97 WAR WATCH WEDNESDAYS, #97, OCTOBER 26, 2022.
NUCLEAR WAR
Gerald Sloan. “Assisted
Suicide.”
Join NAPF for the Next
Nuclear Dangers Zoom Discussion
Dick. From Holocene to Anthropocene: the Military
Bridge.
ASSISTED SUICIDE
By Gerald H. Sloan
Superpowers are
playing chicken
with nuclear weapons
while we try to teach
our children
how to be better
persons.
Where's the
contradiction here
when words like
"shark attack"
inspire more fear
than "nuclear
winter?"
No words in any
language
can span the yawning
chasm, no system link
such epic doublethink.
How to explain to the
next
generation this
abrogation
on so vast a scale, no
calculus
by which our overseers
do not fail?
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War v. Environment.
Title: The Military Bridge from Holocene to
Anthropocene. The Militarism Bridge from
Conventional to Nuclear War.
What are your favorite ironies
today? Let me suggest two more. One:
The fortress at the center of Baghdad is called the “Green Zone.” Two: In 2008, while the Burj Dubai tower was
being built (twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy
Commission of the Geological Society of London was saying Farewell to the
Holocene, Hello Anthropocene!
The Holocene epoch of stable climate that
allowed our civilization has ended.
Because of (causes) the extraordinary human buildup of population,
consumption in affluent countries, capitalism, economic growth, and
(consequences) CO2/greenhouse gases, warming, weather instability,
deforestation, acidification of the oceans, and mass destruction of animals and
plants, the Anthropocene epoch has begun.
Humans have forced evolution itself into a new, rapidly developing
trajectory.
Perhaps the single greatest institutional
contributor to warming, the largest single source of pollution in the world, is
US militarism; in particular, the military in its most ferocious mode, the US
military at war, now ceaseless. The
military produces enough greenhouse gases to place the entire globe in danger of
extinction.
The scale of environmental damage over the
last half century is unprecedented. Falling water tables, shrinking forest
cover, declining species diversity all presage ecosystems in distress. These
trends are now widely acknowledged as emanating from forces of humanity's own
making; ironically however, war, that most destructive of human behaviors, is
commonly bypassed.
The disregard that all wars engender for
all living things, especially for ostensible enemies, is so common as to be
unremarked, and the Pentagon keeps no record of numbers of enemy combatants or
civilians killed. The private Information Clearing House, as of
January 2009, counted Iraq War civilian deaths at 1,297,997 since the invasion
in 2003. I have found no record of the
cows and chicken, dogs and cats, birds and snakes, crickets or butterflies
killed during those or any other years or wars.
If humans who were seeking to avoid death
were so slaughtered, how enormous must have been the decimation of other species
from the shooting, firing, dropping, exploding, and incinerating. The “Shock and Awe” invasion of Iraq began at
10:15 the evening of March 19, 2003, when some 1,700 bombers and fighter planes
flew some 1,400 sorties and fired 504 cruise missiles directly into
Baghdad. In the first two days 800
cruise missiles were fired, one every four minutes, day and night. Each missile weighed about 3,000 pounds,
adding up to a total of 1,200 tons, or 2,400,000 pounds of explosives.
When the US goes to war against a foreign
nation it is a war not only against people, but against the Earth, the soil and
animals and plants, in the most far-reaching, annihilating ways. The earth can no longer absorb the punishment
of war of the ferocity that the greatest superpower in history is capable of
inflicting.
Yet the US will not only not let go its will to dominate the
world; rather it is tightening its grip.
In its latest National Defense Strategy, the Pentagon declared a new
Cold War with both China and Russia and promised to wage the war around the
globe. That is, it is not a defense
strategy, but an aggressive attempt to justify a massively expensive military
buildup for global control, the effects of which on the environment and climate
are beyond imagination.
What we need is an International Rescue
Strategy against the consequences of the onrushing climate catastrophe that
includes not only coastal city adaptations to rising seas but relief for global
economic inequality within and among nations, and millions of displaced
refugees. Instead, the Pentagon offers
us the old, ruinous, ostensible threat of Cold War adversaries. As Pentagon Secretary Jim Mattis expressed it,
“Great Power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of U.S. national
security.” To the Pentagon, China and Russia threaten the world, not warming,
hurricanes, drought, extinctions, or rising oceans.
Resistance
You and I can make two effective
responses right now. We can stop saying
Department of Defense. Put an X
or a slash over Defense. It’s the War
Department, just as it was before President Truman and the Pentagon
cunningly changed its name. And we can support anti-war, anti-imperial
organizations; such as Veterans for Peace, Peace Action, AFSC/FCNL, ICAN,
NAPF, OMNI. Want to expand your antiwar footprint? Join an antiwar organization.
And then we can join the United Nations in estimating the environmental and
climatic destruction of US wars before and afterward, toward pushing Congress
to force the Pentagon to declare the true costs of its wars. This is a feasible and even familiar
practice. For example, a 2010 study
found that 3,000 companies were responsible for $ 2.15 trillion worth of environmental damage in 2008. Let’s get the damage data and let’s name the
perps.
And then
we can laugh out loud at all the green-washing--many as absurd as Baghdad’s
“green zone”-- distracting us from calamitous planetary war and warming.
References, KPSQ talk #18 on War
and Environment Sat. Feb. 24, 2018. (800 words, I cut this for the radio
editorial to around 650 to be under 7 minutes).
Barry Sanders, The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism. 2009. Over
a decade old but still cutting-edge, so little attention to the destruction has
been paid.
Mike Davis, “Foreword,” to The Green
Zone, “ Living on the Ice Shelf: Humanity’s Melt Down” (2008).
“Putting a
price on global environmental damage .“
Trucost. https://www.trucost.com/trucost-news/putting-price-global-environmental-damage/ Oct 5, 2010.
Robert Borosage. “Trump’s Forever Wars.” The
Nation (Feb. 26, 2018).
Alice and Lincoln Day, Producers. Scarred Lands & Wounded Lives: The
Environmental Footprint of War. The effects of war and war preparations on the environment, while
profound, have been largely overlooked. In
2011 OMNI brought Alice and
Lincoln here to show their excellent film.
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