CAMPAIGN 2012: MILITARY SPENDING AND THE DEFENSE OF THE INDEFENSIBLE

George Orwell back in 1946 wrote this observation about political discourse.    It was true then; it seems utterly prophetic today in the 2012 presidential campaign.  

“In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them. Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this:

“ ‘While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.’

“ The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer. I should expect to find -- this is a guess which I have not sufficient knowledge to verify -- that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years, as a result of dictatorship.”
    — George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946)

In 2012, there is no such thing as keeping out of politics.  Political speech and writing are still mostly the defense of the indefensible. Things like

    ●    the Colombia Armed Conflict, the Mexico Drug War, the Syria Civil Uprising, and various African wars in and around Sudan,
   
    ●    the continuance of Israeli domination of Palestine
   
    ●    Russian purges and corruption
   
    ●    the use of drones in Afghanistan
     
can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of our political parties.

Mitt Romney says in his campaign for the Presidency of the United States that Americans must expand the American military both in men and in funding.   He advocates this even though The Federal Government he wants to lead sits up to its dome in various varieties of debt.   Whether the Federal Government can even manage said debt in the short term remains to be seen. 

The United States of America had a population in 2010 no less than 310 million people.   That represents at most 4.5 percent of the world’s population.

  My experience in the Local Census Office 3147 in Provo Utah in 2010 taught me that counting people is more complicated than it looks. The best census still has the element of guestimate in it.  

Currently, various organizations in the know estimate the world population at 7 billion people plus or minus a few hundred million.   Humans do not know for exactly the Earth’s resource limitation.  Even so, humans continue to push their population right into the red zone of resource reserves. 

China probably has (give or take) 1.4 billion citizens.   That is almost 20 percent of the world’s population.  

India probably has (give or take) 1.3 billion citizens.   That is about 17 percent of the world’s population.  


QUESTION FOR MR. ROMNEY TO ANSWER
AND FOR AMERICAN VOTERS TO PONDER
Based on comparing labor and resources – 4.5 percent vs. a little less than 40 percent – the United States cannot win a war against China and / or India.     So how money should The United State spend on the illusion of military security?   This money will be, in the main, borrowed.

The United State does have several thousand nuclear weapons and we could use them on our enemies.   How many people who do not live in the United States can the United States kill to insure a USA victory?   Given we represent 4.5 percent of the world and China represents nearly 20 percent: How many dead Chinese can we consider ethical in our defense?

100 million dead

200 million dead

300 million dead

400 million dead

500 million dead

600 million dead

700 million dead

800 million dead?