Are Climate and Disaster Victims Violent?
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- Published on Saturday, 04 April 2020 01:26
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin ... No. 2044 ... April 4, 2020
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Are Climate and Disaster Victims Violent?:
Klare’s Paean to the American Military
Judith Deutsch
Michael T. Klare’s new book, All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change, is an uncritical paean to the American military. He credits the Pentagon with taking climate science seriously. But he does not question, bring contradictory evidence, or analyze the military’s self-appointed role as global manager of climate-related human disorder. Klare’s work is detailed and comprehensive and merits a close reading. He demonstrates the reach of American military power and its Hobbesian premises about human nature.
In the climate movement, there is some attention to the money spent on the military in comparison to the environment, less focus on the military’s enormous greenhouse gas emissions, and very little consideration of the implications of securitizing climate’s human impacts. I will summarize Klare’s unquestioning presentation of the military point of view, address Klare’s biases and omissions, and conclude with a psychoanalytic perspective on American militarism.
Klare’s is a military institution-centric framing with no regulatory or normative roles for... local, national, regional, or international institutions. The book’s present tense title is telling: what’s just a possibility (hell breaking loose) is accepted as an inevitable reality, a law of nature. This is a closed system, and it is sealed against inquiry into causes and challenging facts. "Senior officials at the Department of Defense and the American intelligence community have peered into the future and seen this world." The thesis is that it may be possible to mitigate and adapt to climate change but untouched here are all the systemic causes of both proliferating emissions and of human disaster. The designation "resource-deprived states everywhere" is unquestioned by Klare and by the military: unasked, who exploits the resources?
The unquestioning endorsement of the American military is especially significant in view of Klare’s previous critical work on America’s energy wars and politics. He is the defense expert for the Nation magazine and is a frequent contributor to Counterpunch, Tomgram, and Democracy Now. His new book is acclaimed by Bill McKibben (founder of 350.org) and human rights historian Adam Hochschild, and it was uncritically featured in the New York Times and The Guardian.
