By Tony R
It might be worth considering for a minute the seemingly stark contradiction when you hear that the Green party has voted to overturn its long held opposition to Nato in favour of backing one of the worlds biggest polluters. In war, profit feeds from conflict, from life, and the destruction that comes with it. It’s also generally the case that in the natural world, profit feeds from waste, from depletion of our earth.
So it’s a fair connection to make between this profit driven ideology that depletes and degrades our natural environment, and the profit driven ideology that drives and continues conflicts. War and capitalism are intrinsically linked. If we look at both the Green Party and NATO and what their general stated aims are when it comes to the natural world we find the following:
Green Party: their political programme “…sets out what Greens are in politics to do: to end the system that keeps hurting the environment and all of us who rely on it – and to build a better alternative”.[1] A statement that recognises the connection between a system and the consequences of that system to our environment and people in it.
NATO: In the “Environment, Climate Change and Security” section of their website, NATO is “looking for ways to improve energy efficiency in the military through innovative technologies”[2] and that “it also focuses on enhancing energy efficiency and reducing the environmental footprint of armed forces” [2]. So, not the same as “ending” the system like the Greens mention. You could argue that in this respect, NATO is just interested in making its killing machine more efficient, but what else should we expect?
The words in the Greens Political Programme suggest a recognition of the connection between conflict, profit and the hurt caused to the environment and the people in it. These words ring hollow.
References:
1) https://www.greenparty.org.uk/political-programme.html (18/3/23)
2) https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_91048.htm (18/3/23)
Yes, the Greens have lost the plot, but so have the vast majority of the political left over the past few years by supporting lockdowns and all the other authoritarian measures implemented on the pretext of a respiratory illness that never was any more onerous than normal seasonal influenza.