The Perpetual War Machine
The American-Israeli war machine –the profits from mass murder and a destabilised world
Dedicated toHossam Shabbat and all the Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza.
“...empires rise and fall at a wave of the pointer, the blood is blotted out - And only one small boy, who was not paying the least attention, will ask between two victorious wars: and did it hurt in those days too?”
(Miroslav Holub, tr. George Theiner)
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Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Diversity is life
- Peace as continuous war
- Ukraine
- Genocide is good for business
- The destroyer of worlds
- Our world today is the one Eisenhower warned about
- A transformed purpose for power
- Remembering the atomic atrocities
- Further research
- Footnotes
Introduction
So many of our global political issues, and so much human suffering, stem from the increased militarisation that was necessary during WWII but that continued long after to today.
Before discussing the US-Israeli war machines, we should remind ourselves of the urgent necessity of cooperation of all the world’s powers, countries and people to find solutions to the many issues that humans and others species currently face. We must be honest about the great challenges we face, the fact that we are quite simply running out of time. We must ensure that all of our leaders are fit for the enormous task ahead.
We can only solve these issues by working together globally, relying on science and technology to help us and good faith.
The neo-fascist autocrats, that we must now resist and defeat, know very well what the science tells us all. They lie about it, not because they are anti-science but because they have no desire to be part of the solution. They are anti-truth, anti-justice and anti-humanity. They are like the cannibals in the story The Road , just in their case they actively hasten the degradation of the world and human civilisation. They want to create a ‘man eat man, woman and child’ world and aim to ensure they are first to the table with sharpened knives.
We must resist
The Men
Who will
(For starters)
Wolf down
Our children
Diversity is life
Planet Earth relies on a wonderful diversity of life-forms to maintain its ability to support all life throughout the biosphere.1
World Atlas – why is biodiversity critical to life on Earth?2
“the truth is that the Earth’s environment has been massively adapted to sustain habitability. It is life that has controlled the heat from the Sun …the Sun is gradually emitting ever more heat. In fact, over the last 3.5 billion years its output has increased by 20 per cent. This should have been enough to raise the surface temperature of the Earth to 50°C and bring about a runaway greenhouse effect that would have sterilized the planet. But it didn’t happen.__ "
(James Lovelock, ‘Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence’)
However, we continue to destroy the planet’s capacity to carry us and so many other wonderful species.
We accelerate into a man-made natural catastrophe which could destroy Earth as home for humans and many other complex life-forms.
The risks are so serious and startling they require all the major countries and powers to collaborate in ways never before managed or imagined, if we are to avoid billions of deaths and a severely depleted natural environment. A runaway fiery catastrophe.
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Indeed, the planet could very soon become so degraded that it is pushed past a point of no return.
“The best available data suggests that what we decide over the next 10 years will determine the long-term fate of human civilization.“3
Yet much of the world is still practising a business as usual growth model. Despite such an approach making it impossible to meet our global warming mitigation targets. Research shows that an updated version of the ‘Business As Usual’ (BAU) scenario, with slightly modified assumptions shows “a clear collapse pattern” with “a steep decline to set in around 2040”.
According to Gaya Herrington’s analysis, this scenario indicates economic and industrial growth stopping and then declining, which would “hurt food production and standards of living”. (Gaya Herrington, ‘Update to limits to growth’ 2020)4
Other studies confirm that we must rapidly recalibrate our global efforts to an extraordinary degree – to save the human species from a future that no one would wish to live in (even if they could survive).
_” The fact is that the recalibrated model again shows the possibility of a collapse of our current system. At the same time, the BAU scenario of the 1972 model is shown to be alarmingly consistent with the most recently collected empirical data.” (Recalibration of limits to growth: An update of the World3 model)_5
Instead of using our collective intelligence to solve these urgent problems, a new coalition (a new Axis powers) comprised of Russia-America-Israel believe that now is the time to carve up the world.
Trump and his friends want to remove or criminalise environmental protections, eradicate civil rights and make much of the world into their personal fiefdoms.
Netanyahu is systematically dismantling the limited Israeli democracy (even for Jews) whilst conducting ethnic cleansing and Genocide.
Putin’s aggression in Ukraine has resulted in up to 1 million casualties on both sides,6 as well as widespread systematic torture, rape and the forced abduction of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children.7
All of the Axis powers publicly gloat about committing crimes against humanity. The very antithesis of all that is blessed or holy (whole) in our universe.
Trump and his friends want to turn the world into Mordor
In short, this is precisely the opposite of what the world needs to solve our myriad complex problems. They can only be solved by collective universal collaboration and cooperation, based on respect for diversity of humans and all life-forms.
Peace as continuous war
Since WWII, America has been involved in more than 500 overt or convert military interventions (in wars,8 and support for regime change, coups, insurrections and bloody dictators).
It is very hard to get agreement on the exact numbers but tens of millions of civilians have been killed or have died as a result and tens of millions of people have been displaced.9
(IBON Foundation)
With a peace this bloody, who needs wars?
Obviously, because nearly all of this happened elsewhere, most people in Europe and America are largely oblivious. Most of the mainstream media has no financial incentive to report the truth.
After the break up of the USSR and the end of the cold war, US military spending declined significantly (the so-called peace dividend).10 When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, American military spending stood at 7% of GDP.
