Counterpunch, 3 August 2023
Podcast available on the Latitude Adjustment Podcast website
Bell's Special Missions Aircraft (Bell)
Paul Cochrane and Eric Maddox interviewed
Andrew Feinstein about the devastating impact of the global arms trade,
how militarism feeds corruption and undermines democracy, how the arms
trade supports occupation, and why the military’s carbon boot print
should not be excluded from climate change talks.
Feinstein, a former African National Congress (ANC) member of South Africa’s parliament, is the author of Shadow World – Inside the Global Arms Trade and is a researcher at Shadow World Investigations. A documentary was also made about his book, which can be found online. This is an abridged transcript of the interview broadcast on the Latitude Adjustment Podcast website.
The Global North’s systemic corruption
Eric Maddox: As
someone who’s been involved in politics in both South Africa and the UK,
how well does South African corruption compete with UK corruption? How
is corruption in the Global North and Global South discussed in the
Global North, and how does implicit racism inform the disparities?
Andrew Feinstein: I had a
very interesting personal experience. I was an African National Congress
(ANC) member of parliament in South Africa, and worked on the financial
accountability side in parliament. I was the ranking ANC member on the
Public Accounts Committee, and we investigated a $10 billion arms deal
that my own party and government took just a few years after we became a
democracy. For South Africa, the sums of bribes were quite large, we
are talking about a total of $350 million of bribes paid to senior
politicians, senior officials, senior corporate executives and of course
intermediaries. The incredible thing is South Africa was immediately
named this deeply corrupt country – “typical of Africa”, “didn’t take
long to become like the rest of Africa”, was the sort of discourse one
heard.
When I started investigating the global
arms trade and moved to the UK, I discovered that (former UK prime
minister) Tony Blair and Prince Andrew, and his mate Jeffery Epstein – I
am not sure if he is involved, but he was involved in a lot of arms
deals and corruption related to arms deals – had paid £115 million
($150 m) of bribes in South Africa for BAE Systems (British Aerospace)
to win a contract that they weren’t even shortlisted for. They were
doing the same thing in seven or eight countries at the same moment, and
they were paying over £1 billion ($1.31 bn) of bribes, at that
particular moment in history.
One of South Africa’s former presidents,
Jacob Zuma, is on trial with a French arms company, but the reality is
Zuma received what is worth today around £25,000 ($32,775) in bribes,
and he should suffer the consequences of that, because he had no right
to take bribes as a senior politician and government official – in my
opinion he betrayed the South African people and South Africa by so
doing – but what about Tony Blair? What about BAE Systems,
the most corrupt company on the planet, who continue to this day to
bribe and corrupt people around the world shamelessly, and Britain
doesn’t see itself as a corrupt country. It sees the corruption as
elsewhere, completely ignoring the fact that the corruption has its
source in London, and in fact I would argue that a huge amount of the
world’s corruption has its source in Washington D.C., London, Paris,
Berlin, Madrid, Rome etcetera.
Countries of the Global North who
effectively corrupt both other countries in the Global North and the
Global South, and the discourse around it, is a completely subversive
one. When we look at the Transparency International Corruption Perception Index,
what Transparency International does is ask people in a country whether
they think their country is corrupt, and shock and horror, in the
Global North people say no our country is not corrupt, and in the Global
South the responses are, our country is corrupt. The reason for that is
low level corruption is more common in the Global South on a daily
basis when trying to access basic services, whereas in the Global North
the corruption is at such a systemic level that people are virtually
unaware of it.
Look for instance at the UK during the
COVID pandemic, and the fact that (former Prime Minister) Boris Johnson,
probably one of the most corrupt individuals to hold office anywhere in
the world at any time, gave friends of his, and donors to his political
party, contracts worth tens of billions of pounds, that they simply
didn’t deliver on, and there have been no consequences, either for
Johnson, or for the recipients of public money.
Then there is another level, and that is
the way in which anti-corruption activities are used selectively. In the
case of the South African arms deal I mentioned, (former President)
Thabo Mbeki was the president who really oversaw the deal and ensured
that the ANC benefitted from the bribes. He allowed law enforcement
authorities and prosecutors to investigate his opponent Jacob Zuma but
told them absolutely explicitly that they couldn’t investigate any of
his political allies, and so they didn’t. This is a carry over from the
reality that in the Global North this sort of corruption is seldom ever
investigated.
