Unpublished letter submitted to the Toronto Star
Re: No winners in new arms race, Editorial, February 17, 2018.
Contrary to the Star’s assertion there were big winners in the last arms race and there will be big winners in the coming one – the arms industry or what Dwight D. Eisenhower called ‘the military-industrial complex’. Eisenhower warned about its dangers for the future world. We must remember that the U.S. and Russia have enough weapons to destroy the world multiple times over to arms treaties are a moot point. The editorial assumes rationality. If the discussion were rational we would not even be having it. The fact is that war is, has been and will always be madness conducted by men against anyone who disagrees with them. Nuclear war is simply the ultimate extension of the arms race. If the discussion were rational we would stop spending trillions of dollars on it while people starve around the world. The only thing that humans excel at are making weapons and killing each other in increasingly sophisticated ways.
Our entire society is structured on a war footing with pompous, vain and self-centered leaders primping and playing geopolitical games of brinksmanship driven by religion and economics. Thirty percent of the GDP of the United States comes from weapons production and the rest of the G8 spend much smaller but still staggering sums on their military. Countries have long and storied military histories with leaders lionized on statues throughout the world. There is not a single statue commemorating peace. Each nation state is a potential powder key that can explode at any moment. The arms merchants stay in the background arming both sides in conflicts around the world and making trillions of dollars.
What we should be asking is why leaders only know how to lead with confrontation and never with de-escalation. We have been sliding inexorably into a right-wing extremist politics for the past thirty years in which politicians and their people become more and more extreme and dictatorial even in supposed democracies. Currently we have Donald Trump – the dictator of the U.S. and Vladimir Putin – the dictator of Russia. Neither understands or cares about diplomacy or de-escalation, both only care about their ‘base.’ They only know what all dictators know – to rule with fear, aggression, intimidation and violence. The U.S. people were stupid enough to elect their dictator, the Russian people have no choice. Both their economies are based on arms production and there will be winners as thousands of jobs are created and economies stimulated as the arms industry salivates over increased production of nuclear missiles and a variety of military hardware. Where are the leaders who will shackle the war profiteers and build peace economies? We need leaders who will lead us towards peace not war or we will make another horrific mistake again.