However, that peace dividend did not last for very long. American geopolitical power is based on being able to enforce its will against nearly any other country in the world (irrespective of international laws). Perpetual war is baked into the American political system.12
Without perpetual warfare, the US would soon lose its military dominance and technological edge in new weaponry and war machines. This would force its administration to have to comply with international laws, and to collaborate and cooperate with others. It has evinced no desire to do so since WWII.
In addition, there are many politicians and powerful people and corporations in America that do much better financially from the dividends of war,13 mass murder and Genocide than they would from a peaceful world.
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength "
(George Orwell)
US military spending has increased more than 48% in real (inflation-adjusted) terms in the first 24 years of this century. This growth has occurred despite the end of the Iraq War and the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
US military spending is currently around $900 billion (3% of GDP). However, this only tells part of the story. If we factor in Foreign Military Sales (FMS) **between 2019 and 2023, the United States accounted for 42% of global arms exports.**15
In 2022, the year of the latest Russian invasion of Ukraine, arms transfers through the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) program increased year-over-year by 49% to $51.9 billion and Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) transactions increased by the same percentage to $153.7 billion.
In 2024, the United States’ Foreign Military Sales (FMS) and Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) of military equipment reached a combined total of approximately $318.7 billion.16
Sustained warfare is really great for some American corporations,wealthy investors and politicians but really terrible for nearly everyone else.
This extraordinary level of foreign purchases, represents substantial growth from the Cold War period, when US arms exports totalled approximately $13.4 billion annually (1987-89 average), representing 0.28% of GDP. With US GDP of approximately $29 trillion in 2024, the $318.7 billion in all foreign military sales that year accounts for about 1.15% of the US GDP.
The proportionate scale of American military spending is evident when viewed in relation to other major powers:17
- The US spends approximately 4 times more than China on defence
- US military expenditure is nearly 7 times larger than Russia’s defence budget
- American defence spending exceeds the combined military budgets of the next 10-12 largest defence spenders globally
EU Observer: The turbo-charging of EU defence — explained18
With these statistics it is no surprise that increased foreign military purchases of US weapons are a key component of the Project 2025 authoritarian neo-fascist takeover of America first and then – working as part of the new Axis powers – much of the rest of the world.
These mafioso warlords want the rest of the world to pay continuous tribute to them. For Trump and his collaborators, that plan includes further strengthening the American industrial-military base (using other people’s money), making those other countries even more dependent on America for those weapons to be able to work. A perpetual cycle of servitude, where the enslaved pay for their own increasingly advanced and secure chains.
The American military strategy, is a great strategy only if the rest of the world is both stupid and scared.
Sadly, this American strategy is not a product of wild outlandish speculation. Indeed, it has worked very well in Europe for decades, and it is a fair reflection of Europe’s historic geopolitical and military lack of intelligence (excluding France).
Between the start of Russia’s war in 2022 and June 2023, 78% of defence acquisitions by EU member states were made from outside the EU, with the U.S. alone representing approx 64%.
“While the U.S. supplied 52 percent of European NATO members ’ military equipment between 2015 and 2019, the share rose to 64 percent in the subsequent five-year period.“19
- Norway, Sweden, Italy, and the Netherlands : Over 90% of their arms imports came from US suppliers between 2020 and 2024.
- The UK : Sourced over 80% of its arms imports from the United States during 2020-2024.
- Germany : Experienced a dramatic increase in US arms imports, rising from less than 10% in the 2015-2019 period to 70% in 2020-2024.
- Poland : Is a significant purchaser of US equipment (such as F-35s and Abrams tanks), however IISS data suggests that between February 2022 and September 2024, Poland spent almost as much on European equipment (37%) as on US systems (38%). Contracts with Korean firms during this period also amounted to 25%.
European countries have been funding the American-Israeli war machine without any thought or strategic planning. They have failed to consider the basic question of whether this purchase of US-Israeli weaponry actually secures and increases European defensive capabilities.
Far too few politicians and military experts have seemed to consider carefully how such a policy only strengthens the American stranglehold. It ensures the EU and UK are, at best, increasingly weak vassals that one day will be unable to make their war tribute payments (and so must be broken up for valuable parts).
There is also the shocking cost of our hypocrisy in largely supporting a US-Israeli Genocide, the great mass sacrifice of 20,000 or more children.
Ukraine
It is clear that America has benefited the most from the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, receiving tens of billions in weapons orders and military funding.
In addition, some of the responsibility for the conflict must also be laid on America, given that it actively encouraged Ukraine to join NATO despite knowing that the Russian administration had always considered this a red-line – due to the understandings between the superpowers reached during and after the fall of the USSR.
“U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University “21
Angela Merkel was also well known for treating the Russian fears of NATO expansion seriously.22
That said, this is still not a sufficient justification for the invasion of Ukraine and, if it was the real reason, a peace plan could be established immediately which prevented Ukraine from joining NATO whilst protecting its territorial and political integrity and sovereignty. Putin has shown no desire for such a peace plan, and instead seeks unilateral disarmament of Ukraine, to keep the territory Russia has invaded and for the installment of a Russian-puppet President.
In addition, the other reasons given by Russia for the invasion are Putin’s lies that it was necessary for Russia to do so “to demilitarize and denazify Ukraine”.23
In fact, Russia and Usrael are the greatest supporters of far-right and neo-Nazi groups across Europe.
