Abby Martin (born 1984) is an American film maker known for her forthright documentaries on the US military and foreign affairs. Her most recent is Earth’s Greatest Enemy, a full-length account of the destruction wrought by the world’s biggest and most powerful military. In a brief commentry for Double Down News, she points out (at 2.32) that, under intense pressure from Bill Clinton, the original Kyoto conference granted exemptions to all military forces throughout the world. They are not required to report their consumption of fuel or emission of greenhouse gases, etc. So in the first two weeks of the criminal Israeli-American war of aggression in Iran, the attacking forces produced at least 5,000,000 tons of greenhouse gases which are not counted in how fast we’re heading toward climate catastrophe.
It has to be remembered that that’s only the direct production of gases, it’s only planes taking off, bombs exploding and all the minor stuff. The real damage is concealed because it’s scattered over practically the entire world. It’s huge mines in the Pilbara region of West Australia digging up iron ore for export through Port Hedland, one of the world’s busiest ports by tonnage, 580million tonnes last financial year. Shipping every one of those tonnes to Asia produces about 2 tonnes of CO2. It’s ore processed by coal dug up in enormous opencut mines in Queensland and New South Wales (the biggest coal port in the world is Newcastle, NSW). It’s gigantic ships travelling empty from Asia and Europe to faraway Australia to collect vast loads and send it back, belching sulphurous gases every inch of the way. It’s huge railways hauling minerals and chemicals to be processed and then hauled further to be made into bombs and tanks which are then shipped around the world to be blown up.
That’s part of it. The rest is the vast “defence establishment,” the hundreds of millions of people whose entire careers are devoted to burning money. I regularly drive past an army base here in Brisbane. It consists of a hundred or more large buildings sprawled over hundreds of acres with several thousand people and many hundreds of mostly large vehicles, all marching and buzzing around militarily, all achieving precisely nothing. A farmer produces crops and livestock, a fisherman brings in fish, a nurse cares for sick people, a teacher teaches and so on but the military and their swarms of civilian employees and all the millions of industrial workers and transport drivers and people building ships to carry ore to make tanks to be blown up, they consume prodigiously but produce nothing except greenhouse gases and toxic waste. Consume baby consume. They’re parasites on the productive world.
The Stockholm Institute of Peace (SIPRI) estimates the total cash cost of militarism each year, in wages, cost of materials, cost of replacing damaged structures, farmland destroyed and so on, is of the order $19trillion a year or nearly one sixth of world GDP. That’s the direct cost but what is called the opportunity cost of this titanic effort is incalculable. Consider a simple but routine example. There is a house standing on a street with an empty block next door. One morning, a gang of men arrive in a truck laden with building materials which they unload on the empty block and start building another house. It takes a couple of months and we can calculate the total cost in cash and in environmental terms but at the end, we have two houses to show for it. Consider another scenario, same house standing on the street. One day, the same truckload of men arrive, this time dressed in military uniforms with a tank and guns and explosives and they blow it up. End result, no houses and a lot of black smoke. Same energy consumption but one path produces two houses compared with no houses by the other. By diverting productive capacity to militarism, the opportunity to do something constructive is lost as well as the direct losses. That is the opportunity cost of militarism, the cost of foregone production. Every soldier on duty isn’t ploughing a field or building a house or nursing a sick person or teaching a child. Every civilian employed by the Defence Dept. isn’t doing something constructive. It is probably twice the direct cost, giving a total of nearly $60trillion per year, every year, that we pay just to have lots of fireworks and cemetaries.
In 1850, Frédéric Bastiat, a French economist, introduced the idea of opportunity cost in a parable of broken windows. Consider a small village: one day, somebody breaks a window, so the glazier comes to repair it. The glazier is better off as a result, as is the man who brought the glass to the glazier in his wagon, as is the man who makes wagons and so on. Soon, the villagers work out that if they smash all the windows in the village, everybody will be better off. Needless to say, they aren’t as the money could have been spent on constructive things, like repairing the bridge, fixing the school and so on. Nowadays we laugh at people who could make such a simple mistake: destruction and the money spent recovering from destruction is never a net benefit to society. Laugh, but we’re doing it all the time (see here, 9.50).
The effect is very real. China doesn’t spend anywhere near as much on its military as the US so it hasn’t had 80 years of continuously losing wars, and their civil infrastructure is roaring ahead. Since 2008, they have built over 50,000km of high speed rail; the US has lots of bombers and aircraft carriers but no high-speed trains. That is not a coincidence. They talk about building one in California but don’t actually have any agreed plans so if they started today, it would be a minimum of ten years before the first train pulled out. By 2035, China expects to have another 20,000km. This is not trivial as railways are a good investment, they last a very long time. On the other side, the destruction of Gaza has produced many millions of tonnes of rubble, mostly concrete, production of which released perhaps 100million tonnes of greenhouse gases. Currently, the rubble is being removed in diesel powered trucks and the displaced Palestinians will need somewhere to live, which will produce more gases.
On the face of it, this is blind stupidity. These three years 2024-26 are the hottest on record and everything says it’s going to get hotter still. Instead of burning things down, we should be using the same energy (actually a lot less) to build an economy that will last in the long term. In the DDN interview, Abby Martin asks:
Unless we understand why this has happened, who’s responsible and how it needs to stop, how the US military is enforcing this unsustainable, insane fossil fuel infrastructure ... we’re never going to solve the problem (at 4.00).
