Time to look at history from the point of view of the arms industry?

How did we end up in a situation where there is increasing talk of an emerging Third World War? A look back at a century in which the arms industry repeatedly found enemy images, along with the appropriate triggers, and in the meantime perfected its arsenal.

Time to look at history from the point of view of the arms industry?

(Jacobin NL ) – An article published in the Dutch daily newspaper Financieel Dagblad on Friday 6 September 2024 stated that we need to ‘make the armed forces as a whole more of a deterrent’, and that €1 billion has been appropriated for this purpose. Society must ‘become … more aware of our growing insecurity and … make the necessary preparations, otherwise life in the Netherlands may be disrupted.’ It is as if this growing insecurity has come out of nowhere and all we can do is prepare for it – as if there are no forces that are actively contributing to it. Such scaremongering about warfare implies that this is a completely new and exceptional situation.

But there are forces that benefit from war and will do all they can to boost this sense of insecurity – first and foremost, the arms industry. It has constantly been looking for threats in order to sell its weapons; and again and again it seems to find a reason to use those weapons, so there are always plenty of opportunities to perfect their military use. A cunning example is the recent ‘pager attack’ on people in Lebanon who were assumed, without any investigation or judicial procedure, to be members of Hezbollah.

To rid ourselves of the idea that ‘our growing insecurity’ is some kind of natural phenomenon that ‘just happens’, it is useful to look at developments in war and peace over the past century from the point of view of the global arms industry. This automatically brings us to the two threats that have predominated in the most recent cases of warfare: the Russians who will soon be on our borders, and the Muslims who want to take over the whole of the West. And it also brings us to what is perhaps even more important to the arms industry: creating a warlike atmosphere that will let it continue operating unabated.

The arms industry after the First World War

Let us start in 1918, just after the First World War. A war which had really been about nothing at all, or in fact only about supposed threats stirred up on either side – was over, and a disappointed arms industry had to look around for a suitable replacement. Luckily the search did not take long, for the Germans felt so humiliated by their defeat and the high cost of Allied war reparations that they swiftly found a new military target: their former enemies. For the arms industry it was back to business as usual.

After the Nazis had come to power in Germany in 1933, they were first joined by likewise fascist Italy in 1936, and later also by Japan. Meanwhile General Franco was mounting his coup in Spain – but there was so much armed resistance to it, including from international brigades, that it took him until 1939 to finally seize power and establish his dictatorship.

From the outset, all these fascist and autocratic states worked feverishly to build up a military apparatus, especially to carry out their own domestic purges. But the newly-made aircraft, bombs, tanks, cannons and rifles were soon able to display their deadly capabilities, for in 1939 Nazi Germany began attacking its European neighbours, and in 1940 it was the turn of the Netherlands to be invaded.

On the other side of the world, in the Pacific, Japan had been attacking other countries for far longer. In 1941 it bombed the American fleet in Pearl Harbor in an act of war against the United States; and in 1942 it attacked the Dutch East Indies colony, where we Dutch still held sway. That was where I was enjoying my colonial life of luxury as a child along with my parents, sister and little brother, and a host of Indonesian servants at our beck and call. I can still see my mother sitting at the breakfast table, issuing instructions to our female cook who was squatting on the ground.

An anti-fascist alliance

In response to all this fascist warfare, France, Great Britain, Canada and the United States formed the Western alliance, and so a new world war had begun. In 1941 the Allies were also joined by the Soviet Union.

During the Second World War, the weapons first destroyed homes, schools, factories and other buildings, and claimed millions of dead and injured. And during the ensuing occupations the weapons were used to capture, starve and torture the thousands of local people who dared to resist. The many traumatised survivors and refugees would remain filled with feelings of revenge, for generations to come. The same was true of the survivors of the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis in a cunning military system – a mechanism whereby the Jews were gradually excluded from everyday life, and were finally destroyed by an industrial killing machine.

On 8 May 1945 Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies; Italy had already surrendered, and Spain was for the time being allowed to remain fascist. But in the Pacific there were several more months of fighting against a Japanese army which, although very much weakened, was still trying to postpone its inevitable defeat with its desperate kamikaze flights – flying bombs manned by pilots who were prepared to commit suicide for their homeland.