_“Every war is a war against children.”_24
Genocide is good for business
The military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about has found one its most stable profitable manifestations in the US-Israel relationship. In many ways, geopolitically, Israel must be seen as the 51st State of America though their objectives and interests are not fully aligned at all times.
The US is the world’s largest arms exporter (42%), and Israel is the eighth-largest (3.1%). Their combined influence on global arms markets is without peer.
In addition to European countries, major purchasers of US weaponry include Saudi Arabia, Japan, and Qatar. India and Germany are also significant buyers of Israeli weapons. The arms exports of the USA and Israel also contribute to militarization in many other regions including the Middle East and South Asia (they are largely agonistic as to who buys the weapons).
Israel is a technological laboratory for the dark arts: experts in perfecting murder, surveillance and misinfo (Hasbara) and the use of cutting edge technology to control, compromise and inflict suffering on people. And yet it must also be said that Israel (obviously not including the Occupied Palestinian Territories) is much more democratic than most of its neighbouring countries, it also has extraordinary investigative journalism (particularly publishers like Haaretz and +972) and a willingness to publicly challenge power and corruption within Israel.
Israel operates under a ‘Permanent War Economy’ where military considerations are deeply integrated into its identity and economy, with technologies often tested on Palestinian populations before international marketing.25
By February 2022, the total bilateral military assistance from the U.S. to Israel had reached approximately $150 billion (non-inflation-adjusted) since WWII.
Since the conflict in Gaza began in October 2023, the U.S. has spent over $18 billion on military aid to Israel and committed, in an MOU, to spend an additional $20bn by 2028. As with US support for Ukraine, much of this support feeds back to US arms manufacturers. However, a unique feature of the relationship is Israel’s privileged position in being allowed to use U.S. Foreign Military Financing (FMF) for ‘offshore procurement’ – purchasing from Israel’s own defence industry.26
The 51st state relationship has enabled Israel to build significant military capabilities to become militarily expert in addition to its world leading expertise:
(i) in spyware 27 (frequently used against politicians, lawyers, human rights experts, judges etc) where it also collaborates with Russia as well as far right groups around the world and in Europe; and
(ii) the use of AI to surveil and kill civilians.28
In addition, US defence contractors openly acknowledge the financial benefits derived from conflicts involving Israel and state that it is “good for business”. The CEO of RTX (formerly Raytheon), America’s largest defence contractor and a major Israeli weapons manufacturer, bluntly declared after the war on Gaza commenced “across the entire Raytheon portfolio, you’re going to see a benefit of this restocking”.29
We should therefore expect a forever war in the Middle East and elsewhere.
The Palestinian people of Gaza and the West Bank are currently the main victims30 of this military-industrial complex.
A man carries an injured child following Israeli bombardment at al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, June 16, 2024. Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images
However, the people of Europe cannot be complacent, and may soon find that conflict is not contained to Ukraine and our children are next.
Indeed, if the extremists and neo-fascists are unopposed or win, once they run out of easy weak targets, we should expect war to be waged against their own people (as Trump’s administration is already showing).
“In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word ‘war’, therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. "
(George Orwell, 1984)
Fascististic regimes are cannibalistic. They always eat their own too.
The Nagasaki bomb destroyed vast swathes of the southwestern Japanese city. Getty Images
The destroyer of worlds
“Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
(Oppenheimer citing the Bhagavad Gita)
US National Archives and Records Administration, “Nagasakibomb”, Wikipedia, public domain.
To understand how we got here there are, of course, many complex interacting forces at work. There is the traditional historic analysis – which sees American imperialism within the context of a long line of empires going back before the British all the way to the Romans.
It is true, all countries or civilisations require military power to maintain and defend their territory. The great empires also focus on enlargement (whether by force or agreement). Those that have the power to enforce their views on weaker people and territories will also have the power to determine what is right and wrong, what is lawful and punishable.
We are told that history is written by the victor. Churchill is often attributed with this phrase - though he in fact said:
“_I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself “_31
(Winston Churchill, House of Commons on Jan. 23, 1948)
Painted study of Churchill, Grahame Sutherland (1954)
Even when the laws in place determine such acts are unlawful, misdeeds and immorality are of course capable of being dealt with by ignoring the laws in a culture of immunity and impunity (the Iraq war, Nicaragua, Trump’s sedition etc).
“..Yet law-abiding scholars write: Law is neither wrong nor right, Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times..”(W. H. Auden, ‘Law Like Love’)
The macro-historical approach is of course useful but, in this article, I want to take a different approach and zoom-in on a specific moment in time. A moment when I believe the US military war machine crossed a rubicon and turned from a (largely) justifiable defence footing to that of a violent worldwide aggressor without compunction. A moment when the baton of imperial cruelty and violence of European civilisations was definitively passed on to the new Europeans of America as the global superpower.
For me, that moment occurred towards the end of WWII. With the unjustified purposeful destruction of the civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The greatest of war crimes, by any other country in any another time.
In analyzing these events, firstly, one should be aware that we must always give a huge discount to any narrative which we find too comforting.
As an experiment, ask a few of your more thoughtful friends what they think about the use of atomic bombs in Japan. I have tried it, nearly everyone repeats to me the historic party lines “it hastened the end of WW11”, “it saved lives”. It soon became clear from such discussions, that none of the people asked had actually looked at this point in history, and yet they seemed remarkable confident with their blithe ethical assessments about the moral rightness of killing civilians with atomic weapons. It truly is a short walk from that position to justifying other atrocities such as Vietnam, Iraq and the Genocide in Gaza.
