During the seventies, feminists maintained that if women had power, there would be no wars. Women, feminists claimed, know that food on the table is more important than guns. After all, we can’t eat corpses. Back then, of course, many women spent most of their lives cooking, cleaning and looking after children. But now, with so many women in power – women who never even have to boil a potato and who delegate the care of their children to underpaid strangers – it would seem that women are no better.
Mind you, I’m all for women’s equal rights. Unequivocally so! It’s just that – well, women are no better, that’s all. Look at von der Leyen and Nancy Pelosi, hawks of the first order. Nancy Pelosi, for one, should know that the greatest threats to USA are not the Chinese nor the Russians, but domestic problems. Serious domestic problems. She knows! But she is bluffing, hoping to keep the Democratic Party morale up against all odds.
Domestic problems, yes, and the global climate crisis, which is still just nibbling away at the edges of human existence, not least in the continent we all initially came from, Africa; but it will come roaring over us, all of us, including the Chinese and the Russians unless we get our acts together. We’ve had foretastes in the shape of forest fires, floods, droughts, hurricanes, cyclones, mass migrations, power outages… – but in the end, we’ll know all of the above and more, at once and everywhere. You don’t believe me? Not my problem, really, because I’ll be gone soon, and I’m not religious, so if the human species doesn’t survive, that won’t bother me much. I will point out, however, in case you have forgotten, that even today, long after Freud, denialism is still considered a serious obstacle to rational problem solving.
To be frank, it is my problem, too, because I really hate seeing people suffer. Also in the US, people are suffering and have been suffering for decades. Decades! And your politicians haven’t done a thing about it, too busy defending the neoliberal economic order and, more recently, too obsessed with the idea of recovering the country’s irreversibly lost hegemony. The Biden administration’s proposed fiscal budget for 2023 includes spending USD 813 BILLION on “defence and national security”, but apparently both houses of Congress will demand to spend more (yes, more not less!). USD 813 billion is more than was spent on “defence and national security” during any year of the Korean and Vietnam wars, and more than what is spent by China and Russia and the 7 next top military spenders combined.
More than half of what US Americans paid to the military last year, about $2,000 per taxpayer, according to an analysis by the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies…..will have gone to giant weapons contractors like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, along with thousands of smaller arms-making firms.
People in Europe are also suffering now, and will suffer more because of this stupid war of attrition against Russia. And of course Ukraine is suffering terribly, having been tricked into waging a war it cannot win. Mind you, Russia is not – repeat NOT – suffering. The sanctions on Russian gas and fertilisers and wheat, etc. are bringing Europe (but not Russia) to its knees. That will not – repeat NOT – benefit USA, because who will buy products from the US when Europe’s purchasing power has been reduced to pennies? There will still be Australians, of course.
USA has its holier than the Bible+Talmud+Koran so-called constitutional amendments. The defence of these “amendments” is reminiscent of religious fundamentalists’ vindication of “laws” imposed many centuries ago, laws that might have made sense at the time when they were adopted, but that are completely out-of-time and out-of-place today, in short downright nefarious.
Guns! Good heavens, how ludicrous! How pathetic! Above all, how sick! Frankly I prefer an honest hurricane, which at least reminds survivors that we – women and men – are not omnipotent.