While lecturing workers about ‘consumer choices’, western environmental lobbies give a free pass to the planet’s real polluters.
As finance capital attempts to turn supposedly environmental carbon measurements into financial packages that can be traded and sold, ‘progressive’ capitalists like to pose as green evangelists. However, their pretended concern for the environment evaporates when confronted with the fact that it is the imperialist war machine itself that is the greatest polluter on the planet. (Why the Pentagon Is the world’s biggest single greenhouse gas emitter by Ruqaiyah Zarook, Mother Jones, 7 October 2022)
For this gentry, the cardinal right of the imperialist west to plunder the world (and to chastise any country that prefers to take its own path of development – like Venezuela, Cuba, north Korea, China or Russia), takes precedence over even the most urgent environmental issues.
Hear the sainted Greta Thunberg blessing Nato’s guns and falsely blaming Russia for the sabotage of Kakhovka Dam: “This ecocide as a continuation of Russia’s unprovoked full-scale invasion of Ukraine is yet another atrocity which leaves the world lost for words. Our eyes are once again on Russia who must be held accountable for their crimes.” (Greta Thunberg, Twitter, 8 June 2023)
Nor is Greta out of line with right-on green politics in general. In March this year, the Green Party of England and Wales voted to remove the party’s old commitment to quit Nato. It’s one thing to guilt-trip everyone over taking a plane to Marbella, but another thing entirely to get in the way of Nato’s insatiable thirst for aviation fuel – after all, that might actually impede British imperialism’s mission to ‘stand with Ukraine’ by hurling as many Ukrainians as possible to their deaths.
Depleted uranium to Ukraine courtesy of ‘green’ British government
To take just one example of the way that warmongering imperialism pollutes the world without a care for the consequences, the British government recently announced that it had sent depleted uranium (DU) rounds to Nato’s infamously corrupt and fascistic stooge ‘government’ in Kiev.
One might think that previous experience would give our green-conscious rulers pause. After all, the use of DU in Nato’s criminal war against Yugoslavia turned Serbia into the cancer capital of Europe, while its use in the indiscriminate shelling of civilians in Fallujah shocked even hardened British military officers, as the Iraqi city was transformed into a nightmarish radiation hotspot.
Worse birth defects and at a higher rate have been registered in Fallujah than those that followed the USA’s dropping of the first nuclear bomb on Hiroshima in August 1945.
Both targeted civilians and targeting soldiers suffered the consequences of these war crimes. Tasked with cleaning out tanks coated in this noxious substance, the unlucky ones started dropping like flies. Needless to say, the Ministry of Defence’s chief concern was not the health of ‘our boys’, but how to avoid paying compensation to the bereaved families.
“Dyson cleaned tanks during the Gulf war in 1991 and later developed a rare cancer, passing away in 2008. An inquest jury found it was ‘more likely than not’ that depleted uranium had caused his death. The Ministry of Defence rejected the ruling and refused to pay his widow a pension for those who die from service.” (Depleted uranium: Courts accept cancer risk denied by army by Phil Miller, Declassified UK, 2 May 2023)
In fact, the MoD had known about these health issues for many years, but continued in its usual supremacist fashion to expose British soldiers and civilian populations around the world to their lethal effects, while lying bare-facedly to all enquirers.
“I want to reassure our troops, civilian back-up and families that there is nothing to fear from this particular type of munition,” one senior officer told the press. “People must understand that when we act, we act with the interests of our troops and civilians very much in mind.” (British army knew of depleted uranium risk four years ago, NZ Herald, 10 January 2001)
So the British government sent the promised depleted uranium rounds to Ukraine, only to find that Russia, which no doubt has reliable informants across the country, was able to blow them up while they were still in the warehouse – in Khmelnitski, in fact, a town to the west of Kiev, hundreds of miles from the fighting.
A report on the Sputnik news website described the explosion at the Khmelnitski weapons silo (about which western media have been strangely silent) and detailed the various strands of evidence which pointed to its having contained the British DU shells:
“What we see is a massive explosion … and reports of a spike in gamma radiation near the site. Uranium oxide is black, and the black plume moves north west slowly, the weather pattern is stable and the wind blows towards Poland.
“Polish EU detectors all show gamma radiation increases at the expected time of arrival of the plume. The EU detector system is shut down rapidly, but not before we have obtained data from several sites. The Poles provide a detector result that identified Bismuth as the cause of the increase, but do not go so far as to formally state that it is (in case of later blowback).
“One final piece of evidence. We see videos on the internet of the Ukrainians clearing up the explosion site using robot vehicles, not ordinary firemen. Why do they need robot vehicles? The last time we saw robot vehicles clearing up was in the ruins of Chernobyl and Fukushima.” (Ukraine’s depleted uranium blast: Europe on brink of ‘environmental disaster’, 19 May 2023)
The criminal recklessness of imperialism in using these weapons, and the way in which such behaviour is quietly tolerated or even cheered on by green lobby groups, furnishes but one example of how the western establishment’s much-vaunted ‘concern’ for the environment stops conveniently at the line where the interests of the imperialist war/profit machine begin.
