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NEWS & LETTERS, December 2002
Workshop Talk Column
Deadly war recycling
by Htun Lin Just when George W. Bush is hell-bent on another war in
Iraq, he gutted environmental protection of the air we breathe to reward his
polluting friends in the energy business. The disastrous human and ecological
consequences of massive quantities of depleted uranium dumped on Iraq in the
1991 war show how closely war and pollution go together. Son of Bush now wants again to destroy Iraq as his father
destroyed it over a decade ago, then kept that monster Saddam Hussein in power
to liquidate Iraqi liberation forces. MEMORIES OF HIROSHIMA I began thinking about depleted uranium again when I
recently heard a group of Japanese activists headed by a Japanese Diet member,
Hosaka, on a speaking tour in the U.S. Japanese activists take special interest
in depleted uranium with their memory of Hiroshima. In the words of Takashi
Morizumi, a photojournalist who catalogued the devastation of the people and
landscape after Desert Storm, depleted uranium as a weapon was really "a
different nuclear war." Depleted uranium is a perfect commodity for an expanding
permanent war economy. It is a waste product of the enrichment of weapons-grade
uranium. Methods of disposal would have been needed had it not been for
capitalist ingenuity, in this case their idea of "recycling." Because
of its unusually dense quality, depleted uranium has been reused for the
hardened tips of missiles and ammunition. In other words, the Iraqi landscape has become our nuclear
dumping ground. Depleted uranium pulverizes upon impact, creating a lasting dust
carried by prevailing winds to be inhaled by the population. Morizumi reported
that the cancer death rate in Basra, a city close to the battlefields, had
increased seventeen-fold by 2000. Some suspect that depleted uranium may have
something to do with Gulf War Syndrome, an "occupational" illness
suffered by many soldiers who returned from Desert Storm. ANYTHING CAN BE A COMMODITY No one is able to calculate the long-term effects of this
scourge. However, we suspect that long after the tyrannical regime of Saddam
Hussein is gone, depleted uranium will continue to wreak havoc for many
generations. Iraqi mothers no longer ask whether a newborn is a boy or a girl,
but whether it is "normal." This capitalist recycling, creating a new deadly commodity
within their permanent war economy, reminded me of the argument Marx had with
those who felt capitalist crises come from underconsumption by ordinary
consumers. Marx demonstrated that, contrary to conventional wisdom, capital's
problem is not that the average consumer isn't buying enough. We are merely incidental as consumers, appendages as
workers to capital's production machine. Some of us now enjoy the wonders of
wireless communication and the information superhighway, but the internet was
originally created by computer scientists to satisfy just one customer, the
Pentagon. The benefits some of us receive as consumers are merely accidental to
the original military application and capital's primary mission, its own
self-expansion. MILITARY NEEDS SAME AS CAPITAL’S Under capitalism even health care is reduced to a
commodity. We health care workers have seen a decade of restructuring where
capital has sucked out health care resources for its own enlargement. The war machine is part of capital's production for the
sake of the perpetuation and expansion of capital's domination. Some capitalists
have only other capitalists to buy their products as the raw material for still
other capitalists. Raw steel can end up in plates and cables in a corporate
headquarters or in millions of land mines. Depleted uranium has become another commodity to satisfy this one customer, the Pentagon. But this time, the incidentals are not "collateral benefits" but rather devastating "collateral damage" to the health of the producers, the users and the especially unfortunate inhabitants of targeted areas. Capital's self-expansion and permanent war economy are threatening the planet and humanity in so total a way that we workers have to finally put an end to capital's deadly grip on our minds and our bodies. |
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