We have the case of (former Chancellor)
Helmut Kohl in Germany, a Chancellor who unified East and West Germany,
who funded his political party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) – I
have written extensively about all of these things I am raising here
with thousands and thousands of footnotes, so if people are interested, I
would strongly recommend they look at the Shadow World
book and can see the sourcing of the evidence for all of these
statements I am making – and Kohl financed his CDU primarily off licit
and illicit arms deals, and I actually describe in particular how arms
dealer Karl Hans Schreiber
would actually meet with Kohl’s party treasurer and personal accountant
just across the border in Switzerland, and would literally move
briefcases of cash from the boot of his car into the boot of the car of
the party treasurer or personal accountant. Literally until the day he
died Helmut Kohl was indignant, threatening to sue anybody who accused
him of corruption.
His successor, Angela Merkel, a politician
who is quite respected in Western Europe and the Global North generally,
she did it more cleverly than her predecessor and political mentor
Kohl, in that she got Germany’s arms companies to give an exponential
number of gifts to local party officers, of which there are thousands
across Germany, all in the amount of Euro 1,000 ($1,122). The reason she
did that is German prosecutors don’t regard payments of Euro 1,000 or
less as corruption so they don’t even bother to look into the issue.
I think political systems around the world
have become deeply corrupted by the intertwining of business and
politics that was an inevitable consequence of neoliberal capitalism. I
think the way we decide to attack it depends entirely on the political
hat we wear. The hypocrisy of the Global North in the way it talks about
corruption in the Global South, ignoring the systemic corruption that
is intrinsic to each and every form of governance in the Global North,
is devastating and I find it deeply disturbing.
Even when corruption is blatantly used and
undermines democracy, as it was in Brazil, and I would recommend a
brilliant documentary called The Edge of Democracy,
where prosecutors conspired to put the current, then former President
Lula (da Silva) in jail for corruption, but were doing so on behalf of
the far right wing in Brazil, who then came to power because Lula was in
prison, and because his political protege (former President) Dilma
(Rousseff) was forced from office. She was probably the least corrupt
politician in Brazil at the time, and the prosecutor who led all these
charges then became (now former President Jair) Bolsonaro’s justice
minister.
Even after emails and Whatsapp messages
between the prosecutors explicitly conspiring to remove Lula from public
life in Brazil, even after those became public, anti-corruption
organisations in the Global North still speak about those prosecutors as
if they were some sort of anti-corruption heroes rather than political
operatives who ensured that a far more damaging and reactionary, and
corrupt group of people, came to power in a country like Brazil.
“What is their competitive advantage? They pay bribes”
Cochrane: You have argued for years that the arms industry is one of the world’s most corrupt sectors, accounting for around 40 percent of all corruption in world trade,
and that European manufacturers can be considered more corrupt versus
the US arms industry, which is the largest in the world – why is this
the case?
Feinstein: I think
originally, in the post World War II world, it was the most corrupt on
the planet. The US has for decades manufactured around 40 percent of all
weaponry that is made in the world, so you can’t talk about the trade
without talking about the US, and I am not in any way saying the US arms
industry isn’t corrupt, in fact the domestic industry, the way in which
the big defence companies sell to the US government, which is obviously
the majority of their business, is a form of what I describe as
legalised bribery.
It is actually legal in American law for a
company like Lockheed Martin to fund a whole lot of politicians’
campaigns and political careers, and once in office to ensure that those
politicians, quite explicitly, will vote for billion dollar contracts
to go back to Lockheed Martin and at the same time, defence contractors
do like the latest revelation, they charge the American taxpayer $52,000 for a trash can that costs them about $200. In that sense, the domestic US arms trade is entirely and fundamentally corrupt.
The involvement of US defence companies in
foreign corruption has decreased over time with the advent of the
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and particularly the tightening of
the Act in the mid to late 1980s. Before then US companies would pay
bribes wherever they were trying to sell arms, very explicitly. There
was this wonderful incidence of the husband of the Queen of the
Netherlands, Prince Bernhard, and Lockheed Martin and Nothrop Grumman,
two of the biggest defence contractors in the world, who were vying for a
contract to produce a jet fighter for the Dutch military. Without
realising they were both bribing Prince Bernhard to covertly act as
their agent on the deal, they didn’t realise he was taking about $1
million from each of them, and they were competitors for this contract.