The spectre of communism had begun to haunt Europe at the start of the century, and the Western Allies had deplored the fact that they had needed the Soviet Union to beat Nazi Germany. But in 1945 the possibility had fortunately arisen to launch what came to be known as the ‘Cold War’. After Nazi Germany had signed its surrender on 8 May 1945, the Allies discussed how to pursue the war in the Pacific. The Soviets let it be known that the huge losses in human life they had suffered meant they would need some time to recover – and so they could only join in with the war against the Japanese in the Pacific precisely three months later, on 8 August 1945.

But rather than wait for this, the United States rushed to drop atomic bombs on two Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on 6 and 9 August 1945. Hundreds of thousands of civilian victims were killed, and the thousands of survivors who had been exposed to nuclear radiation many miles away would suffer the consequences for decades, including cancer and foetal deformities. But Japan did surrender on 15 August 1945.

In the Japanese concentration camp on the island of Java, where I was imprisoned together with my mother, sister and brother, we were told it was this miracle of engineering, the atomic bomb, that had forced the Japanese to surrender. I was then nearly eleven years old, and could already understand quite a lot of what was going on. I imagined all those men, women and children falling to the ground and slowly dying, and thought how terrible it was that all this had been necessary just to give me back my freedom. It was true that the Japanese had kept us locked up for all those years, and the grown-ups said the Americans had had to show the Japanese how powerful they were.

But then why hadn’t they dropped the bombs on an uninhabited island? No-one would give me an answer, and once I had reached adulthood it became clear to me that things had been even worse: the inhabited city of Hiroshima had been chosen with cynical meticulousness because the surrounding mountains would amplify the force of the explosion. Nor could I help wondering whether, and if so to what extent, the fact that the victims were not white had played a part in the decision to drop the bomb there.

“Arms Trade,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3 / Clip2Comic, 2024

This notion that the Second World War was brought to an end by the two atomic bombs is still often heard, but must be dismissed as a myth – for negotiations about Japan’s surrender were almost over, and were now really only about the Japanese fear that their emperor would lose his divine status.

Creation of myths to justify unjust acts of war

What really mattered to the Americans was to sideline the Soviet Union; they wanted to make sure the Russians would not be involved in the postwar occupation of Japan and would have as little influence as possible in the Pacific – and in this they succeeded. This effectively marked the start of the Cold War, the rift between the capitalist West and the communist East; and at the same time it gave the Western arms industry a monopoly on nuclear weapons, a situation that would remain unchanged until 1949, when the Soviet Union developed an atomic bomb of its own.

The Cold War divided Europe into two with an ‘Iron Curtain’, and to the delight of both the Western and the Eastern arms industries both sides immediately embarked on an arms race – involving, in particular, vast quantities of nuclear weapons which between them would be capable of wiping out all life on earth. There were a few scary incidents that could have ended in disaster, but it is generally assumed that the mutual ‘balance of terror’ ensured that those weapons were not in fact used.

At the same time, the arms industries on both sides eagerly began developing long-range weapons which could also carry nuclear warheads. This had the deadly advantage that the people pressing the buttons would no longer be troubled by the sight of the damage they had done. This had already happened when bombs were dropped on civilians from the air, for instance when the British bombed German cities in the closing days of the Second World War, and also when the Americans bombed the inhabitants of Japanese cities; one of the pilots involved is said to have later gone insane with remorse.

In all these cases the perpetrators could still see their targets from a distance, or at least have some inkling of what was happening there. But the missiles and drones that were subsequently developed broke the link between individual feelings of guilt in the air and the people killed on the ground. If human compassion had ever played a part in warfare, this was now entirely eliminated. An added boon for the arms industry was that the users of the weapons – the ‘consumers’, if you will – were themselves at less and less risk as the distance from their targets increased.

In 1948 another country, Israel, had joined the Western camp, and soon began to build up an impressive stock of armaments, which eventually included nuclear weapons. At first its conventional weapons were used to expel some of the original inhabitants of the area, the Palestinians, and then to keep them under control, including those in the numerous refugee camps. And later Israel used the weapons to defend itself against the Islamic countries that surrounded it and in fact attacked it in 1967. Israel then occupied parts of those countries; and the occupations have continued up to the present day.

