Rob’s comments below are in italics.Derek’s comments below are in normal font.
Today, we’re going to talk about how wealth is seemingly represented by weaponry and other destructive elements of society, and relate that to some current events. So what do people need to know?
“Ilth” and the Futility of War
Well, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the definition we settled on: wealth is what people want. Obviously, people do want weapons, and therefore you could indicate that that’s a form of wealth. Certainly, in accounting, we add up all the financial transactions to get a number —the gross domestic product (GDP). The prevailing attitude is still that this should be regarded as some proxy for human wellbeing. Obviously, if you’re making huge quantities of weapons, it adds to the GDP. Particularly if you use the weapons and destroy a lot of things, and you then have to spend more money rebuilding them, that adds to GDP too, which highlights the absurdity of this as a metric.
I think ”illth” is a better word for things like weapons, ammunition and military equipment; wealth being a measure of wellness, and ills being a measure of illness. So with illth, it should be a negative and subtracted from the metric. But even if we get away from money, what does that represent? Well, apart from enormous margins of profit, which are simply being funnelled into the pockets of the people who are the ultimate beneficiaries of the arms manufacturers. The rest of the money is going to pay people to design the weapons, to pay people to manufacture the weapons, and to buy the materials that go into their manufacture and to pay for the energy that goes into the manufacturing process.
But more importantly, it goes into the energy in the explosives and the propellants. All that is energy which could have been used for something else. It could have been used to delay the transition away from fossil fuels once there are no longer any economic sources of them, quite apart from the pollution aspect. So this is truly tragic, and that’s before we’ve even gone on to the humanitarian issues of the pain and the suffering and the bereavement that this causes.
Another thing that I’ve been increasingly reflecting on over the last year or so is that warfare itself is becoming futile. Even within the mindset of regarding tanks and personnel carriers and bombers and missiles and fighter aircraft and all the rest of it, even if you regard that as an investment, it’s only an investment if once you’ve got it, you can use it over a period of time to do the job that you wanted to do, to get something that seems to the weapon owner as being worthy of the investment in terms of a result.
What we’re plainly seeing is that enormously expensive pieces of equipment get put into the battlefield, and a large number of them get destroyed very often by very cheap drones within a matter of days or weeks. Sooner or later, even within the calculations of people who think that warfare is a worthwhile operation in the first place, even within their calculations, it must get to the point where, hang on a minute, this looks self-contradictory. What do you think?
I was wondering whether warfare has been largely futile for pretty much a hundred years, other than as a way to cull the population, if that was your goal. Perhaps the Vietnam War was a good example of a war that was futile, not winnable, even with the unlimited arms budget. So I don’t think this is necessarily new. It’s just an extenuation of a process that’s been happening for a while.
Yep. Obviously, the whole thing, from my point of view, and I would say from the point of view of anybody who wasn’t actually insane, the whole enterprise is disgusting. We just shouldn’t be doing it. There should be more in the way of a convincing attempt to avoid it than there seems to have been over the last few years.
But what I’m saying is that the drone warfare that we’ve seen in Ukraine has really shifted the balance entirely. In Vietnam, the slaughter on both sides was horrific, but the equipment and the weapons that went in there were reasonably durable, whereas we’re seeing no durability at all on the battlefield in Ukraine. This is going to be increasingly the case going forward.
Current Affairs
I don’t know whether you saw or not, but there was an article in The Guardian revealing that Boris Johnson had received a kickback of £1 million (or a present or a consultancy fee) around the time that he went over to Kyiv and strong-armed Zelensky into backing out of the peace deal that was on the point of being signed. This donation came from a British man who lives in Thailand, who is apparently the largest shareholder in three UK arms manufacturers.
So I don’t know how widely this has been disseminated, apart from amongst Guardian readers and some followers of George Galloway and other alternative news channels on the internet. Had you come across this at all? What is interesting is how much effort will be made to hold him to account for that in some way, or to provide an explanation.
