As Europe in the 1990s enjoyed the benefits of a peace dividend after the fall of the Soviet Union, US arms manufacturers set to work<\/a>, pushing for NATO\u2019s expansion into eastern Europe, thus reneging on promises to Mikhail Gorbachev by a parade of western leaders \u2013 Fran\u00e7ois Mitterrand, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, even US Secretary of State James Baker \u2013 that the alliance would not grow in the direction of Russia\u2019s borders. Under heavy lobbying pressure, the US Congress in 1996 agreed to establish a multi-billion-dollar fund to allow the Pentagon (aka the taxpayer) to guarantee loans for \u2018defence\u2019 exports to enable cash-strapped new members Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic to bring their militaries up to standard.<\/p>\n So the main source of grievance outlined in President Vladimir Putin\u2019s demands to NATO came about as the result of a campaign of sabotage against a carefully conceived programme of statecraft to ensure peaceful relations in post-Cold War Europe. Surely an example of what President Eisenhower, in his famous valedictory address to the American people on leaving the Oval Office in 1961, called \u201cunwarranted influence\u201d by the \u201cmilitary-industrial complex\u201d.<\/p>\n As it prepared to open its doors to former Warsaw Pact countries, NATO changed its rules to allow military action on the territory of a non-member, to engage in \u2018Operation Allied Force\u2019, the 1999 bombing of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, over its attempts to suppress claims for independence by the Albanian-speaking population of Kosovo. Changing international borders by the use of force was another precedent duly noted in Moscow, and prayed in aid<\/a> of its own interventions in portions of Georgia and now, of course, Ukraine. As ye sow…<\/p>\n A newly published report<\/a> by the Australian Democracy Network identifies today\u2019s exertions of unwarranted military-industrial influence as an example of \u201cstate capture\u201d. It looks in detail at a AUD$1.3bn contract for armoured vehicles from Thales Australia \u2013 a local subsidiary of the French manufacturer \u2013 which the country did not need and, even if it had, could have procured at much lower cost elsewhere. A federal audit office report was suppressed, and the company even went to court in a failed bid to stop the truth coming out.<\/p>\n The State Capture report outlines how networks of corporate think-tanks influence media reporting, to promote overblown risk assessments and convince publics they are living in a much more dangerous world than is, in fact, the case. Australia, with its trade and cultural links to China, has every interest in developing friendly relations with Beijing, for instance \u2013 but one of these think-tanks in particular, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, has for years promoted a \u2018China threat thesis\u2019 that serves the interests of its funders in \u2013 you guessed it \u2013 the arms industry.<\/p>\n The switch was flicked on the Thales contract by the current Liberal-National Coalition ministry, but development work had continued with equal dispatch under its Labor predecessor. Indeed, when that government took office in 2007, under Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, it commissioned an inquiry into Australia\u2019s defence needs, chaired by former New South Wales state senator Stephen Loosley \u2013 who had, months previously, joined the advisory board of Thales Australia.<\/p>\n Neither party wants to expose itself to charges of being soft on security, or indeed negligent in bringing jobs. The traction enjoyed by arms industry lobbying has only increased as manufacturing in other sectors has continued to recede \u2013 so careers requiring high levels of training and technical skills, in occupations which add value and therefore command high salaries, are at a premium.<\/p>\n A recent edition of the Illawarra Mercury<\/em> newspaper, serving a section of rural and coastal New South Wales that is also a key political battleground in the forthcoming federal election, noted<\/a>: \u201cThe Australian government is going through the largest defence acquisition cycle in living memory\u201d<\/em>. David Bridge, who chairs the Illawarra Innovative Industry Network, told the paper: \u201cDefence is really an untapped opportunity for the Illawarra, because there is a tremendous amount of money to be spent with new equipment, systems, plant, resourcing\u201d. Woe betide the MP or candidate who is seen to welcome that prospect less warmly than their rivals.<\/p>\n Amid this gloom, two chinks of light: one recent, the other from nearly half a century ago. This year, the campaign to close down the plant operated by the Israeli arms dealer, Elbit Systems, in the northern England town of Oldham, finally succeeded. Activists for Palestine justice braved all the hazards of protest criminalization in neoliberal states such as the UK, keen to promote profit over notional political freedoms. They endured repeated arrests to occupy the factory entrance, smash windows, chain themselves to the premises and spray blood-red paint on factory walls. The group says its repeated occupation of the site has cost Elbit \u201cmillions\u201d and forced the \u201cfactory closure.