This is also not a ‘woke’ apology for winning WWII. I simply ask whether the danger is that Nazi’s were so clearly evil, we have never had to come to terms with our own part in the causes of WWII and our own war crimes. A less evil opposition might have forced us to look in the mirror more. We have never wanted to face the self-serving justification for our intentional mass killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
My God, what have we done?”
(Capt. Robert Lewis,
co-pilot of the Enola Gay)
In addition, we have often used success in WWII to deprecate or forget our own imperial crimes. To avoid facing up to the historical injustices perpetuated by capitalist ‘democratic’ societies – and to ignore our continuing depredations (including in America against the large population of black people who still did not have equal rights and opportunities).
“The Second World War conveniently wiped the slate clean for the liberal elite, as if they had had no involvement in countless genocidal projects throughout the era of colonialism.”
(Aurelien Mondon, ‘Really existing liberalism, the bulwark fantasy, and the enabling of reactionary, far right politics’)32
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Credit: Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Copyright
“I have always condemned the use of the atomic bomb against Japan but I could not do anything at all to prevent that fateful decision"33
Photo of what appears to be an old person with walking stick, burned onto stone steps in Hiroshima, Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images; taken from Ian Dickinson, “37 Hiroshima Aftermath Photos That Reveal The True Devastation”, Ian Dickinson, All Thats Interesting, 20 March 2018 CE, fair use assertion.
Given the factual and counterfactual difficulties and the scale of intentional civilian suffering, we must be particularly careful when evaluating the ethical justification for events especially if we benefit emotionally from holding those views (writing from the ‘victorious’ side that committed the horrific acts).
It is estimated that about 140,000 of Hiroshima ’s 350,000 population were killed by the atomic bomb - Photo of Hiroshima Getty Images.
Some say that by the time of the bombing the Japanese knew they were defeated, and the Russian intervention was more important than the bombs in ending the war. From this perspective, the bombs were more a show of strength aimed at terrifying the Russians34 than any attempt to avoid further loss of life.
“Some girls could not close their eyes. Some girls – their lips were all melted with their chins so they could not close [their mouths].” 35
(Koko Kondo)
These events remind us that, even if we are on the winning side of a war, we must always be skeptical and critical of our leaders and their purported aims and justifications (including post rationalisations as per Sec. of War, Henry Stimson).36 Otherwise we are simply asserting that ‘might is right’.
There is good evidence that Pres. Truman was misled about Hiroshima being a military target and base and that he also was not advised of the bombing of Nagasaki. An earlier draft of his press release to be published following the bombing stated:
“The world will note that the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima which is purely a military base. This was because we did not want to destroy the lives of women and children and innocent civilians”.
(Truman)
After the Hiroshima bombing, and before Truman knows the full extent of civilian casualties, the reference to Hiroshima as a purely military target is edited to indicate that it was not “purely military”. Once he discovered the true nature of Hiroshima (a normal city with a military base attached) he ordered a halt to further use of nuclear weapons, saying again that he could not deal with the idea of killing “all those kids.” Truman was consistent about not wanting to use the atomic bomb on civilians whereas his military advisors were not concerned by that suffering. America has changed a lot since WWII, now the Presidents also have no concern about killing women and children.
A “purely military” target? Truman’s changing language about Hiroshima
“Secretary of War Stimson … informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan…the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test..and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.”
(Gen. Eisenhower)
General Eisenhower was in as good a position as nearly anyone to assess whether dropping the atomic bombs on Japan was necessary to bring the war to halt. His position was clear that it was not and he noted Sec. Stimson “was deeply perturbed by my attitude…”:
“my belief [was] that Japan was already defeated … and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid…the use of a weapon whose employment was…no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives…”
(Eisenhower)
Two consecutive US Presidents appear to have been misled or had grave misgivings about the alleged reasons for using the atomic bombs. It is more than striking (it is chilling), that a military establishment man like Eisenhower went on to warn about the dangers of the establishment of a “military-industrial complex” in his last message to the American public.
Farewell address by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, January 17, 1961; Final TV Talk 1/17/61 (1), Box 38, Speech Series, Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower as President, 1953-61, Eisenhower Library; National Archives and Records Administration
“we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence..by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power..will persist.”
(Eisenhower)
Eisenhower’s Farewell Address37
Our world today is the one Eisenhower warned about
The world we live in is precisely the world Eisenhower tried to warn us about, where American might is right and there is serious money made from bombing large parts of the planet and killing millions of men, women and children. It makes little difference whether red or blue figureheads are in the White House.
We have a natural blind spot to our own failings, especially when there is money to be made from mass murder.
I was very disappointed with the film Oppenheimer because it did not close the film with a look at the impact of the atomic bombs on real Japanese civilians. Too much truth for Western audiences to buy presumably. Ethical and artistic cowardice by the director (with serious consequences).
Photo of Cillian Murphy playing Oppenheimer, in a 2023 biographical drama film written, produced, and directed by Christopher Nolan. It follows the life of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the American theoretical physicist who helped develop the first nuclear weapons during World War II.
Since WWII, the USA (often with allied support) has maintained military dominance over the world at the cost of terrible suffering for many millions of people in many different countries.
