6: Profit, Destruction, and War

Chapter 6

The Relationship Between For-Profit Destruction And War

 

Territorial sovereignty societies accept that the people who run the entities called ‘countries’ can authorize their people to rape the land of any resource wealth it contains and sell this wealth for money, which they can then keep. (The ‘people’ with the right to rape the land are normally ‘corporate people’ but this issue encourages war whether the rights belong to corporate people or human people.) 

They sell the resources they take from the land for money and then use that money to buy luxuries and hire servants to minister to their every need.  The more money they can get for resources, the more they can take advantage of the rights they get.  They want ‘demand’ for the things they take from the land.  They want people to be so driven to get these resources that they will do anything and pay any price to get them. 

In times of war, resource prices go up.  Often, they skyrocket.  The people who have gained rights to rape the world know this.  They want war.  Quite often, the people who control the resources have massive amounts of wealth they can do to help them to instigate wars and create tensions that make war more likely.  They gain from this:  resource prices go up whenever war tensions go up, even if the tensions don’t lead to war. There is evidence that the people who control resources sometimes even stage phony ‘atrocities’ to drive up tensions that might lead to war. 

We need to understand this relationship.  If we can understand the relationship between war and resource prices, we can use tools to limit the benefits to resource extractors from international tensions.  For example, a switch from extractive to renewable energy supplies clearly has an impact:  if we get more energy from solar and other renewable supplies, prices of extractive energy supplies (oil, coal, gas, uranium, for example) fall.  The relative benefits to those with extractive rights fall. 

The people with rights to extract got these rights somehow.  They enforce these rights using understandable methods. The book Anatomy of Destruction, a part of this series, goes over this system and shows how it works in general.  But if we want to understand war, we need to understand that the anatomy of destruction and the anatomy of war are related.   We need to understand this relationship and understand the tools that we have to take action in these areas to gain the time we need to deal with the structural problems.