what every person should know about war by chris hedges

It revels in the despicable beauty of U.S. The public, bombarded with war propaganda, cheers on their self-immolation. (Christopher Ebdon, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) spent a record $213 billion servicing the interest on its national debt.īoeing B-52H Stratofortress at Barksdale Air Force Base, 2014. This imbalance is not sustainable, especially once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency. national debt to over $31 trillion, nearly $5 trillion more than the U.S.’s entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP). These huge military expenditures, along with the rising costs of a for-profit healthcare system, have driven the U.S. spent $877 billion on the military, that’s more than the next 10 countries, including China, Russia, Germany, France and the United Kingdom combined. It is a circular system of corporate welfare.īetween October 2021 and September 2022, the U.S. The American public funds the research, development and building of weapons systems and then buys these same weapons systems on behalf of foreign governments. since 1949, almost all of it since 1971 in the form of military aid, with most of it going towards arms purchases from U.S. Israel has received $158 billion in bilateral assistance from the U.S. Egypt, which receives some $1.3 billion in foreign military financing, is required to devote it to buying and maintaining U.S. Military systems are sold before they are produced with guarantees that huge cost overruns will be covered.įoreign aid is contingent on buying U.S. It is the largest single sustaining activity of the government. Since the end of the Second World War, the federal government has spent more than half its tax dollars on past, current and future military operations. The war state is a Götterdämmerung, as Dwight Macdonald writes, “without the gods.” This amnesia, which means there is never accountability, licenses the war machine to economically disembowel the country and drive the Empire into one self-defeating conflict after another.

Its military fiascos in Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Middle East have disappeared into the vast cavern of historical amnesia. Its billions of dollars in waste and fraud are ignored.

The war machine’s massive budgets are sacrosanct. It is axiomatic among the two ruling parties that there must be a constant preparation for war. America is a stratocracy, a form of government dominated by the military.

What every person should know about war by chris hedges