1. Our Top Priority

This is a table of priorities in global expenditure at the turn of the century (1998). Figures are expressed in billions of US dollars:

The figures come from theGlobal Issues website in the section on consumption, and give us a precious and precise insight into the values which define human society.

The most striking revelation would be to compare the first and last of those priorities.

The figures are already out of date, and we’ve made a lot of progress since then – a dozen years later, military spending and arms dealing exceed 1,100 billion dollars a year (far more than spending on medicinal drugs at around 643 billion dollars), making it humankind’s largest expense item.

This, then, is the main business among nations, and it demonstrates the struggle between them to share world domination. Beyond each nation’s legitimate need for security, it is also and above all a question of looking after “its own interests”, in other words, gaining control of raw materials and markets, control which is established by force, and by the presence of military bases and armies.

“Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry?” President Woodrow Wilson recognized. (1)

“The most highly decorated Marine Corps General in U.S. history, Smedley D. Butler understood all too well the real nature of the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. foreign policy in general when he concluded after his retirement in 1931 that during his 33 years as a Ma