Obviously when they found out they were less than thrilled, although he
was very proud of himself.
The Americans used to be at the forefront
of corruption in the arms trade, but the FCPA has made a significant
difference, and the Americans now dominate the arms trade because one,
economies of scale, they produce so much for the Pentagon that adding on
for the international market is relatively cheap to do, and it means
their prices are very competitive and their equipment is very
competitive, but in addition to that, what they use as leverage is their
power. By buying weapons from the USA you are consolidating an alliance
with that country, so poodles of the US like the UK continue to buy
huge amounts of weaponry from the US and it sort of guarantees their
poodle status.
Other allies like Saudi Arabia would be a
great example, who have an appalling human rights history at home and
abroad, completely undemocratic, but are seen as flawless by the US who
will sell them any arms they want. For many decades they were buying
this weaponry and leaving it, they weren’t using it, they didn’t have
the capacity to use it. I managed to find this photograph while I was
researching the Shadow World book of over 70 jet fighters parked in the
deserts of Saudi Arabia that have never been flown, they were just left
to rust, but this is how Saudi ensured that their reliance on the US
remained strong. Given that people are benefitting from these deals
materially just adds to the force of that alliance.
When NATO expanded Eastwards this was a
huge boondoggle for defence contractors as well. There was this
committee created called the Committee to Expand NATO, very creatively
named, and it was chaired by a senior vice president for international
operations of Lockheed Martin, a guy called Bruce Jackson. Jackson
basically went from Eastern European capital to Eastern European capital
and said to them quite explicitly, when you join NATO you are going to
have to increase your defence spending to 2 percent of GDP, you are
going to have to modernise all of your equipment as follows, and here’s
the deal: if you spend the $20 billion or whatever you need to modernise
with Lockheed Martin I will guarantee you that the US will support your
accession to full NATO membership. And that is what they did, and made
tens of billions upon tens of billions of dollars in that way. But then,
in the case of the Europeans, no European country has anything
equivalent to the FCPA, in fact foreign corruption from most European
countries and the UK is virtually ignored by law enforcement.
We have taken literally dozens of cases to
the UK Serious Fraud Office (SFO). The ones they have have even bothered
to look into, at all, I don’t even need one hand to count them, I just
need a couple of fingers, because it literally is just a couple of
cases. There is no interest and it is politically unpopular to do. Don’t
forget prosecutors come under enormous political influence, and often
get their job because they are very political players, Keir Starmer (head of the UK Labour party, former Director of Public Prosecutions and head of the Crown Prosecution
Service) being a case in point. Their desire to investigate corruption
that is at the same time corrupting foreign ministers and officials is
creating what we call the feedback principle, it is also paying off
politicians at home, and the families of political parties at home. That
sort of stuff just doesn’t get investigated.
The Europeans, they don’t have the
economies of scale that the US have, they don’t have the same
international diplomatic kudos that the US can bring to bear on its arms
sales, so what is their competitive advantage? They pay bribes. All of
the European countries and the UK, until today, continue to pay massive
bribes on virtually every arms deal that they do, and those bribes are
built into the economic structure of the industry.
“We are living in an insane world”
Maddox: Speaking as an
American, I notice that the US discourse around “gun control” is almost
entirely limited to the domestic sphere, while most of our arms sales
take place internationally. In what ways does the US role in the global
arms industry impact the way Americans discuss and deal with gun
violence at home? What connections should Americans start making?
Feinstein: The important
thing is that America is the biggest military player globally, it is not
just that they produce the most weapons. America, since WW2, has been
involved in more conflicts and more invasions, and military activity,
outside the USA than any other country on the planet. In fact, many of
the next biggest countries combined don’t come anywhere near this sort
of military impact the US has had on the world.