Some will say that this is the cost of a fragile global peace, but this murderous destructive ‘peace’ was a peace only for the great powers.
In this same post-war period, even Russia has been in no way nearly as aggressive to other countries as America.
China’s aggression has largely been confined to the destruction of many of its own people between WWII and the 1970s. In addition, more recently, there has been the persecution and crimes against humanity of the Muslim Uighur peoples in Northwest China.38 Russia has also been extraordinarily murderous and brutal to its own people in the decades after WWII, in addition to horrific destructive wars in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Ukraine more recently. Is it really any surprise that Russia and America make such good bedfellows with the Trump administration?
You still find apparently intelligent people (who I assume read history books) saying things like: “The United States is the incarnation of enlightenment. Never in history was a hegemon this unselfish “. Yep, keep dreaming that American dream.
Yet no one can advise with any accuracy, even to within a figure of 5 million, how many people have been killed, injured, tortured and displaced in the last 80 years: due to US military aggression, covert operations, overthrown governments, supported dictatorships and the rest of its arsenal of tools used to dominate or extract value from other people.
What is striking is the ignorance of most people in America and Europe about the impact of this military-industrial complex and sociopathy on the rest of the world, presumably because they think it has been good for us and that’s all that matters really.
To take just one, of a hundred examples, look at the appalling treatment of the people of Laos:
I have visited Laos and it was the most beautiful country I have ever been to. It has a strong Buddhist culture and the people are generous and warm-hearted. The USA conducted a secret, unlawful and immoral war against it and has never made reparations for it.40
Of course, all dominant imperialist mind-set empires are cruel in the means used for maintaining their position. The question in those societies, is who chooses how cruel and who benefits from that cruelty. A cursory glance at modern history shows the people are lied to continuously, to justify the unlawful and unnecessary use of force and to perpetuate the machines of war.
This disconnect between public reasons given for extraordinary violence and the actual motives seem even further apart today than ever. The WMD lies based justification for the Iraq war was the latest pinnacle of this disconnect. Lies that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Currently we see the military and political lie machine in full force in Israel, where the US is fully behind a Genocide of Palestinian civilians41 who were already living under a cruel and barbaric apartheid regime for decades. I hope we one day we will discover the full extent of Israeli lies used to justify the genocide in Gaza and the destruction and displacement now occurring in the West Bank and Syria.
In any event, if we are to improve, we must start with a lot more honesty about how we got here, with knowledge of who actually makes decisions that kill or hurt millions of people and what is the quality of information behind those decisions. Like a detective we must start by asking in every military conflict ‘Cui Bono?’Who benefits?
Also, look what happened to the last US President that started to really preach the language of peace (leaving aside his failings and his own record of aggression):
“the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children — not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women “
(Pres. Kennedy)
Kennedy was killed only a few months after making this speech.
Are we to believe entirely coincidentally?
So where do we go from here?
The American war machine created during WWII is out of control. It makes little difference whether a Democratic party or a Republican party is in power (as Obama and Biden showed).
As with America’s economic issues, the issues are much deeper than party politics and go the heart of who actually runs America (as Eisenhower warned). The imperialist mind-set is precisely the opposite mindset to that which we are going to need to solve our global problems collectively.
We must not confuse the non-violence of necessary self-defence with the violence and wage of war of aggression and the military industrial complex. In WW2, the Americans came to the defence of the allied powers. This time Europe must come to its own defence, and to the defence of the many weaker nations now facing the aggression and rapacity of the new Axis powers of Russia-USA-Israel.
In the current necessity for European rearmament with non-US weaponry and technologies, we must never forget the purpose of this rearmament.
It must be intended solely to ensure that we are one of the great powers of the world, and that those great powers are the ones willing to collaborate and cooperate to ensure our planet is hospitable to all life-forms and human civilisation. We must turn away from the imperialist mindset, consign it to history, so that we can collaborate on a planetary basis and use our technologies to make life better for all and ultimately ensure it is viable at all. In the meantime, we work, hope and prey for that day when peace reigns on Earth:
“Let it come like wildflowers, suddenly, because the field must have it: wildpeace.”
(Yehuda Amichai)
A transformed purpose for power
The argument here is not pacifism. It is not a call to disarm in the face of those who will not. Europe must rearm — but it must never lose sight of why. The purpose of building independent European military and technological capacity is not to construct a new imperial bloc, not to rival the United States in the projection of lethal force across the Global South, but to ensure that when the great powers of this century sit down to negotiate the terms of a shared future, Europe has the standing to insist on a different agenda. Power in service of life and diversity rather than the interests of those who profit from its destruction. We must note that rearmament with noble intent has a very poor track record of remaining noble and so clear objectives and limits must be hard coded into our efforts. The purpose is to reduce dependence and risk on reliance in the USA and Israel, and then to deescalate the arms race again from a position of strength.
The ultimate stakes are not geopolitical but biological. The planet’s systems — its atmosphere, its oceans, its webs of interdependent species — are failing on a timeline that makes every arms budget, every strategic rivalry, every manufactured justification for the next war look like a civilisation fiddling with increasingly sophisticated instruments of death while the conditions for life itself quietly collapse. The perpetual war machine turned on each other is an evolutionary dead end.
The technologies human ingenuity has produced — nuclear power and the bomb, the drone, the AI kill list — can be turned, deliberately and collectively, toward making life viable and dignified for every person on this planet, and for the extraordinary community of life forms with whom we share it. It is the only rational destination for a species intelligent enough to understand that it could causes its own destruction.
