By John Scales Avery*
COPENHAGEN, 15 March 2023 (IDN) — It appears that the military-industrial complex has complete control of the government of the United States, which recently voted to give the Pentagon roughly a trillion dollars of the taxpayer’s money. This was done by cutting back on social programs which would have helped poor working families.
Recently Joan Roelofs published a book entitled “The Trillion Dollar Silencer: Why There Is So Little Anti-War Protest in the United States” (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2022). In this book, she points out that the US military-industrial complex has located military bases in regions where the local economy is entirely dependent on them.
The vast river of money flowing into the pockets of the military-industrial complex implies that very many people earn their living, directly or indirectly, from the manufacture or use of weapons.
Why is there bipartisan support for sending billions of dollars worth of advanced weaponry to Ukraine, thus gradually escalating the war into an extremely dangerous proxy war between Russia and the United States and its NATO allies?
The great danger is that the escalation of the conflict will result in a nuclear war. However, politicians from both US political parties are so blinded by nationalism that they believe the risks are necessary to “weaken Russia”, thus asserting American global hegemony.
The US Anti-China campaign
As if the proxy war with Russia were not enough, the US government, driven by the greed of the military-industrial complex, has begun to threaten war with China. At the bottom are some links that report on the recent anti-China campaign and the unprovoked threats to China**.
The threat of war and actual war
To justify obscenely enormous government spending on weapons, the military-industrial complex does not need actual war – only the threat of war. But threats can lead to actual war, even if no one wants it, as we should have learned from the outbreak of World War I.
The threat of nuclear war
Reading the discussion in the links above, one finds no mention that the United States and China are both nuclear-armed nations. A war between the US and China is visualized as a conventional war (which, by the way, the United States certainly could not win). However, a war between two nuclear-armed nations inevitably exposes the world to the danger of a catastrophic nuclear war, in which a large fraction of its humans, animals and plants would perish. We cannot afford to take this risk.
Cooperation rather than competition
Instead at aiming at global hegemony through military power and regarding China as a competitor, and hence an enemy, the United States should cooperate with China, arranging exchanges and conferences in science, engineering, economics and climate mitigation. [InDepthNews]
Several of the writer’s freely downloadable books can be found at the following web addresses:
https://www.johnavery.info/ and http://eacpe.org/about-john-scales-avery/
* John Scales Avery (born in 1933 in Lebanon to American parents) is a theoretical chemist noted for his research publications in quantum chemistry, thermodynamics, evolution, and the history of science. Since the early 1990s, Avery has been an active World peace activist. During these years, he was part of a group associated with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.
Image: China-US Flags. Source: Missouri State