One of the prime reasons the US is not what
I would describe as at the forefront of peace efforts globally is
because it is economically and materially advantageous to America to
have conflict and instability around the world, pretty much all the
time. So how does this work? To give you one example, in the work we are
doing on the conflict on Yemen, in which America, Western Europe, the UK
and to a much less extent China and Iran have effectively weaponised,
the Americans have been so ubiquitous in selling or giving weapons to
various dictatorial, human rights abusing regimes in the Middle East,
and to a wide range of militia groups across the region, that there are a
number of battles that have taken place since 2015 in Yemen where we
have been able to identify that all of the protagonists in those
battles, and this includes tribal groups within Yemen – it includes a
whole range of political factions, it includes groups supported by Saudi
Arabia, by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), groups supported by Iran –
there are some battles where all of the weaponry used is American made.
That is the extent of the ubiquity of America’s role in arming conflict
around the world.
We see this most obviously in a very simple
statistic – the US government employs more people to maintain and run
one aircraft carrier than they have diplomats across the entire world.
Today, the US has 12 aircraft carriers. What America lives with is what
the sociologist C. Wright Mills calls a military mindset, a military metaphysics
where everything is seen through the lens of conflict and war. It is in
America’s founding myths, it is in the absurd approach to gun control
that costs so many Americans lives domestically every year, and that
causes such conflict around the world. How do these two things combine?
We tend to think that the domestic gun lobby, the National Rifle
Association (NRA), particularly, and all the politicians they buy, and
that is what they do, they buy them. I think Americans need to
understand that, your politicians are all bought. The thing is, it is
easier in America to identify who, it is more difficult in Europe and
the UK, because it is legal to buy politicians, as we described in the
relationships between defence contractors and politicians.
What the NRA does is basically ensure that
politicians cannot even have an adult conversation about meaningful gun
control in the US yet alone actually doing something about it. They are
creating the environment in which its defence sector plays such an
incredibly important role globally it can only flourish. This is seen in
the fact that in major sporting events in the US, the military is front
and centre. In fact, when you board a plane in the US, military
personnel are invited onto the plane even before families with young
kids and babies. There is a psychological connection to weaponry, big
and small, to the US military role in the world that I think is
incomprehensible to most people outside of the US and everywhere else in
the world.
I think it is really important that
Americans be aware of the impact of this focus on a military metaphysic
both at home and abroad, as what it is doing is taking a huge proportion
of your tax contributions. A brilliant colleague of mine called Bill
Hartung, he is now at the Quincy Institute, writing about the American
arms trade for decades and decades, he has written a brilliant biography
of Lockheed Martin (Prophets of War),
describes the Pentagon as a self-licking ice cream, which is the best
analogy of the Pentagon I have ever heard. Bill calculated that for
every dollar paid to the US tax authorities, 30 cents pretty much goes
to the defence contractors.
Let us think about the state of the world.
What are the challenges facing us as human beings? Clearly climate
catastrophe, global pandemics, and extreme and increasing inequality.
That means people in America have to work three jobs to be able to feed
their family if they are lucky enough to find a job, and it means that
food bank use in countries like the UK is at its highest level since
WW2.
We are living in an insane world at the
moment, but we are still spending, in the case of the US, well over $1
trillion a year on what we euphemistically describe as defence. Now this
is money that should be going into helping Americans with the current
cost of living crisis, helping Americans with healthcare, with
education, dealing with the climate emergency, ensuring that we are far
better prepared for inevitable future pandemics than we were for COVID.
So it infuses every aspect of American life, and the NRA’s constant
pitch for no gun control feeds into the same sort of laissez faire
attitude to American arms exports to the rest of the world, that fuels
conflicts everywhere they are sold.
The Military Industrial Complex and the Ukraine-Russia conflict
Cochrane: Why has the White House been resistant to negotiations and instead emphasizing armed intervention in Ukraine?
Feinstein: It follows the
pattern the US follows all over the world where you resolve issues by
conflict rather than diplomacy because that is incredibly lucrative to
the US, and it ensures the US continues to play a dominant role in the
world. I think that is starting to change. For instance, if we look
before I get to the Ukraine at the Yemen conflict, a very interesting
development has happened, where China has brokered a rapprochement
between Saudi Arabia and Iran, that has effectively made it possible to
in practice, even if not in theory, maintain a cease fire in Yemen for a
good while now.
