A fundamental principle across the major world religions is that all human life is sacred. This principle can and should be adopted by atheists and agnostics as well, because human beings have a unique1 capacity to consciously experience the world in all of its beauty, wonder, pleasure, and pain. If we have but one life to live, we had better make it good, and any life prematurely snuffed out is a tragedy.
If you accept this simple yet profound principle (if you do not, stop reading now and let us hope you never come to occupy any position of power), many otherwise complex moral conundrums become quite simple. One such moral conundrum is War.
The Scourge of War
War is the destruction of human life on an industrial scale. In every War, the sacred lives of soldiers and civilians alike are snuffed out in the most brutal fashion – exploded into pieces, burned alive, tortured, and starved. In the Twentieth Century alone, an estimated 231 million individual human lives were erased by War.
To try and grasp the magnitude of that loss, let us conduct the following thought experiment. Think of someone close to you who died – someone whom you loved and who loved you back. Then think of the impact of that single loss on you and on all of the other individual human beings who loved that person. Think of the tears shed, the days and nights spent in mourning, the heartbreak – the loss.
Now do that again 231 million times.
As you might expect, this thought experiment simply cannot be done. Even if you took as little as one minute to ponder the impact of a single loss of life, it would take more than five human lifetimes to ponder the consequences of War in the Twentieth Century alone.2 The human brain is not designed to empathize on such a massive scale. To quote Joseph Stalin, “One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic.”
While this quote is almost certainly apocryphal, like other made-up stories it conveys a deep, underlying truth about a critical flaw in human psychology. Those who wage War exploit this psychological flaw to get away with their brutality. And, since ancient times, they seek to justify their actions by distorting the Sacred Principle described above or by fraudulently invoking its limited exception.
To demonstrate, let us restate the Sacred Principle, now with emphasis on the most important yet most overlooked word: All human life is sacred.
Does this mean that a human life can never, under any circumstances, be taken? No. The Sacred Principle allows for self-defense, and all societies since time immemorial have recognized the right of an individual to take the life of an aggressor to prevent death or serious bodily harm to oneself or others. What “all human life is sacred” means is that all human life has equal worth and that superficial – and often artificial – distinctions in nationality, geography, religion, language, gender, and race make no difference. A child in Yemen is as worthy of life as a child in Ukraine, Uganda, or the United States, and the loss of one precious child is equally tragic as the loss of another, because what is lost in each circumstance – the opportunity to consciously experience the world – is the same.
As noted above, those who wage War turn the thousands of individual men, women, and children killed by their actions into a cold, bloodless statistic, and, to the extent that their actions ever come under scrutiny, invoke the self-defense exception as a justification. As will be discussed in more detail below and in future posts, the self-defense justification is always a lie in War, as the exception to the Sacred Principle by definition can never apply at the scale of nation states, modern armies, and drones.
Who, then, are these wagers of War? And what can we do to stop them? To answer the first question, we shall rely on another piece of apocryphal wisdom:
Follow the Money
To quote U.S. Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, “War is a racket. It always has been.” This quote is not apocryphal.
As the two-time Medal of Honor recipient went on to say of War:
It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable [racket], 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.
Smedley Butler was speaking and writing in the 1930s, a decade in which U.S. military expenditure never exceeded $30 billion. Nevertheless, the particular “racket” he described – in which the people of the world pay in blood and treasure and a privileged few reap exorbitant profits – is eerily familiar today, though, as we shall see, the public cost and the private gains are orders of magnitude larger now.
In describing who paid for the First World War, Major General Butler said:
The World War, rather our brief participation in it, has cost the United States some $52,000,000,000 . . . that means $400 to every American man, woman, and child [what a quaint amount in hindsight!]