Remembering the atomic atrocities
Let us also never forget the terrible human cost in Japan of our actions.
Yōsuke Yamahata photographed this child incinerated in Nagasaki. American forces censored such images in Japan until 1952.
In Hiroshima alone 70 per cent of all buildings were destroyed and it caused an estimated 140,000 deaths by the end of 1945 42(getting close to half of the largely civilian population), along with increased rates of cancer and chronic disease among the survivors.
Iri and Toshi Maruki are the subject of the documentary ‘Hellfire: A Journey from Hiroshima ‘. They went to Hiroshima after the destruction of the city and tried to help survivors. Visions of charred bodies and the smell of death stayed with them long after.
“They lay dead in heaps along the riverbank, their heads pointing toward the water they had been seeking. Having reached the river, the water remained out of reach below the steep bank, and they died with their thirst unquenched. "
Boys and Girls by Maruki Iri & Maruki Toshi: 1951 Sumi ink, charcoal or conté on paper 180 × 720 cm
“Parents were forced to abandon children pinned under fallen houses, children abandoned parents, husbands abandoned wives and wives husbands …Still, in the midst of this, many witnessed the miraculous sight of children who survived, held tightly in their dead mothers’ arms.”
Maruki Iri and Maruki Toshi, Mother and Child, 1959 Sumi ink, pigment, glue, charcoal or conté on paper 180 × 720 cm
In Nagasaki (which was actually a fall back secondary target for the city of Kokura), the plutonium atomic bomb exploded near the Urakami Cathedral killing an estimated 80,000 people within the year 44(including as many as 10,000 Christians)
The ruined buildings of Nagasaki after the atomic bomb, Getty images.
Recommended documentary (including interviews with US servicemen) - White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (HBO).46
Statue of Mother and Child in the Storm, byBalon Greyjoy - Own work, CC0, – Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park
Further research
Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum
Footnotes
- Earth’s extraordinary biodiversity — spanning forest canopies, wetlands, and ocean trenches — is being destroyed at a rate 100–1,000 times above natural background levels. Habitat destruction, pollution, climate change, and invasive species are the primary drivers, undermining the biological systems on which all human civilisation ultimately depends. ↩︎
- [World Atlas explains why biodiversity is critical to life on Earth](https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/why-is-biodiversity-critical-to-life-on-earth.html), covering how functioning ecosystems provide food security, clean water, medicines, and climate regulation. It outlines the cascading consequences of species loss and makes the case for urgent conservation action to preserve the planet’s essential life-support systems. ↩︎
- New research confirms that MIT’s 1972 World3 model, which predicted societal collapse this century, tracks closely with real-world data. The Business As Usual scenario projects economic and industrial growth peaking before a sharp decline around 2040, with severe consequences for food production, living standards, and social stability globally. ↩︎
- Gaya Herrington’s 2020 Yale publication updates the landmark Limits to Growth model with current empirical data. Her analysis confirms the Business As Usual scenario still shows a “clear collapse pattern,” with economic growth stalling around 2040 and leading to deteriorating food production and living standards if current trajectories are not fundamentally altered. ↩︎
- Wiley Online Library hosts the peer-reviewed Recalibration of Limits to Growth study, which re-ran the original World3 model with revised assumptions and updated data. It finds the BAU scenario shows a “clear collapse pattern” with steep decline from around 2040, and warns that current empirical data remains “alarmingly consistent” with the original 1972 predictions. ↩︎
- Perplexity research on Ukraine-Russia casualties compiles estimates suggesting combined casualties — killed, wounded, and captured — may approach or exceed one million. Figures are contested due to wartime information restrictions, but Western intelligence agencies, Ukrainian officials, and independent analysts broadly converge on this catastrophic scale of human loss. ↩︎
- The Atlantic Council has documented Russia’s systematic human rights violations in occupied Ukrainian territories, including well-evidenced patterns of torture in detention facilities, mass sexual violence used as a weapon of war, and the forced deportation of tens of thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia in breach of the Geneva Conventions and international law. ↩︎
- IBON International documents the scale of death, displacement, and destruction caused by US military interventions, regime changes, and covert operations since WWII. Covering conflicts across Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa, the research estimates tens of millions of casualties, the vast majority of them non-combatant civilians. ↩︎
- Perplexity research on non-American civilian deaths from US military action compiles estimates across all post-WWII US engagements, suggesting total civilian deaths in the millions. Figures vary significantly by source and methodology; Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, and the Indochina bombing campaigns account for the largest individual conflict tolls. ↩︎
- The Economic Times reported on the “peace dividend” following the Cold War’s end and the Berlin Wall’s fall in 1989. US defence spending as a share of GDP declined significantly through the 1990s, representing a brief window of reduced militarisation — one that closed rapidly in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks. ↩︎
- USAFacts: How Much Does the US Spend on the Military? provides a data-driven overview showing that US defence spending has grown by more than 48% in real terms since 2000. Annual expenditure now stands at approximately $900 billion, or around 3% of GDP, making the United States by far the world’s single largest military spender. ↩︎
- The Atlantic has published analysis of how perpetual warfare is structurally embedded in the American political system, serving the financial interests of the defence industry and a political class with deep investments in arms manufacturing. The piece explores how institutional incentives ensure military spending remains a constant regardless of strategic necessity.