I’d not known. It doesn’t surprise me at all. I don’t think there is any holding of accounts of people allegedly at the ‘top’. It seems that they just do what they want with no consequences. That would be my prediction if I were a betting man.
Yeah, mine too, I’m afraid, but we’ll watch this space.
The second thing that’s happened is that there is supposedly a peace deal for Gaza on the table. Whether this comes to anything or not, we’ll just have to watch this space. Given the record of Israelis holding to any agreements they’ve made, personally, I find it very difficult to raise any optimism about the likelihood of anything good coming from this, apart from hand-waving.
Another interesting thing that has happened this week is that China has really taken the gloves off by imposing export restrictions on rare earth minerals and the high-performance magnets made from them, as well as on the technology for processing and refining them and making these magnets. Bearing in mind the depletion of the US and Western arms because of the Ukraine conflicts and the Israeli conflicts and the far lower output of the weapons manufacturers in the States and the importance of these magnets for just about the entire range of high-performance modern weaponry, it looks like that’s a serious torpedoing of the ability to replenish the stocks, which I can only say is a good thing.
Of course, there have been howls of outrage and accusations of unfair trade wars and so on, but the Chinese clearly know what they’re doing.
So bearing in mind what I’ve said, it is potentially a real game-shifter. Of course, more or less every day this week, there’ve been conflicting stories about whether America is going to provide Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine and what impact this would have on the war. There have been the usual contradictory statements from one day to the next, along with ambiguities from Trump.
It now looks as though the latest thing is that he’s said he’s not going to send them, which is just as well. It couldn’t possibly be anything but catastrophic, I would say, if they went there and started firing missiles which have a nuclear capability. Of course, until they land, you don’t know whether it’s got a nuclear warhead or a conventional one. But the only point of Ukraine having them would be to make more attacks deep inside Russia.
Zelensky’s gone to Washington. It looked like he had a bit of a low-key arrival. There was very little pomp and ceremony, which wasn’t a good omen, according to people who read these signs. He’s due to meet with Donald Trump today. So at the end of that, we will know whether the Tomahawk missiles are on or off, and we’ll know what statements, if any, have been given about how much extra support he can expect from the United States. So this will be interesting, and we’ll see what the implications of that are and what people make of it over the next few days.
Of course, the much more significant thing is that yesterday, Trump said he had a long phone call with Putin and that they’re going to arrange a face-to-face meeting, possibly next week, possibly in Hungary. That is a bit of a smack in the teeth for Zelensky. Let’s hope that it’s a helpful sign. Because of the erratic nature of Trump’s pronouncements, it’s very difficult to know for sure where he’s going, what he thinks, or how much is a bluff and how much he knows himself.
Of course, the big question is what is going on behind the scenes? Who has leverage over him? How strongly that leverage is being applied, how much of what we’re seeing is a result of him trying to accommodate that, and how much of it he still is a loose cannon from the point of view of the intelligent deep-state bureaucracy.
Yeah, I don’t know about Ukraine, but I think regarding Israel, he definitely seems to be a controlled actor in the process. People like Miriam Adelson seem to have given him many billions during the election.
Right. Well, things are being revealed more candidly to more people, and this is an accelerating race. The other thing that’s happened is that in Germany, there’s been the most enormous anti-war demonstrations and demonstrations against Chancellor Mertz.
Sooner or later, the ruling elites of Britain, France, Germany, and Europe in general are going to have to make some accommodation with how far out of step they are with their populations at large. Rather worryingly, so far, it seems to be more and more draconian crackdowns. It’s difficult to know how far that will go and to what extent it will be effective in the long run. So we’re definitely living in interesting times.
Perhaps a little bit too interesting!
Yeah, perhaps. Okay, so assuming we’re here next week, the focus of next week’s talk, I want to look at the role of energy and what could be possible as we move out of the age of being totally dependent on fossil fuels, which is something that’s going to unfold in your lifetime if not in mine.
No doubt at great cost to us peasants.
Yes, okay, we’ll see.
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