But the soldier pays the biggest part of the bill. If you don't believe this, visit the American cemeteries on the battlefields abroad. Or visit any of the veteran's hospitals in the United States. On a tour of the country, in the midst of which I am at the time of this writing, I have visited eighteen government hospitals for veterans. In them are a total of about 50,000 destroyed men -- men who were the pick of the nation eighteen years ago. The very able chief surgeon at the government hospital; at Milwaukee, where there are 3,800 of the living dead, told me that mortality among veterans is three times as great as among those who stayed at home.
Boys with a normal viewpoint were taken out of the fields and offices and factories and classrooms and put into the ranks. There they were remolded; they were made over; they were made to "about face"; to regard murder as the order of the day. They were put shoulder to shoulder and, through mass psychology, they were entirely changed. We used them for a couple of years and trained them to think nothing at all of killing or of being killed.
In describing those who profited from the First World War, Major General Butler said:
Take one of our little steel companies that patriotically shunted aside the making of rails and girders and bridges to manufacture war materials. Well, their 1910-1914 yearly earnings averaged $6,000,000. Then came the war. And, like loyal citizens, Bethlehem Steel promptly turned to munitions making. Did their profits jump -- or did they let Uncle Sam in for a bargain? Well, their 1914-1918 average was $49,000,000 a year!
Or, let's take United States Steel. The normal earnings during the five-year period prior to the war were $105,000,000 a year. Not bad. Then along came the war and up went the profits. The average yearly profit for the period 1914-1918 was $240,000,000. Not bad.
. . .
Airplane and engine manufacturers felt they, too, should get their just profits out of this war. Why not? Everybody else was getting theirs. So $1,000,000,000 -- count them if you live long enough -- was spent by Uncle Sam in building airplane engines that never left the ground! Not one plane, or motor, out of the billion dollars worth ordered, ever got into a battle in France. Just the same the manufacturers made their little profit of 30, 100, or perhaps 300 per cent.
. . .
It has been estimated by statisticians and economists and researchers that the war cost your Uncle Sam $52,000,000,000. Of this sum, $39,000,000,000 was expended in the actual war itself. This expenditure yielded $16,000,000,000 in profits. That is how the 21,000 billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16,000,000,000 profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum. And it went to a very few.
Fast forward 88 years, and let’s see who’s paying and who’s profiting now.
Bipartisanship is Alive and Well in Matters of War
As the Senate Committee on Armed Services proudly noted in a recent press release, “For the 62nd consecutive year, Congress has reached a bipartisan, bicameral agreement to pass the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).” For FY 2023, $816.7 billion was allocated to the Department of Defense (formerly known as the Department of War, though the reason for the name change was never made entirely clear). The 2023 NDAA authorized an additional $41.2 billion in “defense” spending outside the Department of Defense (the vast majority of which is devoted to the Department of Energy, which maintains the U.S.’s vast nuclear arsenal), bringing the total topline defense funding to $857.9 billion.
That topline figure exceeds the President’s own budget request for FY 2023 by $45 billion, and exceeds the military spending of the nine next largest spenders – China ($300 billion), India ($77 billion), the UK ($68 billion), Russia ($66 billion), France ($57 billion), Germany ($56 billion), Saudi Arabia ($56 billion), Japan ($54 billion), and South Korea ($50 billion) – combined. Together, these ten countries comprise over 75% of global military spending, and the United States’ share of that spending is over 50%.
In short, the United States is the world’s preeminent financier of War.
“Where does this money come from?” you may ask. That answer is clear. It comes from us – U.S. citizens who pay taxes and the citizens of the rest of the world who finance the $30 trillion U.S. federal debt.
“Where does this money go?” you may also ask. Well, that answer is not completely clear, as the Department of Defense has failed every audit it has ever attempted and cannot account for trillions of previously allocated funds (see also here and, hilariously, given the date, here). But, fortunately for us, the private military contractors that receive the bulk of this public money are assiduous recordkeepers, and the Department of Defense does appear to keep somewhat accurate records of its contracting outlays.