↩︎ - OpenSecrets is the leading US tracker of money in politics, documenting how members of Congress and their immediate households hold substantial personal investments in defence contractors that they simultaneously fund through Pentagon appropriations legislation — a systemic conflict of interest at the heart of the American military-industrial complex. ↩︎
- Common Dreams reported that at least 50 US lawmakers, or members of their households, hold direct financial investments in companies manufacturing military weapons and equipment. These same legislators vote on Pentagon appropriations worth hundreds of billions of dollars annually, raising acute questions about democratic accountability and the corrupting influence of financial self-interest. ↩︎
- The SIPRI Trends in International Arms Transfers 2023 report confirms that between 2019 and 2023, the United States accounted for 42% of all global arms transfers. This cements the US position as the world’s dominant weapons exporter by a wide margin, with its nearest competitor, France, accounting for just 11% of global arms sales. ↩︎
- Defense Archives reports that combined US Foreign Military Sales and Direct Commercial Sales reached approximately $318.7 billion in FY2024, a historic high. Equivalent to roughly 1.15% of US GDP, this figure reflects the dramatic acceleration in global arms purchasing driven by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and broader NATO rearmament programmes. ↩︎
- Visual Capitalist’s global defence budget comparison shows US military spending is approximately four times China’s, nearly seven times Russia’s, and exceeds the combined defence budgets of the next ten to twelve largest military spenders worldwide — a level of military dominance with no historical parallel in the modern international system. ↩︎
- EU Observer: The Turbo-Charging of EU Defence — Explained analyses the dramatic acceleration of European defence spending since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The piece examines whether this rearmament is genuinely strengthening European strategic autonomy or primarily channelling European taxpayers’ money into American defence contractors. ↩︎
- Politico EU reported that the US accounted for approximately 64% of EU member states’ defence acquisitions between mid-2022 and mid-2023. For Norway, Sweden, Italy, and the Netherlands, US imports exceeded 90%, raising urgent questions about European strategic dependency and the long-term viability of an independent EU defence industrial base. ↩︎
- Deutsche Welle examines whether EU manufacturers can meaningfully reduce dependence on American suppliers amid surging defence budgets. The analysis finds that deep structural dependencies — in advanced technology, NATO interoperability standards, and industrial capacity — make genuine European strategic autonomy a long-term and politically contested ambition. ↩︎
- National Security Archive: NATO Expansion — What Gorbachev Heard — declassified US, Soviet, German, British, and French documents reveal that Western leaders gave Mikhail Gorbachev multiple assurances in 1990–91 that NATO would not expand eastward. Secretary of State Baker’s “not one inch eastward” pledge is among the most explicit on record. ↩︎
- Euronews reports that Merkel’s memoir reveals she blocked Ukraine’s NATO membership at the 2008 Bucharest summit, believing it would immediately provoke Russian military action. Her position acknowledged that Moscow viewed NATO expansion to Ukraine as an existential red line — a concern many Western leaders understood but chose not to address through sustained diplomacy. ↩︎
- RUSI commentary from the Royal United Services Institute demonstrates that Putin’s stated justification for the invasion — “denazification” of Ukraine — is undermined by Russia’s own documented history of funding and cultivating far-right nationalist movements across Europe, including in countries it simultaneously claims to be protecting from fascism. ↩︎
- Truthout argues that children disproportionately bear the cost of armed conflict through death, injury, displacement, trauma, and the collapse of education and healthcare systems. Drawing on data from Gaza, Ukraine, and historical conflicts, the essay contends that mass child casualties are not collateral damage but an intrinsic structural feature of modern warfare. ↩︎
- Logic Magazine: The Genocide Industry — Mowing the Lawn investigates Israel’s “Permanent War Economy,” exploring how military technologies tested on Palestinian populations in Gaza are subsequently marketed internationally. The essay examines how occupation functions as a live laboratory for surveillance systems, urban warfare tactics, and AI-assisted targeting with global commercial applications. ↩︎
- Civilians in Conflict provides legal analysis of whether US arms transfers to Israel comply with US and international humanitarian law given documented civilian casualties in Gaza. It highlights Israel’s unique and controversial privilege of using US Foreign Military Financing for offshore procurement from its own domestic defence industry. ↩︎
- The Guardian has reported extensively on Israeli spyware operations, including NSO Group’s Pegasus technology. Investigations document its use against politicians, lawyers, journalists, human rights defenders, and judges in multiple countries, with surveillance links connecting Israeli intelligence capabilities to far-right political networks and authoritarian governments globally. ↩︎
- +972 Magazine’s investigation into the Lavender AI system reveals that the Israeli military deployed artificial intelligence to generate kill lists of Palestinian targets in Gaza. The system accepted a significant margin of error, and the investigation found that low-ranking suspects were targeted alongside large numbers of family members and civilian neighbours with minimal individual human review. ↩︎
- The American Friends Service Committee’s Gaza Genocide Companies database identifies corporations profiting from Israel’s military operations in Gaza, including US and international arms manufacturers, technology firms, and logistics companies. The resource is widely used by divestment campaigns and provides sourced documentation of financial links between business entities and the conduct of the war. ↩︎
- Human Rights Watch has extensively documented the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and the West Bank, finding violations of international humanitarian law including unlawful killings, collective punishment, and the systematic obstruction of humanitarian aid. HRW has also documented attacks on Israeli civilians by Palestinian armed groups, applying a consistent rights-based accountability framework to all parties. ↩︎
