Earth’s Greatest Enemy: The US Military-Industrial Complex Is A Climate Behemoth / Abby Martin
Independent journalist and documentarian Abby Martin joins me to discuss Earth's Greatest Enemy, a feature length documentary that examines one of the largest polluters and contributors to global climate change in the world: the United States military. I ask Abby what the seeds of this massive project were, and why the military-industrial complex is the "elephant in the room" in the political discourse on human-caused climate change. Also, we connect this subject to the horrific mass violence in Gaza being enacted by the State of Israel—with full US complicity—to the ecocide implicit in the maintenance of US hegemonic interests globally.
The forthcoming feature length documentary, Earth’s Greatest Enemy, does something sorely needed in the discourse about climate change and the global environmental crisis. It shines a light on the devastation the US military leaves behind in every landscape it arrives at, every body of water and airspace it traverses, and every community of life—human and more-than-human alike—it disregards with callous imperial hubris.
The United States has the largest military presence in the world. According to David Vine, professor of political anthropology at the American University in Washington, DC, there are about 750 US military bases in at least 80 countries around the world, and according to a 2021 report by Al Jazeera, “the actual number may be even higher as not all data is published by the Pentagon.” Abby Martin corroborates that point in this interview: the scale and scope of US military installations, from large-scale bases to “lily pads” to clandestine black sites, is inconceivably far-reaching. Hell, the Pentagon may not even be able to account for the entirety of it, having failed it sixth yearly audit in a row this last November. But, who’s counting anyway?
The US military is Behemoth. And with its global status, its role in shaping global affairs is unassailable. So, is it a surprise that as national political leaders discuss how to address the realities of global heating, at times even pointing to some of the obvious perpetrators of this crisis (such as fossil fuel corporations and rampant consumerism), that the military-industrial complex is never even mentioned? That climate policy goals concocted and refined at international summits would even allude to the US military and its benefactors as part of the problem? I think you know the answer to that.
The direct connections between the violence of militarism and the violence of anthropogenic climate change are made plain in this discussion with Abby Martin. We acknowledge the roots that gave rise to the US Empire and the phenomena of climate disruption are the same.
Concurrent with this discussion, both its recording and release, is the ongoing genocide in Gaza being perpetrated by the so-called Israeli Defense Forces. Abby has reported on the realities of the Israeli occupation of Palestine for years, and we spend a considerable amount of this interview discussing her journalism on this subject.
We also reference her powerful speech at the Belmarsh Tribunal about the persecution of Julian Assange by the United Kingdom and the United States, and the ways truth-telling is suppressed. There are many ways to assassinate a journalist, some of them being by defamation, some by legal persecution, and in the case of over one hundred journalists in Gaza, by bullets and bombs.
Bio:
Abby Martin is an independent journalist and host of The Empire Files, an ongoing interview and documentary series. She is the director of the 2019 documentary Gaza Fights for Freedom, “a documentary about the historic Great March Of Return protests, which occurred every week from March 2018 until December 2019, but covers so much more.”
Episode Notes:
Learn more about Earth’s Greatest Enemy.
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Learn more about all of Abby’s work.
Music produced by Epik The Dawn.