Since 2015, the US and its Western allies
have made absolutely no effort whatsoever to bring any sort of peace to
Yemen because they are all making far too much money out of the conflict
and the fact that tens of thousands of innocent civilians were being
killed, a massive violation of international humanitarian law and in war
crimes incidental to them, it is not their concern. In fact we see the
complete weakness of any controls over who America and Europe and the UK
sells arms to by the fact that they continue to sell arms to Saudi
Arabia and the UAE, who are primarily responsible for the killing of
those tens of thousands of innocent civilians, showing that the domestic
arms export controls are basically voluntary, that regional and
international agreements on arms exports control are pretty much
ignorable, and allowing the US, Western Europe and the UK to do what
they want. That is the first reason why they have very little interest
in peace in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
I should be clear on this as to where I
stand on the matter. I believe that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has
been a brutal, illegal invasion. I don’t believe there is any
justification for it. At the same time I believe that the West has over a
number of years contributed to an environment that led to that illegal
invasion by, for instance, its zeal in expanding NATO Eastwards. You can
actually understand whatever your thoughts on Vladimir Putin are, and I
should say he has murdered at least two people I have worked on arms
trade matters in Russia over the years, so I would hardly describe
myself as a fan, and I think to be critical of the West and Ukraine does
not in any way imply that one is in any way in favour of what Vladimir
Putin has done, is doing and is likely to do.
I think the West contributed to a very
febrile atmosphere, whether its approach to the Eastwards expansion of
NATO, and the idea of Ukraine joining NATO, which would effectively mean
that there would be American missiles on the border with Ukraine. Now
there have always been contested territories between the two countries,
there are significant ethnic Russians living in Ukraine, so the
situation has been a very febrile one for many years.
What is America’s interest in all of this?
Well, as we know the Biden family has a variety of interests in Ukraine
that have never been properly explained. One of Biden’s sons seems to
have had business interests in the country for quite a long while now.
And I do think these material interests, we should not rule out there
importance in geopolitical decisions, as unfortunately politicians
across the world, be it Vladimir Putin, be it Joe Biden, they make a
hell of a lot of money out of being politicians, and anybody who can’t
see that is simply being incredibly naive and myopic. So, there is a
history of some sort of financial engagement and relationship but I
haven’t investigated it, I don’t understand it, and I am not sure what
exactly it is.
I think the Biden administration decided
that it wanted to see Putin from office. Now regime change is something
that the US in the post WW2 world has engaged actively around the world.
Eric, where you are sitting in Latin America has probably seen the
brunt of it. The carnage that has gone on in the Middle East for decades
is primarily a consequence of the US desire for regime change,
particularly in Iran. So I think that they saw an opportunity to weaken
Putin, perhaps to defeat him. But as any student of conflict, of war, is
aware, very few wars are won and lost. Most wars are resolved in some
sort of highly unsatisfactory manner to everybody involved, and usually
at an enormous cost to the lives of innocent civilians, and
unfortunately I think this is what we are seeing playing out in Ukraine.
It has more to do with the US’ geopolitical
view than it has to do with anything particularly germaine to Ukraine,
and very sadly, I think that conflict will be brought to an end when it
is no longer in the material interests of the main protagonists, and by
that I mean Russia and Putin. I estimate that Putin has probably made in
excess of $40 billion from his personal cut in arms deals over the time
that he has been the key figure in Russian politics.
The so called Military Industrial Complex
(MIC) in the US is, as I have tried to explain, absolutely central to
the financing of the American political process, and to the personal
finances of an enormous number of senior American politicians. But there
will come a time when the costs of the war, even to these people,
outweighs the benefits. And that time sadly, it will not be the people
of Ukraine who are foremost in anybody’s mind, it is not going to be the
people in the disputed territories that are at the foremost of
anybody’s minds, it is going to be the then short term interests of the
Americans and the Russians. I think the primary reason why the Americans
haven’t been interested in any sort of peace initiative thus far is
because it is serving their purposes of loosening Putin’s grasp on power
and making an enormous amount of money for America’s MIC who have seen
their share prices increase by on average 35-40 percent since the
invasion.
Capitalism and the global international security elite
Maddox: What are your
thoughts on the following statement: We don’t have an institutionalized
corruption problem, we have a capitalism problem. Until we remove the
profit incentives for violence, exploitation, and the hoarding of
resources nothing will fundamentally change because corruption is
inevitable under the system we have.