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n So some other principle can, at the expense of considerable courage and sustained pressure by a social movement, be inserted ahead of profit \u2013 in this case, the responsibility, on states that claim to be law-abiding, not to collude in Israeli war crimes. A crack in the neoliberal worldview, indeed.<\/p>\n A more profound and far-reaching challenge can still be glimpsed in the 1970s proposal from workers at the UK\u2019s Lucas Aerospace, to \u2018beat swords into ploughshares\u2019 by repurposing plant, machinery and workforce from military to civilian applications instead. In fact, as one veteran of the plan notes<\/a>, some of the technological innovations proposed as new lines by a \u2018Combine\u2019 of trade union shop stewards from all 15 of the company\u2019s plants, such as hybrid power packs for motor vehicles, and wind turbines, have since become familiar.<\/p>\n But the initiative failed, he reflects, because: \u201cWhile individual Trade Unions and the Labour Government supported the Combine\u2019s Plan in principle, there were neither the structures in place, nor the political will, to put pressure on Lucas Aerospace management to negotiate with the Combine to implement the Plan. An opportunity was lost to make a company receiving public money accountable to the community… Like other UK-based manufacturing companies, Lucas Aerospace was a victim of poor, unaccountable management, and a sad lack of successive governments\u2019 industrial strategy\u201d.<\/p>\n That is, indeed, the challenge. In his writings on power, Michel Foucault teases us: \u201cIf it never did anything but say no, do you really believe that we should manage to obey it?\u201d<\/em> Militarism is a menace, in efforts to build a more peaceful world system, and it is propelled by the gravitational force, which distorts political and media responses alike, of the military-industrial complex. To oppose it entails having something else to propose, to put in its place, as a source of security and prosperity alike. And that will require governments to rouse themselves to reset relations between capital, labour and broader society.<\/p>\n ________________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n Militarism is a menace, in efforts to build a more peaceful world system, and it is propelled by the gravitational force, which distorts political and media responses alike, of the military-industrial complex. To oppose it entails having something else to propose, to put in its place, as a source of security and prosperity alike.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[867,1817,1161,1188,120,101,725,1253,100,1126,1050,504,2462,769,287,99,70,126,118],"class_list":["post-205485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial","tag-anglo-america","tag-anti-militarism","tag-arms-industry","tag-arms-race","tag-conflict","tag-cultural-violence","tag-culture-of-violence","tag-demilitarization","tag-direct-violence","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-international-relations","tag-military-industrial-media-complex","tag-military-supremacy","tag-power","tag-structural-violence","tag-usa","tag-violence","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205485\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/jake-lynch1-150x150.jpg\")
<\/a> Jake Lynch is based at the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies of the University of Sydney, after completing a Leverhulme Visiting Professorship at Coventry University, in the UK, in 2020.<\/em> His debut novel, <\/em>Blood on the Stone: An Oxford Detective Story of the 17th<\/sup> Century, is published by Unbound Books. Jake has spent 20 years developing and researching Peace Journalism, in theory and practice. He is the author of seven books and over 50 refereed articles and book chapters. His work in this field was recognised with the award of the 2017 Luxembourg Peace Prize, by the Schengen Peace Foundation. He served for two years as Secretary General of the International Peace Research Association, having organised its biennial global conference in Sydney, in 2010. Before taking up an academic post, Jake enjoyed a 17-year career in journalism, with spells as a Political Correspondent in Westminster, for <\/em>Sky News, and the Sydney Correspondent for the <\/em>Independent newspaper, culminating in a role as an on-screen presenter for <\/em>BBC World Television News. Lynch is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a> and advisor for TRANSCEND Media Service<\/a>. He is the co-author, with Annabel McGoldrick, of <\/em>Peace Journalism (Hawthorn Press, 2005), and <\/em>Debates in Peace Journalism, Sydney University Press and TRANSCEND University Press<\/a>. He also co-authored with Johan Galtung and Annabel McGoldrick, <\/em>Reporting Conflict: An Introduction to Peace Journalism, which <\/em>TMS editor Antonio C. S. Rosa translated to Portuguese<\/a>. His most recent book of scholarly research is <\/em>A Global Standard for Reporting Conflict\u00a0(Taylor & Francis, 2014).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"