From publicly available data, we know that an average of $396 billion per year was gifted to military contractors from FY 2018 through FY 2022. The Congressional Research Services estimates that spending on contractors for FY 2020 was $420 billion, well over half of the total Pentagon budget for that year. And a report authored by William Hartung of the Center for International Policy published on September 13, 2021, shows that “one-third to one-half” of the over $14 trillion in Pentagon spending since 2001 went to defense contractors (that’s $4.6–$7 trillion). Of that amount, “one-quarter to one-third” has “gone to just five weapons contractors: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman.” Those five firms “received over $286 billion in contracts in Fiscal Year 2019 and Fiscal Year 2020 alone.”
Copied below is a chart from that September 13, 2021 report detailing the value of these contracts:
As the report also notes, “From FY 2001 to FY 2020 these five firms alone split over $2.1 trillion in Pentagon contracts (in 2021 dollars).” Coincidentally, four of the past five U.S. Secretaries of Defense came from these firms.3
To put this money into perspective, it has been estimated that it would cost approximately $40 billion per year to end world hunger. Do you recall the proud, bipartisan press release mentioned above that boasted about increasing defense spending “by $45 billion above the President’s budget request?” That delta alone could have fed the world’s hungry for one year (and the total FY 2023 defense budget could do so for over two decades).
Consider as well that there are approximately 500,000-600,000 human beings sleeping in homeless shelters or on the streets on any given night in the United States. The average home price in the United States is $348,000 as of 2022. So, it would cost between $174 billion and $208 billion to end homelessness in the United States by buying every single homeless person in the country a new house! That’s less than what Lockheed, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, and Northrop got in 2019 and 2020!
What did they do with that money? Well, they did not feed the poor or house the homeless, but Lockheed did pay out over $3 billion in dividends to investors last year, and Raytheon’s market capitalization went from $30 billion in 2001 to $142 billion today. And, of course, much of the funds they extract from the public trough are plowed back into the manufacture of the products that they sell, including missiles (Raytheon, Lockheed), radar systems (Lockheed), aircraft (Boeing, Northrup Grumman, Lockheed), helicopters (Lockheed), tanks (General Dynamics), targeting systems (Raytheon), $1.7 trillion fighter jets that don’t work (Lockheed) and anti-intercontinental ballistic missile missiles that don’t work (Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin).
The current amount of public expenditure on weapons of War is, of course, a scandal. But it is not treated as a scandal. The public has been conditioned to accept these astronomical outlays as a matter of course. But, if you think about it for more than the obligatory minute we spent pondering the loss of one human life, it all falls apart under scrutiny.
A. Ernest Fitzgerald was famously fired from his job at the Pentagon by Richard Nixon for revealing the outrageous overruns in military contracting, including $640 toilet seats and $436 hammers. The fundamental truth that he exposed is not that individual components such as toilet seats are overpriced – the entire military budget is a toilet seat. A $1.7 trillion fighter jet that doesn’t fly or a failed antiballistic missile missile system is “no more reasonably priced than the toilet seat.”4
The problem is overpriced fighter jets and missiles are worse than an overpriced toilet seat, as a toilet seat, however overpriced, has never exploded a human child into bits. Raytheon’s GBU-12 – a 500lb laser-guided missile that costs $40,000 per unit – has.
How, then, do we justify the looting of the public treasury to pay for these overpriced weapons of War? Surely, these so-called “defense” expenditures are vital to secure democracy and protect the Homeland from those who would do us harm?
