[Arktwo] The Aftermath

[Bruce Beach]

I get many emails asking me to describe
what it will be like
after nuclear WW3 -
and many others
describing other people's opinions.

Most generals and economists
fight the previous war
but the thing
about catastrophes -
(especially TEOTWAWKI catastrophes)
is that they are not like
the catastrophes of the past.

One email this morning -
had a copy of a widely distributed newsletter
that speculated
that the result of WW3 would be:

One fourth unemployed -
(which is less unemployment
than the Great Depression -
and far less than there is among black males -
in many of the US ghettos).

He assumed the continuing of
the economic and banking system -
with the cities still standing -
most of the population surviving -
and most of the problems 'elsewhere'
in the world.

Others go to a somewhat other extreme -
expecting Chinese,
(or Russians or Germans -
from some UN Force)
invading America
and enslaving the survivors -
if there are many -
after they use neutron bombs.

Because I anticipate
that the temple is going to be
brought down on the heads
of all the people in the world,
I don't have any concern about
Russians, Chinese, Muslims,
invading the US.

The oceans are still there -
and they don't have enough boats.
In addition,
their own social disruption
will be too great for them to organize
such a venture.

Nope, the great enemy of Americans
will be the Americans themselves.
It is like taking three shrews
and putting them in a glass jar.
After awhile two of them will get so hungry
that they will eat the third.

A little later one of the two remaining
will conquer and eat the other.
And still later
the one remaining will start
to eat its own tail.

It is Americans
that will devour Americans.
Whites versus blacks -
Mexicans and other minorities
versus others.
Racism will rule -
along with power groups -
renegade police, biker groups, you name it.

It will be MAD -
Mutual Assured Destruction -
right in America -
as it will be in the whole world
where 80 percent of the world's population
will die.

The survivors will continue to have
major disruptions for a long time.
Just a major EMP attack alone
on the US
would almost completely close it down,
destroy the economic system,
and cause total chaos in the social order.

The aftermath
of a world-wide nuclear war
will be such
as to disrupt the health infrastructure
so that plagues and pandemics
are very, very likely.
However, the fear about the use
of biochemical warfare is largely just paranoia.
Those weapons are inefficient -
difficult to control in their effects -
and are impractical to use.

Each of us has our paradigm -
and I anticipate
that the nuclear holocaust
will only be ended through Divine Intervention
in such a manner while natural in appearance -
that will be even more traumatic for many
than the holocaust itself.

I will not speculate further
on that line of reasoning
because my religious teachings state that -
to do so would not be meet and seemly.

LXI. The world is in travail, and its agitation waxeth day by day. Its face
is turned towards waywardness and unbelief. Such shall be its plight, that
to disclose it now would not be meet and seemly. Its perversity will long
continue. And when the appointed  hour is come, there shall suddenly appear
that which shall cause the limbs of mankind to quake. Then, and only then,
will the Divine Standard be unfurled, and the Nightingale of Paradise warble
its melody.
	(Baha'u'llah,
	 Gleanings from the Writings of Baha'u'llah,
	 p. 118)

In the Baha'i teachings
all this is now inevitable.
After WW2 the Guardian of the Baha'i Faith wrote:

"... the great failure to respond to Bahá'u'lláh's instructions, appeals and
warnings issued in the 19th Century, has now sent the world along a path,
and released forces, which must culminate in a still more violent upheaval
and agony. The thing is out of hand, so to speak, and it is too late to
avert catastrophic trials."
	(Lights of Guidance,
	 p. 129)

The Guardian,
regarding the Destiny of America,
said that it would experience:

"Tribulations, on a scale unprecedented in its history, and calculated to
purge its institutions, to purify the hearts of its people, to fuse its
constituent elements, and to weld it into one entity with its sister nations
in both hemispheres, are inevitable."
	(Shoghi Effendi,
	 Citadel of Faith,
	 p. 36)

To catalogue all the ills -
that reflect humanities wilful separation from God,
would require more space than I have here.