The use of weapons in global decolonisation

Outside Europe, the Cold War was thus far from ‘cold’, and this bore plenty of juicy fruit for the Western arms industry. Now that there was no longer an alliance with the Soviet Union, the communist threat was gratefully exploited to cast suspicion on independence fighters all over the world and take up weapons against them. After the Second World War they had found the courage to cast off their Western colonisers’ stranglehold, and by no means all of them considered it self-evident that their future economic system would be a capitalist one. At the same time, communist rebels had been making inroads in the Chinese countryside, and in 1949 they proclaimed the People’s Republic of China – which, together with the Soviet Union, was to serve as a role model for the decolonised new states.

The arms industries in the countries that were then communist, such as the Soviet Union, Cuba and China, worked at full steam during the Cold War. Their weapons, sometimes backed by military personnel, were deployed all over the world to support the freedom fighters who had risen in revolt against their colonial masters.

One of the countries that adopted a communist social system was North Vietnam; and from 1955 to 1975 the United States waged a terrifying war there, in which the country was ‘carpet-bombed’. Large numbers of cluster or fragmentation bombs, which have no impact on military targets but do all the more damage to human bodies, were also dropped on the population. An ugly feature of these bombs is that, after entering a body, the fragments travel on inside it and cause acute pain, so that the victim can no longer take part in the fighting. Not forgetting napalm, which was intended to destroy their crops and at the same time deprive them of their hiding places, which they then rebuilt underground. North and South Vietnam together eventually managed to drive the Americans out of their country.

Another colony where a bloody four-year battle for independence was fought during the Cold War was the Dutch East Indies, now renamed Indonesia. My parents, who had started out in the colony as typical colonials, had experienced for themselves in the Japanese camps what it meant to be oppressed, and then gave the Indonesians their unconditional support. This made our family the target of much aggression. Most Dutch minds were poisoned by colonial racial prejudice, and so failed to see that no people on earth will let itself be oppressed for centuries; they disguised their military assaults on the local population as legitimate ‘policing operations’; and our family’s support for the independence struggle made them think of us as traitors.

Soon after gaining its independence, Indonesia began wondering which economic system to adopt, and looked to countries including communist China. This was viewed with utter dismay in the West. But in 1965, as the failure of the Americans’ openly military attempts to dissuade Vietnam from making the same choice was growing increasingly clear, use was made of a secret weapon that was to prove far more effective. Intelligence services in the Netherlands and several other Western countries conspired with right-wing forces in Indonesia itself to unleash an unprecedented massacre of presumed communists. This destroyed the democratically elected Indonesian communist party, and for the next thirty years the West could rely on the support of a thoroughly pro-capitalist dictatorship. The dictator’s opponents were jailed without trial and tortured, and the West did not lift a finger.

Of course, this overt and covert tyranny had the same effect as tyranny always does: large numbers of people were killed and injured; the resulting traumas festered for generations, sowing the seeds of new warfare; and thousands of refugees had to build up new lives for themselves in foreign countries to escape from their unspeakable suffering.

 

The new threat Islam

If  one threat comes to an end, a new one is needed. 1989 saw the end of the Iron Curtain and in Europe the capitalist West and the communist East came back into contact, and for the time being it looked as if the capitalist/communist conflict could no longer be exploited to produce and sell new weapons. Nor could all the stocks of atomic bombs turn any profit in the short term, for they had to be carefully guarded until they could actually be used.

 

Gloom and despondency spread through the global arms industry – where could new, profitable enmities now be generated? But suddenly, just in time for the West, a useful new threat appeared on the world stage: Islam. Islamophobia was already widespread in the former colonising countries of Europe, due to the age-old contemptuous racism that had prevailed during the colonial era. This Islamophobia now found a convenient target in the many Islamic migrant workers who had moved into Europe. And in 1987 the largely Islamic Palestinians had begun their first intifada in Israel.

On 11 September 2001, amid this growing anti-Muslim mood, the Western arms industry received an unexpected boost: the assault on the Twin Towers. Islam now seemed to have found its ultimate justification as a threat, and the Western arms industry had little difficulty in unleashing a new wave of warfare: the ‘War on Terror’. The Muslim countries Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya were reduced to rubble by vast quantities of weapons. And in the midst of all this, in 2011, Syria appeared on the scene, with easy pickings for the arms industry on both sides; and here again the result was total chaos.