Later, she talks to senior military officers but is dumbfounded when she realises that they talk about the need for the US to be dominant but have no idea why it should be: “Some of them have never even thought about these things (i.e. that US must be dominant) or questioned their motives...” (8.30). The psychopathic Henry Kissinger said: “Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy.” What he meant was that if they start asking sensible questions, the whole military thing falls apart. Give them enough wars to keep them busy and they won’t question what they’re doing, as the writer Thomas Pynchon observed: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.” As long as they’re asking each other: “What’s the best way to bomb Tehran?” they’re not asking: “Should we really be doing this?” But back to Martin’s question: Why has this happened? Who’s responsible and how are we to stop it?
The core thesis of narcisso-fascism is that humans just are aggressive. People often ask why there are no Neanderthals left, why they died out. My suggestion is that they were killed off by Homo sapiens just because Neanderthals were gentle souls lacking the innate drive to dominate the mob in the next valley. They used their limited aggressive urges hunting mammoths in the snow and couldn’t be bothered picking a quarrel with the neighbours. And then we arrived. Trouble is, as Martin indicates, we don’t even recognise how aggressive we are, it’s second nature and we don’t question it. For us, a person who doesn’t want to be king of the castle is the odd one, probably ASD or something. Kissinger didn’t ask: “Why are we in Vietnam in the first place?” Had he been asked, he would have said: “To stop the communists.” He would not have asked: “What are the conditions in Vietnam that make communism attractive?” because the answer was: Western colonialist capitalism. The last thing he wanted was generals with their eyes wide open, as happened to Marine General Smedley Butler in South America early last century. When he retired, Butler wrote a short book called War is a Racket, in he which he slammed the entire idea:
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes (1935, p1).
And a lot of people end up dead. Nothing has changed. Trump kidnaps the Venezuelan president, killing a hundred people in the process, and gloats how he has got his hands on 65billion barrels of their oil, plus billions of dollars in a Qatari bank. They were mismanaging it, he says, so we had to take over, overlooking the fact that their oilfields were built using American machinery to provide the dense oil to US Gulf coast refineries, and when the first “sanctions” were imposed years ago, they couldn’t get spare parts to service or repair the machinery, so their production went down and down. First strangle them, then blame them for not breathing properly.
“Why has this happened?” The answer to Martin’s question is perfectly clear: because Homo sapiens. The urge to dominate is blind to the consequences, it doesn’t want to know about consequences, it thinks only of the next few minutes. The joint US-Israeli urge to dominate the 93million Iranians didn’t consider the possibility that the Iranians might not want to be dominated and might hit back. If anybody were to tell Trump or Netanyahu about the millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases they have released, they’d say: “Piss off and stop wasting my time, I’m got more important things to deal with.”
“Who’s responsible?” We all are. We could blame the 77million Americans who recently voted for a convicted thief and unconvicted child molester who told everybody well in advance that he would be a dictator but don’t forget that the execrable Nigel Farage was just re-elected to Parliament in the UK on a similar program, and the totally PHONy Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party just won a state election in West Australia, same reason. France, Germany, Italy, India, Israel, you name it, the message is: “We’re the best, we should be in charge and we’ll smash anybody who disagrees.”
“How are we to stop it?” Ah well, that’s the more difficult part because the people running the show have set it up so that anybody who disagrees with them is heading for the slammer for a long time. Protestors at an ICE facility in Prairieland, Texas scored up to 100 years inside, including 30 years for moving a pile of books. Same in the UK with the Filton protestors; fortunately, a defendant in Australia won his appeal over so-called terrorism charges. As Gen. Butler saw nearly a century ago, a small group of people make a shitload of money from militarism, so they’ll stop at nothing to keep the party going. And they certainly don’t care who gets killed in the process.
Militarism and global heat catastrophe go hand in hand. Militarism is by far the biggest single contributor to greenhouse gases but it’s hard to calculate as the causes are buried deep inside a million other accounts. The crucial decisions concerning the future of the world are being made by a small coterie of profoundly corrupt people, such as a dementing 80yo man who wants to name the Strait of Hormuz after himself, and a psychopathic politico-religious fanatic surrounded by immeasurably evil people who wants to build his own version of the Third Reich in West Asia (watch the first minute of this video for a late night fright).
If we continue on our present course, the world is finished. We need a total change of leadership, which will only come when the electorate realises that all the talk of “We need to be world leaders” or “The communists/Islamists/terrorists etc. are coming” is a gigantic assemblage of lies and propaganda designed to stop us asking the right questions. They use fear to convince us to hand power to their small group and let them get on with raping the planet. We are not in a clash of civilisations or a battle for freedom or a war for democracy or a crusade for God or any of that claptrap. We are in the grip of a clique of power-hungry idiots who believe they know everything that counts, who refuse to consider that they could be wrong and are more than happy to kill you to prove how right they are.
Unless we get the military parasites off our backs, there’s no chance. That’s all you need to know.
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My critical works are best approached in this order:
The case against mainstream psychiatry:
McLaren N (2024). Theories in Psychiatry: building a post-positivist psychiatry. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. Amazon (this also covers a range of modern philosophers, showing that their work cannot be extended to account for mental disorder).
Development and justification of the biocognitive model:
McLaren N (2021): Natural Dualism and Mental Disorder: The biocognitive model for psychiatry. London, Routledge. At Amazon.
Clinical application of the biocognitive model:
McLaren N (2018). Anxiety: The Inside Story. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.
Testing the biocognitive model in an unrelated field:
McLaren N (2023): Narcisso-Fascism: The psychopathology of right wing extremism. Ann Arbor, MI: Future Psychiatry Press. At Amazon.
The whole of this work is copyright but may be copied or retransmitted provided the author is acknowledged.
That is a revelation, the impact of militarism on global warning
Thank you for a deeply thought provoking article, succinctly put.
And horrifying in its implication: Homo Sapiens is doomed by its inherent ineptitude.