"a situation which ... in the words of 'Abdu'l-Bahá, (will) cause the
streets of American cities to run with blood, aggravating thereby the havoc
which the fearful weapons of destruction, raining from the air, and amassed
by a ruthless, a vigilant, a powerful and inveterate enemy, will wreak upon
those same cities."
	(Shoghi Effendi (July 28, 1954),
	 Citadel of Faith,
	 p. 124-127)

God, however, ... does not only punish the wrongdoings of His children. He
chastises because He is just, and He chastens because He loves. Having
chastened them, He cannot, in His great mercy, leave them to their fate.
Indeed, by the very act of chastening them He prepares them for the mission
for which He has created them. "My calamity is My providence," He, by the
mouth of Bahá'u'lláh, has assured them, "outwardly it is fire and vengeance,
but inwardly it is light and mercy." The flames which His Divine justice
have kindled cleanse an unregenerate humanity, and fuse its discordant, its
warring elements as no other agency can cleanse or fuse them. It is not only
a retributory and destructive fire, but a disciplinary and creative process,
whose aim is the salvation, through unification, of the entire planet.
Mysteriously, slowly, and resistlessly God accomplishes His design, though
the sight that meets our eyes in this day be the spectacle of a world
hopelessly entangled in its own meshes, utterly careless of the Voice which,
for a century, has been calling it to God, and miserably subservient to the
siren voices which are attempting to lure it into the vast abyss.
	(Shoghi Effendi,
	 The Promised Day is Come,
	 p. 115)

As clear and specific
as are these warnings within my religion
they are unrecognized
and ignored by many of my fellow adherents.

Just this last weekend
a number of them castigated me
about my preoccupation with concern
about the catastrophe.

As clear and specific
is the above quote
about -
"fearful weapons of destruction,
raining from the air"
on the American cities -
they were at pains to explain to me
that we know not the nature of the catastrophe
and that it may be 'spiritual' in nature -
(which of course it also is).

The Baha'is have been told repeatedly
to get out of the cities -
and that no city should have more
than 15 in it.
However,
today there are 1800
in my neighbouring city of Toronto
and similar disproportionate numbers
in other cities.

"Indeed, so grave are the exigencies of the present hour, and so critical
the political position of the country, that were a bare fifteen adult
Bahá'ís to be left in each of these cities, over which unsuspected dangers
are hanging, it would still be regarded as adequate for the maintenance of
their local spiritual assemblies.

	(Shoghi Effendi,
	 Citadel of Faith,
	 p. 128)

Baha'is chastise me
about my preoccupation
with the holocaust -
and they think that if others
had been similarly concerned
the teaching of the Faith
would have been retarded
over the last decades.

I think otherwise.
If those great masses of Baha'is
had dispersed to the villages
then we would have had
many greater numbers of assemblies -
and very possibly a much more receptive audience.

It seems quite reasonable to me
that the institutional mechanisms
would have functioned much better
with these greater number of assemblies.

Years ago I proposed a system called BADI -
Baha'i Automatic Distribution of Information -
in which emergency supplies of literature
would be maintained -
and rotated as they were used -
in all these remote communities -
and where printing masters would be also maintained
for mass reproduction when needed.

Should this have all been done
in the past decades -
with only a handful left in the cities
and much greater numbers of functioning assemblies
then I do not see what harm
there would have been in this.

There is no chastising
of the faithful in the cities -
while there is great dismay
at there being a Baha'i
in a remote village
who repeatedly warns about the catastrophe -
who repeatedly gives the advice to leave the cities -
who tells people that they should make preparation for fearful weapons
falling on the cities,
and the consequences that it will have nation and world-wide.

In the meeting that I attended
last weekend -
not one person sided with me publicly -
or even afterwards privately.

So I despair of warning
my fellow Baha'is -
and how much more so -
much of the rest of humanity -
because it seems to me
that none others
have had so clear and specific and recent warnings
as have the Bahai's.

Baha'u'llah speaks hundreds of times
of the veils
that veil humanity from recognizing Him.

It seems to me
that humanity -
including the Baha'is
are mostly veiled also
from the catastrophe
that is about to befall them.

Reflect, and be not of them that have shut themselves out as by a veil from
Him, and were of those that are fast asleep.
	(Baha'u'llah,
	 Epistle to the Son of the Wolf,
	 p. 49)

Still,
it is only fitting
that I conclude that
I am not an infallible source -
nor do I personally receive any Revelations.

But still again -
I feel called upon to be a warner -
and a warner I have been.
In my newsletters alone
(before this newsletter)
I have told people 189 times
to get out of the cities.
(I just now did a count.)

So very, very few
have listened to that advice -
that you must wonder -
why I bother.

Peace and love,
Bruce
DawnSayer@webpal.org