Gorbachev, whose arrival changed everything. The Berlin Wall came down, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics broke up.

We – the U.S., Europe, and Japan – might have helped the new (Russian) government, but instead we made life a bit more difficult. Our failure to participate, to give them a sense of community, left a huge gap in the global structure, one that was filled with the old familiar power-‘n-violence.

The U.S. has been trying to establish alliances with a number of the former republics, and that has been perceived as threatening to Moscow. When Georgia invaded South Ossetia, thinking they had the support of the West – to what degree they thought that we don’t know; nor do we know what signals they were given that they read correctly or not – they pushed Russia far outside of its comfort zone. Responding the way they had learned to, again, Russia came in with force and made fools of Tbilisi.

The U.S. has postured mightily, with President Bush talking about the Russian’s actions being "unacceptable" and "demanding" their withdrawal. Puh-leeze, invading Iraq was far more unacceptable. Our treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and the rendition practices – that were beneath unacceptable. Shredding the Constitution; failing to deal with destruction of the environment, the collapse of our public education system, the disaster that has befallen health care – those were all unacceptable.

For us to tell anyone that their behavior is wrong in the face of our own over the past eight years is mindless. We squandered the world’s sympathy after Nine-Eleven with our horrendous actions, at home and abroad. And instead of feeling shame and correcting the errors of our ways, the Congress plays politics, the media plays dumb, and the public plays with their video games and TV remotes.

We have earned what is coming our way. The question is will those of us who recognize the situation have the wherewithal to organize – perhaps a third party – to educate the nation to what needs to be fixed, in a timely fashion, and to find the people to lead us that way.