As Jimmy Carter told Donald Trump, “Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None. And we have stayed at war. . . . China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that’s why they’re ahead of us. In almost every way.”
The New York Times routinely tells bigger lies than the clumsy nonsense it published about weapons in Iraq. Here’s an example. This package of lies is called “Liberals Have a Blind Spot on Defense” but mentions nothing related to defense. It simply pretends that militarism is defensive by applying that word and by lying that “we face simultaneous and growing military threats from Russia and China.” Seriously? Where?
The U.S. military budget is more than those of most nations of the world combined. Only 29 nations, out of some 200 on Earth, spend even 1 percent what the US does. Of those 29, a full 26 are US weapons customers. Many of those receive free US weapons and/or training and/or have US bases in their countries. Only one non-ally, non-weapons customer (albeit a collaborator in bioweapons research labs) spends over 10% what the US does, namely China, which was at 37% of US spending in 2021 and likely about the same now despite the highly horrifying increases widely reported in the US media and on the floor of Congress. (That’s not considering weapons for Ukraine and various other US expenses.) While the US has planted military bases around Russia and China, neither has a military base anywhere near the United States, and neither has threatened the United States.
Now, if you don’t want to fill the globe with US weaponry and provoke Russia and China on their borders, the New York Times has some additional lies for you: “Defense spending is about as pure an application of a domestic industrial policy – with thousands of good-paying, high-skilled manufacturing jobs – as any other high-tech sector.”
No, it is not. Just about any other way of spending public dollars, or even not taxing them in the first place, produces more and better jobs.
Here’s a doozie:
“Liberals also used to be hostile to the military on the assumption that it skewed right wing, but that’s a harder argument to make when the right is complaining about a ‘woke military.’”
What in the world would it mean to oppose organized mass murder because it skews right wing? What the hell else could it skew? I oppose militarism because it kills, destroys, damages the Earth, drives homelessness and illness and poverty, prevents global cooperation, tears down the rule of law, prevents self-governance, produces the dumbest pages of the New York Times, fuels bigotry, and militarizes police, and because there are better ways to resolve disputes and to resist the militarism of others. I’m not going to start cheering for mass killings because some general doesn’t hate enough groups.
Be seeing you
Pepe Escobar
