The Earth Loses All Wars

By FRANK LINGO

Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine reminds humanity of war’s insanity. How can the civilized world let one man, Vladimir Putin, consumed by covetousness, have the power to put in motion a murderous onslaught leaving many humans dead and an ecosystem in ruins?

World War II, also started by covetous tyrants, was the deadliest war on record. It left about 60 million people dead, the highest in history. The vast majority were civilians, victims of the German and Japanese policies of mass murder. Even if people avoided the bombs and death camps, they still might starve or die from disease. The Allies killed many civilians, too, mostly from the air.

An old adage states, “All wars are fought for land.” But let’s look at the damage to our land, air and water — the entire Earth. A Fordham University research paper by Philip Swintek studied war’s effect on the environment.

World War I brought chemical and biological warfare, eradicating the ecology from above with airdrops. Then there were the horrific battlefields. In France alone, half a million acres of forest and a quarter million acres of farmland were destroyed in “the war to end all wars.”

In World War II it got so much worse. The scorched-earth practices of retreating armies left many areas in ashes. Ancient armies had used fire, of course, and other tactics like poisoning water, but modern technology brought malevolent methods on a massive scale, and limited use of the new catastrophic creation: the atomic bomb.

The two nukes America dropped on Japanese cities may have hastened the war’s end but it left the land radioactive. It also left us ever since with a legacy of lingering fears of nuclear war.

Even if we manage to restrain ourselves from blowing up the world, conventional warfare is still a terrible trauma to terra firma. The preparation alone causes a considerable carbon consequence by mining of metals to make weapons, fueling tanks and trucks with petroleum, and weapon testing.

Then war’s perpetration multiplies the mayhem, including leaving landmines behind, along with rubble that can leach pollutants into the ground and water.

While most wars are waged by dictators, the United States wreaked the Vietnam War by democratic decree. President Lyndon Johnson lied in the 1964 campaign by saying, “I will not send American boys to fight an Asian war.” Then as soon as LBJ won, he ramped up the war, with the collusion of Congress after a contrived incident in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Among our many sins on that small agrarian nation were the widespread use of chemical compounds like the incendiary napalm and the extremely toxic herbicide Agent Orange. Despite our destruction of huge tracts of land with chemicals and carpet bombing, and even though we killed three million Vietnamese, compared to 58,000 US troops (a ratio of almost 60-to-1), we got our asses kicked.

Having refused to face the futile folly of Vietnam, we repeated our war crimes in Iraq in 2003. The US had been less reckless in Poppy Bush’s 1991 war by mostly fighting it from afar. But both wars inflicted gigantic ecological horrors on the planet with the burning of oil wells that blackened the sky for months, and even for years in some cases, before they could be extinguished. George W. Bush and his cronies lied on TV about the second Iraq war to justify our unprovoked invasion.

Sound familiar? It should, because now Putin has used phony excuses to attack Ukraine, just as Hitler and many other despots have used the same tried-and-false tired tactic.

The ancient Greek Aeschylus said, “In war, truth is the first casualty.” But another recurring victim of the violence is the ecology. If we want the planet to provide our sustenance, we better keep the peace among people because the Earth loses all wars.

Frank Lingo, based in Lawrence, Kansas, is a former columnist for the Kansas City Star and author of the novel “Earth Vote.” See his website at www.greenbeat.world. Email: lingofrank@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, April 1, 2022

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