Russ Martin

Hot & Cold Wars: the bitter truth Russ Martin

The heat of war is carved into American history. Dramatic increases since 1945 reflect the nation's planned-economy philosophy of using defense spending to maintain economic growth. The inherent result is that war and growth are structurally locked into a perpetual economic US-waltz. Russ Martin maps American intentions which sustain poor health and chronic scarcities in dozens of sovereign nations. He calls this ideology 'Empiritis' where all power, control, money and knowledge is assumed blamelessly by a single, all-powerful nation. CIA-assignation programs forge dependencies between the warfare state and its client welfare states in which the former steers the later into latent, unending spirals of economic shortages. In turn, US-foreign aid featuring non-negotiable concessions through tying agreements allows the US to assume political control of targeted countries. The book is about the bitter truths related to this practice. For the last decade, Martin directed a pair of distinguishing methods in his research process to improve the reliability of post-combat assessments. He asserts that war statistics are misleading using traditional indices of lifespans-lost and dollars-spent. His approach uses atypical guides to measure the complex impacts of combat: healthspans-shortened and environments-lost. Each of these hinder the long-term recovery, productivity and stability of the Empiritis-infected sovereign nation which has been targeted for US-conversion. He commendably accomplishes this by matching choices of the subjugator nation with consequential impacts in victim-nations. Official American histories intentionally sever this linkage between the actions of an intruder nation and its harmful impacts on the noncombatants within the wounded nation. Case-in-point: deadly dioxin.