How Many Bullets (will guarantee trust and survival)
Taking for granted the investment in manufactured death
Take a moment or two if you have it. Try to imagine how many bullets exist right now in the world.
How many guns, large and small. How many bombs, mines, missiles, grenades. How many nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction at the ready. How many arsenals and magazines stocked and maintained.
How many tanks, armoured and military transport vehicles. How many drones, airplanes, ships, and submarines. How many soldiers trained and equipped in standing armies and reserves. How many personnel, military officials, government departments, training facilities, institutions and staff dedicated to military functions. Every think tank and every strategist. Every intelligence operative. Every journalist embedded inside the complex. Every observer outside who must remain fixated on the complex.
Every stock and share, start-up, and major corporation, every industrial design company and weapons development process. Every loan and capital investment. Every diversion of sovereign wealth. Every agent and employee. Every factory and production line. Every university which devotes intellectual resources to military research and development.
Every satellite and ground-based communication. Every monitoring and surveillance facility. Every piece of computer hardware, every software program, all the AI applications, autonomous and semi-autonomous weapons guidance and control systems.
Every prison, dungeon, rendition site, and torture chamber. All the means of inflicting physical and psychic pain as the means of extracting information of whatever value. All the humiliation, trauma, and dehumanisation deemed necessary to sustain strategic advantage. All the useful linkages to organised crime and terrorist groups. All the secrecy, the lies, the aggressive foreign policy.
All the uniforms, the heraldic symbols, emblems, patches, and icons bestowing identity and purpose. All the flags. All the tradition. All the political and social justifications and organisation. All the propaganda.
All the energy demanded for production, maintenance, mobility, logistical computations. All the costs of war injuries, psychological and physical and moral. All the environmental destruction, the chemical and radiological poisoning. All the intergenerational damage.
Then, if you are not exhausted, tell me that we are not condemned by the banality of violence in our midst. Tell me that we truly desire to live in peace. Tell me we must arm ourselves to the teeth to be safe as we clank and roar toward Armageddon. Tell me how this unimaginably vast investment shapes the world into one more nurturing and alive. Tell me how this devil’s bargain of amplifying our capacity for violence means we do not live in fear, that we do not live in denial, that this is just the cost to guarantee our survival.