In the meantime, the global arms industry had been working assiduously to provide digital backup for its long-range weapons, missiles and drones. One ironic spin-off of this technological innovation is that it has nullified a former advantage of the original long-range weapons – namely that the perpetrators no longer had to see the damage they had done. The people pressing the buttons can now see in full detail what they are firing at, and how their victims are dying. What is unchanged is that they themselves are not at risk; but at least a few of them will again feel twinges of conscience. But not to worry, the arms industry has again found an answer: great improvements in PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) therapy.

The arms industry shows its true face

The arms industry has taken its biggest step backwards in terms of human decency by developing missiles that can take out people in distant countries without causing an explosion. Just before the head of the projectile reaches the neck of a living person who is suspected of something, it ejects six rapidly revolving blades that do the dirty work. Such killings are not preceded by any form of judicial procedure, there is no prior declaration of war against the country concerned, and the victims have no chance of escaping. Israel has recently killed two Muslim men in this way: one in Beirut, and another in Tehran.

And before long, on 17 September 2024, a moral low point was reached when the Israelis caused thousands of ‘pagers’ to eliminate people in Lebanon whom they suspected of belonging to the organisation that provides support for the Palestinian struggle in Gaza and on the West Bank. Just before exploding, the pager emitted a signal, and when the victims took it out to answer it they lost the hand they were holding it in or one or both of their eyes – or, if they did not respond to the signal, the pager exploded in their trouser pockets and they lost vital organs or were castrated.

Yet the Western arms industry kept looking for threats other than Islam. Not that the threat was about to disappear in the short term, for as early as 2014 the Palestinians who had to live in the Gaza Strip faced Israeli bombardments that lasted seven weeks and claimed thousands of dead and injured. In addition, the bitter truth was that the men, women and children could not flee, because they were enclosed behind fences equipped with the most advanced equipment and watchtowers in order to fire at the refugees. In this case the reason was the killing of three young Israelis on the West Bank.

But meanwhile the Russian arms industry was working at top speed, and making use of its experience with the surrounding NATO, so that Ukraine could become its new threat. This suited the Western arms industry right down to the ground. In the Western world there was still enough anti-Soviet resentment to revive the existing tension and hostility between Ukraine and Russia (which has long ceased to be communist) from 2014 onwards. The Cold War slogan ‘The Russians are coming’ was still working.

These two threats – the Russian threat to Europe, and the Muslim threat to the entire Western world, have now culminated in two bloody wars that are bringing huge profits to the global arms industry. And so all their weapon systems have had an ideal opportunity to be tested and perfected in warfare – in other words, on human bodies. But, perhaps better still, the two threats have made people’s minds ripe for an atmosphere in which the arms industry can continue to operate in the same old way for many years to come.

Once again there have been all kinds of reasons involved, and the last word has not been spoken. But whatever people eventually conclude, the arms industry is bound to profit from it. One reason was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, to which the Ukrainians at first responded defensively, but eventually, with Western aid, more offensively. The other reason arose in 2023, in the form of an armed Palestinian break-out from Gaza in which over two hundred Israelis were taken hostage. To which the Israeli army responded – and is still responding – with disproportionate military force, leaving the local population enclosed within a concentration camp less than a few hundred square kilometres in area. Men, women and children are being starved, deprived of medical facilities and drinking-water, and repeatedly expelled to supposedly safe areas where they are again bombarded – always on the pretext that all this is aimed at members of Hamas. Tens of thousands have already been killed, including 16,000 children.

And now that there is a ‘risk’ of negotiations about the latter two wars, the Ukrainians, with support from the West, are making a last desperate attempt to prolong the war by making attacks on Russian territory. And the Israelis seem so fearful of their oppression of the Palestinian people finally being brought to an end that they are thwarting every opportunity to achieve a lasting truce.

All wars eventually come to an end. But not to worry – if world peace should unexpectedly break out, the West is already gearing itself up for a new war, with a no longer communist China. And grateful use can then be made of yet another echo from the past: ‘the Yellow Peril’.

Anne-Ruth Wertheim, Amsterdam, 2024

This article was published in the Dutch magazine Jacobin.NL:

https://jacobin.nl/wapenindustrie-geschiedenis-anne-ruth-wertheim/