No. The greatest scandal of all is that these expenditures are a “self-licking ice cream cone.” These enormous congressional outlays create powerful incentives for those who wage War to go abroad “in search of monsters to destroy,” even when the United States, after the fall of the Soviet Union, was the world’s sole hegemon, with no external enemies to confront. As Cold War apparatchik, author of the “Long Telegram,” and architect of the containment doctrine, George F. Kennan, wrote in 1987, “Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”5
As will be discussed in future posts, September 11, 2001, and the subsequent War of Terror, gave the American military-industrial complex that “invented” “other adversary” that would sustain the outrageous defense budgets that have ballooned to nearly $1 trillion per year (i.e., 25 times the cost to end world hunger; 5 times the cost to house the entire U.S. homeless population). Now that the War of Terror is winding down, new “invented” conflicts against Russia arising out of U.S. meddling in Ukraine (see also here), and U.S. aggression against China, will surely serve as the justification for new, life-destroying “toilet seats” that will only bring more misery and death to the world.
How, then, is it the case that those who wage and profit from War are so few, and those who pay for and suffer from War are so many, especially when the largest perpetrator of War is also the world’s oldest and freest so-called democracy (see also here)?
Propaganda
The U.S. public is the most propagandized society in the history of the world (see also here).
As will be discussed in future posts, every single U.S. War in the last two centuries has been predicated on fundamental, boldfaced lies6:
World War I. The lie: the Germans blew up the Lusitania, a ship full of innocent Americans, in an unprovoked and depraved sneak attack designed to murder civilians with reckless abandon for no legitimate military reason. The truth: The Lusitania was loaded with munitions and was a legitimate military target. The Germans took out ads in American newspapers warning Americans not to buy tickets because they were planning to blow it up. President Woodrow Wilson and Winston Churchill knew about the planned attack but let it happen as a pretext for the U.S. to enter the War. Over 100,000 U.S. soldiers were killed. Approximately 22 million people died.
World War II. The lie: No one expected a Japanese sneak attack at Pearl Harbor. The truth: The U.S. intentionally goaded Japan into attacking Pearl Harbor. The U.S. had cracked Japanese radio codes and had intercepted the plans for the Pearl Harbor attack, but let the attack happen so that the U.S. could enter the War (see also here). In the only use of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict, the U.S. killed over 200,000 Japanese civilians in 1945. 100,000 civilians were killed in the U.S. firebombing of Tokyo. Over 400,000 U.S. soldiers were killed. Approximately 85 million people died.
Korea. The lie: North Korea initiated an unprovoked attack against the South. The truth: Syngman Rhee, President of South Korea, was a puppet of the U.S. who murdered over 100,000 civilians. North Korea attacked the South in 1950 in response, and the U.S. invaded without a congressional declaration of War. An estimated 2-3 million Koreans were killed. 36,914 U.S. soldiers were killed.
Vietnam. The lie: The North Vietnamese fired upon the U.S.S. Maddox on two separate occasions in the Gulf of Tonkin. The truth: In the first instance, the U.S. shot first; in the second, there were no other boats. The U.S. passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution allowing President Johnson to invade sovereign Vietnam without a congressional declaration of War. Over 3 million Vietnamese died in that War. Nearly 60,000 U.S. soldiers were killed.
Iraq War I (1991). The lie: According to Nayirah Al-Sabah (daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the U.S.), Iraqi soldiers barged into Kuwaiti hospitals with guns, took babies out of incubators, and left them to die on the cold floor. These claims were repeated by President George H.W. Bush. The truth: Nayirah’s testimony was prepared by public relations firm Hill & Knowlton. It was made-up – a lie. It was not something she saw or heard. It was “atrocity propaganda.” Americans, who were suffering from “Vietnam Syndrome,” were ready for War again. Approximately 25,000 Iraqis were killed. 219 U.S. soldiers died. Over 500,000 children were killed by the subsequent sanctions.
Kosovo. The lie: Slobodan Milosevic committed genocide. The truth: Milosevic was exonerated at the Hague in 2016, although he died as a prisoner in 2006, seven years after the U.S. and NATO invaded his country. The reports of mass graves and genocide turned out to be false, and the Kosovo Liberation Army turned out to be a mix of organized crime networks and Al Qaeda financed by the CIA. NATO still occupies Kosovo to this day.
