Bankism and Militarism: The Twin Engines of Class Warfare and Crimes against Peace
IN FOCUS, 28 Jul 2025
Koenraad Priels – TRANSCEND Media Service
If you want to glimpse the strange, brutal logic that governs our world, don’t start with politicians or generals—start with the bank towers glittering above your city skyline and the endless parade of military hardware rolling across distant deserts. These are the altars of the age: places where class warfare is waged relentlessly, not through open declarations but via the everyday rituals of finance and force. And though the language of “class warfare” may evoke images of barricades and revolution, the reality today is far more insidious—a meticulously organized onslaught against the fabric of society itself, a crime against peace perpetrated not by outlaws, but by the very architects of our economic and military order.
Class warfare, in this sense, is neither forgotten rhetoric nor historical artifact. It is the ongoing struggle engineered by a rentier capitalist elite to concentrate power and wealth through exquisitely hidden levers: the banking sector’s extraction of profit from debt, and the military’s protection of the status quo. At the heart of modern society sits the colossal machinery of “bankism”—the rule of the banker, the speculator, the creditor who thrives not by creating real value, but by siphoning it from the world’s laboring masses. You see its fingerprints in surging inequality, in debt that shackles nations and families, in the way governments bend over backwards to appease financial markets even as hospitals and schools fall into neglect.
Few institutions have shaped global fates so profoundly and so destructive as the banking system. What does “bankism” look like in everyday life? It is the subtle violence of predatory lending, the conversion of life’s necessities—home, education, healthcare—into commodities subject to speculation and arbitrage. It is the transfer of billions and trillions in interest from those who borrow merely to live, upward to those who already have more than they can spend in ten lifetimes. Bankism is the silent extraction of wealth from the many to the few, creating a poverty that kills by a thousand cuts and rewarding the architects of the system with social adulation and impunity.
Yet bankism does not stand alone. It requires an enforcer, a shield, an always-ready threat: and so enters militarism, the other mighty engine of class warfare. The world’s armies—overt and covert—have a double task: at home, they guard the sanctity of property (who would dare challenge the rules if riot police stand ready?), while abroad, they secure the raw materials, the “stability,” and the cheap labor that keep profits flowing in. Militarism is the reflex of capital when democracy threatens, when workers organize, when communities resist extraction and dispossession; it is the iron fist behind the velvet glove of “business as usual.”
To call these entwined systems “crimes against peace” is not mere polemic. At Nuremberg, the original “crime against peace” was defined as the planning and waging of aggressive war. But in our fractal, hyper-financialized age, peace is assaulted not in a single act but by a thousand institutional arrangements that slowly erode the foundations of justice, security, and equality. When financial markets can plunge entire countries into poverty overnight, or military intervention dictates who will rule and who will flee, we witness the deep sedimentation of violence—a violence that is technical, legal, sometimes invisible, but no less devastating.
What we must grasp is that this matrix of bankism and militarism is not an accidental coupling, but a deliberate orchestration. The profits of war flow back to the financiers; the infrastructure of finance is secured by force. Both are wrapped in the banners of “progress” and “security”—yet both ultimately serve the same small, self-conscious class, the rentier capitalist ruling elite, whose fortunes grow with every crisis. This is not a conspiracy, but a structure; not a secret, but a scandal hiding in plain sight.
To break the spell, we must speak plainly. To wage class warfare from above—to use economic violence and organized military might to dispossess, divide, and dominate—is a crime against any meaningful definition of peace. It’s a slow, grinding violence that impoverishes, pollutes, and pushes whole regions to the brink, all the while masquerading as inevitability or, worse, as virtue. If justice is ever to be more than a dream, the world must see these twin engines for what they are: not guardians of peace, but its gravediggers.
History shows, as in every age, that empires and elites are toppled not by force alone, but by the unveiling of hidden truths and by the courage of those who refuse to let injustice masquerade as normal life. The task falls to us to name the violence, to resist the siren song of “just business” or “necessary defense,” and to reclaim peace not as the passive absence of war but as the living presence of justice, dignity, and sufficiency for all. The journey may yet be long, but truth is a stubborn thing—and the future will remember those who dared to tell it.
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Koenraad Priels is an independent researcher, social-ecological activist, and founder of Free-B. He has published six peer-reviewed articles, authored a UN report, and initiated the first legal case against the global interest banking system for ecocide in Belgium. He is currently applying for a PhD by publication at KULeuven, focusing on the systemic links between financial architecture, ecocide, and global inequality.
Tags: Bankism, Banksters, Military
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 28 Jul 2025.
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