To any rational person it is impossible to look at "war" and find it justifiable. To organise a group of people to go out and kill another group of people, belongs to the realms of insanity. Despite this, war is always an important part of any state's agenda, preparations for war demand a very large slice of the state's wealth. A wealth created by the very people who will be sent out to do the killing.
In modern warfare the idea of war is even more irrational, with its unimaginable destructive power. Forget all this crap about "smart bombs", when one of our "highly sophisticated" weapons of mass carnage hits a building, we are supposed to believe that everybody in that building and in the surrounding area were "bad people" and deserved to be incinerated at the whim of some foreign power.
Then there is the environmental cost, modern wars are among the largest culprits of CO2 producers. While we murder our environment there is the human cost, the usual destruction of a country's entire infrastructure and the ensuing deprivation, misery, displacement of people and deaths by the thousands and over time millions of innocent people.
If you are a capitalist accountant, you must surely have to scratch your head at the sheer cost of war. Taking America as an example, (since they are the greatest purveyors of war on the planet), the cost to the US taxpayer of that county's wars since 2001, the start of the Afghanistan illegal invasion, (figures from information Clearing House), is an eye-watering $4.76 trillion, yes, $4,760,364,004,134. To put it another way, if you had that sum in your account you could spend $1 million every hour, 24 hours a day, and you would not run out of money for 411 years. That volume of wealth blown up in smoke, in 18 years by one nation in the pursuit of war.
Of course in spite of that vast outpouring of taxpayers money in smoke and death, there are those who make billions from that money burning exercise. That is the real reason for the existence of wars, the wealthy and powerful 1% who control our lives under this capitalist system, continually grow richer on the back of wars.
On their shoulders lies the blame for the 1,455,590 Iraqis slaughtered since the US occupation of that country. They carry the blame for the 4,801 US military personnel sacrificed to swell their fat bank balances, and the 3,430 International troops slaughtered in that illegal invasion. All in the pursuit of wealth and power for the few.
"I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it." - Madeleine K. Albright [In response to a question from Leslie Stahl, "We have heard that a half million children have died (as a result of Clinton's sanctions against Iraq). I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. ... is the price worth it?
Ah, the value structure of capitalism.
Life is cheap these days... other people's lives, that is. The USA is indeed "exceptional" - exceptionally brutal.
ReplyDelete"If the Nuremberg laws were applied, then every post-war American president would have been hanged."
- Noam Chomsky