Afghanistan (2001). The lie: The U.S. invaded Afghanistan in response to 9/11 and to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. The truth: President George W. Bush could have killed bin Laden in 2001 but allowed him to escape (see also here). The Taliban was negotiating his extradition and had asked for evidence of his involvement in 9/11, but President Bush refused. The War in Afghanistan lasted until 2021, 10 years after bin Laden was allegedly killed in Pakistan in 2011, in an operation that was not recorded on video, in which he did not resist or use his wife as a human shield, and in which the special forces operatives apparently panicked and killed this unarmed man, presumably the best source of intelligence about the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil, and then dumped his body in the ocean before telling anyone about it. Up to 2.8 million Afghans were killed since the U.S. invasion, and 2,456 U.S. soldiers died in that War.
Iraq War II (2003). The lie: Saddam Hussein had WMDs, was in cahoots with Al Qaeda, and sent anthrax letters to the U.S. in 2001. The truth: There were no WMDs, there was no connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and the anthrax came from a U.S. military base (see also here, here,7 and, come on, here, here, here, and, for the love of god, here).8
Libya (2015). The lie: Gaddafi was poised to massacre his own people and he was handing out Viagra so his otherwise virulent, twenty-something troops could rape and murder the entire city of Benghazi. The truth: Gaddafi was fighting Al Qaeda, who had migrated to Libya after the Iraq War to overthrow Gaddafi with U.S. support. Leaked State Department cables show that the U.S. wanted to overthrow Gaddafi to preserve French hegemony in North Africa. Hillary Clinton, Obama’s Secretary of State at the time, boasted about his brutal sodomization and murder at the hands of Al Qaeda partisans. The U.S. machinations in that country subsequently resulted in the deaths of Ambassador Stevens and others in connection with a U.S. weapons smuggling operations to Syria.
Syria (2011). The lie: Heinous Hitlerian dictator Bashar al-Assad murdered his own people with chemical weapons. The truth: The U.S. supported Al Qaeda and ISIS in Syria to overthrow Assad. The alleged chemical attacks were staged by Al Qaeda partisans.
Yemen. The lie: the Houthis who seized power in 2014 were supported by Iran. The truth: President Obama took Al Qaeda and Saudi Arabia’s side in the Yemeni civil war to “placate the Saudis” because he wanted to complete his nuclear deal with Iran. The Obama administration knew that the War in Yemen would be “long, bloody, and indecisive,” but backed it anyway because they did not care about human life.
Ukraine (2022). The lie: On February 24, 2022, Russia launched an unprovoked War against Ukraine. Putin is a “madman” who is only interested in imperial expansion and has no legitimate security concerns. The truth. The U.S. tore up arms control treaties, overthrew the democratically elected government of Ukraine in 2014, has been expanding NATO eastward via an ex-Lockheed Martin executive since the fall of the Soviet Union despite express promises to the contrary in order to sell more weapons of War (see also, importantly, here), and now seeks to fight a proxy War “to the last Ukrainian” in order to weaken Russia and keep “the Germans down.”
Now what?
Earlier in this post, you may recall, I asked, what can be done to stop the “small inside group” that wages War? I will attempt to address that question in subsequent posts. For now, I will just say, those who wage War are brazen criminals who violate the international law, the laws of War, and the laws of the United States of America with impunity. The United Nations Charter, which was ratified by the U.S. Senate on July 28, 1945, and thus became the supreme Law of the Land, outlaws the “threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State,” and Executive Order 12333, issued on December 4, 1981, provides that “[n]o person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”
As we shall see in future posts, those who wage War have consistently violated these and other laws, as well as the Sacred Principle, and their power is only growing. The world’s oldest and freest democracy is now an empire, run by rapacious oligarchs who have no regard for the Sacred Principle.