- Winston Churchill’s famous remark — “I intend to write that history myself” (House of Commons, January 1948) — reflects how those wielding power shape the historical record in their favour. It underscores the article’s broader argument that imperial powers, including Britain and America, have controlled the narrative around their own war crimes and colonial violence for generations. ↩︎
- ResearchGate hosts Aurelien Mondon’s essay Really Existing Liberalism, the Bulwark Fantasy, and the Enabling of Reactionary, Far Right Politics , which argues that liberal elites used the moral clarity of WWII to obscure their historical complicity in colonialism and genocide — challenging the self-serving framing of liberalism as a consistent and principled opponent of fascism. ↩︎
- [The Guardian ](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/jul/05/japan.internationaleducationnews)has published historical reporting and analysis on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including evidence suggesting that intimidating the Soviet Union — rather than compelling an already-weakening Japan to surrender — was a primary strategic motivation behind President Truman’s decision to authorise the use of nuclear weapons. ↩︎
- [The Washington Post ](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1985/08/04/did-america-have-to-drop-the-bombnot-to-end-the-war-but-truman-wanted-to-intimidate-russia/46105dff-8594-4f6c-b6d7-ef1b6cb6530d/)has reported on the revisionist historical argument, supported by declassified documents, that the atomic bombings of Japan served as much as a geopolitical signal to the Soviet Union as a military necessity. This reading fundamentally challenges the standard Western narrative that the bombs were solely aimed at ending the Pacific War rapidly. ↩︎
- ABC Australia’s 75th anniversary feature includes powerful testimonies from hibakusha — atomic bomb survivors — describing the immediate horror of the blast, agonising deaths from radiation sickness in the weeks that followed, and decades of social discrimination and chronic health consequences experienced by those who survived the initial explosions. ↩︎
- The Association for Asian Studies provides scholarly context for the revisionist case against the atomic bombings, including analysis of Secretary of War Henry Stimson’s post-war memoirs. Historians widely regard Stimson’s published justifications as deliberate post-hoc rationalisation, crafted to shape public perception and pre-empt moral criticism of the decision to target civilian populations with nuclear weapons. ↩︎
- Eisenhower’s Farewell Address — National Archives provides the complete text and recording of President Eisenhower’s January 17, 1961 speech, in which he warned of the growing, undue influence of the “military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower feared the alliance between arms manufacturers, the military establishment, and Congress would permanently distort US foreign policy and democratic governance. ↩︎
- Amnesty International UK documents the systematic persecution of Uighur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region, including mass arbitrary detention in so-called “re-education camps,” forced labour, political indoctrination, and suppression of religious and cultural identity. Amnesty and other investigators have characterised these abuses as crimes against humanity under international law. ↩︎
- The Bombing of Laos details the United States’ covert and unlawful bombing campaign against Laos during the Vietnam War era. More than two million tonnes of ordnance were dropped between 1964 and 1973, making Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. Unexploded ordnance continues to kill and maim Laotian civilians decades later, with no US reparations paid. ↩︎
- Stanford Digital Repository archives documentation of the US “Secret War” in Laos — a covert CIA-directed military campaign that devastated the country’s civilian population over nearly a decade. Despite its enormous scale and lasting humanitarian consequences, the war remained largely hidden from the American public and has never been subject to formal reparations or legal accountability. ↩︎
- Amnesty International has documented the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza following October 2023, publishing findings that Israel has committed acts constituting genocide under the Genocide Convention. Amnesty calls for an immediate international arms embargo and accountability mechanisms for violations by all parties, and maintains one of the most comprehensive records of civilian harm in the conflict. ↩︎
- ICAN — the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, provides detailed statistics on the human cost of the atomic bombings. Estimates indicate approximately 140,000 people died in Hiroshima by end of 1945. ICAN campaigns for universal ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and documents the ongoing risks of nuclear arsenals. ↩︎
- Maruki Gallery is the official home of Iri and Toshi Maruki’s monumental Hiroshima Panels series. Completed over three decades, the fifteen large-scale paintings depict scenes from the immediate aftermath of the bombing, drawn from experiences the artists witnessed first-hand. They are considered among the most significant anti-war artworks produced in the 20th century. ↩︎
- Google Arts & Culture: The Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki and the Urakami Cathedral explores the destruction of Nagasaki’s Urakami Cathedral — the spiritual heart of Japan’s largest Catholic community — when the bomb detonated almost directly overhead, killing an estimated 8,500 of Urakami’s 12,000 Christians and approximately 80,000 people in the city overall within the year. ↩︎
- BBC In Pictures: Hiroshima and Nagasaki presents a photographic record of the destruction of both cities, documenting that approximately 140,000 of Hiroshima’s 350,000 population died by the end of 1945, and at least 74,000 perished in Nagasaki. Thousands more died in subsequent years from radiation-induced illness, with elevated cancer rates persisting in survivor communities for decades. ↩︎
- White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (HBO, YouTube) — Steven Okazaki’s 2007 documentary features testimonies from survivors of both atomic bombings alongside interviews with American servicemen involved in the missions. The film offers an unflinching human account of the bombings’ immediate and long-term consequences, presenting voices rarely heard in mainstream Western narratives about the end of WWII. ↩︎