In posts to come, I will attempt to adumbrate and analyze the incentives and goals of those who wage War. My ultimate aim is to increase awareness of their tactics and strategies. I personally became aware of the evils of War after my best friend joined the Army National Guard in 2010 and was deployed to Afghanistan in 2011 after Osama bin Laden was killed. He lost multiple friends in that pointless deployment for no discernable reason, and it was then that I began to question the entire narrative that had previously justified the shipment of teenagers to kill other teenagers thousands of miles across the world.
War is a racket, as Smedley Butler said, and there is no justification for it other than the profit of the few at the expense of the many. It is high time we end it, and, as the greatest purveyors of War and destruction, the U.S. ought to take the first step. The anti-war position is the only defensible position, especially among those of us who happen to be citizens of the oldest, freest, most democratic, and most bloodthirsty empire in the history of the world (more on American empire in future posts).
Until then, consider the Sacred Principle. Peace be with you, and with all mankind.
It is likely that nonhuman animals, to various degrees, also consciously experience the world, including some animals that we raise in inhumane conditions for food. This issue is beyond the scope of this post, but the ethical implications will be discussed in future posts.
For a less daunting undertaking, we can limit the thought experiment to the deaths from the U.S. War of Terror (d/b/a the War on Terror) in the Twenty-First Century instead. Based on conservative estimates, 5.8 to 6 million people have died as a consequence of the War of Terror since 2001. Pondering these deaths at a rate of one minute per death would only take 4,166 days (assuming no sleep or breaks).
These are James Mattis (board member at General Dynamics), Patrick Shanahan (executive at Boeing), Mark Esper (head of government relations at Raytheon), and Lloyd Austin (board member of Raytheon Technologies). See here at footnote 97. The September 13, 2021 Center for International Policy report also notes that these firms “also exert significant influence by funding well-known think tanks that advocate for higher Pentagon budgets without highlighting the monied interests pushing that viewpoint forward,” and that “America’s top 50 think tanks received one billion dollars from weapons firms or the U.S. government from 2014 to 2019, and this is just the tip of the iceberg” (see also here).
See Andrew Cockburn, The Spoils of War, at p. 54. The Spoils of War is essential reading. Andrew Cockburn details outrageous spending for no discernable gain, driven primarily by military contractor lobbying and congressional acquiescence, noting that “[e]normous outlays for marginal or even nonexistent returns attract little attention, let alone objection, among our politicians. Congress routinely waves through the Pentagon’s budgets with overwhelming bipartisan majorities. Part of the reason for this must lie in the belief that defense spending is a bracing stimulant for the economy and for the home districts of members of Congress . . . Major contractors have turned the distribution of defense contracts across as many congressional districts as possible into a high art. Contracts and subcontracts for Lockheed’s F-35, for example, are spread across 307 congressional districts in forty-five states, thus ensuring the fealty of a commensurate number of congresspeople as well as ninety senators.”
As libertarian anti-war activist Scott Horton has said, even if the U.S. economy was genuinely dependent on revenue from the manufacture and sale of weapons of War, “we, of course, would still have to do without because killing people for money is wrong.” See Scott Horton, Enough Already – Time to End the War on Terrorism, at p. 256.
Some of this work is drawn from a slide presentation created by Scott Horton. I downloaded the presentation approximately one year ago but can no longer find it on the internet. A description of the presentation is located here.
Graeme MacQueen’s The 2001 Anthrax Deception – The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy is also essential reading. That book makes the most definitive case that the 2001 anthrax attacks were perpetrated by deep forces within the U.S. military-industrial complex to link the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax attacks to Iraq as a justification for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. They were also used to hasten the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act, but once media reports began to cast doubt on the Iraqi origin of the anthrax used in the letters sent in October 2001, the Iraqi connection was quickly buried, and the FBI shortly thereafter claimed that a single U.S. scientist, who later conveniently committed suicide, was to blame. As detailed in the book, this “lone nut” narrative does not stand up to even the most cursory of scrutiny.
It is worth noting that Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons in the 1980s against Iran was approved by the CIA.