Feinstein: I would endorse
that statement 100 percent. I spend a lot of my life trying to deal
with the immediate consequences of the arms trade, be that in Yemen, be
that in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, be that in Ukraine. That
is the Band-Aid, that is the palliative for the immediate problem
because you can’t ignore the suffering of human beings in the here and
now in the appalling political and economic system that we have. The
reality is that, for the nature and functioning of the global arms trade
to change, for the primacy of conflict over diplomacy and development,
what we need is a profound change in our political and economic system
because it is rotten to the core.
In the US the manufacturing of weaponry has
always been in private company hands, but those private companies are
completely subsidised by the state, so in what America describes as its
extraordinary model of free market capitalism, there are in fact certain
sectors – arms amongst them, healthcare, finance, pharmaceuticals –
wouldn’t exist without the backing of the state, what I call State
Corporate Welfare. An enormous amount of money goes into these
companies. The defence companies in particular are such badly run
companies that none of them would survive if there was actually a free
market in the US defence sector.
In Europe and the UK the function of
manufacturing weapons was for a long time in state hands and then with
the advent of a particularly aggressive form of neoliberal capitalism,
and the wave of privatisations in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a lot
of them became privatised and private companies. All that has done is
create an incentive for conflict especially because of the incredibly
close, symbiotic relationship between these companies, the state, the
political actors in that state, senior military and intelligence leaders
within that state, so that the very people that should be properly
regulating this sort of trade are the people who benefit from it
politically and materially.
It is what Lawrence Wilkerson, who was (US
Secretary of State) Colin Powell’s chief of staff for many years,
described as the global international security elite. They all
personally make a substantial amount of money out of warfare and out of
the arms business, and it means we live in a world where we are prepared
to spend huge proportions of our GDP on so called defence, it should be
called offence, but it is defence, ridiculously. And where we require
conflict to be able to continue to justify this enormous expense. We
also have to keep our populations fearful because otherwise they will
start asking too many questions about why we are spending all this money
on defence, and why so much of it ends up with the political parties
and politicians, especially once they leave office.
To change this system, and there is no
political will in our current political system to change it, requires a
fundamental change in the nature and structure of our politics and
economics. I believe we are in what the philosopher Karl Popper would
describe as the classical interregnum, at the moment. The paradigm of
late neoliberal capitalism is clearly failing except for a very tiny
proportion, the one percent. For the vast majority of people the system
is so obviously failing but we don’t know what comes next. We don’t know
what replaces it, and that is why we are in this moment of interregnum
and I think it is incredibly, for us, and I would describe myself, not
only as a researcher but an activist and campaigner as much as a
researcher, to be thinking about how we use the technological advances
that have taken place in our societies, good and bad, to actually
advance our political system. I think we have to ask ourselves huge
questions.
The intertwining of business and politics
has meant, in my opinion, that liberal representative democracy has
totally failed. I can count on my hands the number of so called elected
representatives around the world who I think actually represent the
people that got them there. The vast majority of them represent
themselves, their own narrow interests, and the interests of an elite
that put them in power and that is what needs changing. I even ask
myself the question, if with the technology we have today, is our
current system of representative democracy of party politics, where
parties are really just factions of people trying to force greater and
greater space at the trough from which they feed, whether this form of
politics even has a place in what would be a more democratic, more self
organising system of how human beings manage our lives going forward.
The military’s carbon boot print should be front and centre at any discussion of climate issues
Cochrane: To confront
climate change, environment degradation and the ravaging of our planet,
we need now more than ever to divert the immense resources militarism
uses for more ecological purposes. With global military spending at
$2.24 trillion in 2022, nearly double that of 2000, we are going in the
wrong direction. A key part of this is that at the Kyoto climate talks
in 1997, the US and others made sure that the military was exempt from
climate change talks, yet the US military is the single largest institutional polluter on earth, while the UK military’s carbon emissions
is the same as Uganda’s, a country of 50 million people, roughly that
of England’s 56 million. Do you think the military should be part of
discussions at climate change talks?
Feinstein: Of course the
military’s carbon boot print, as someone has called it, should be on the
agenda at any discussion of climate change. It comes back to the matter
of political will. I think the reasons that the military has been
excluded, and it is not just from any sort of accountability around
their carbon emissions, the defence sector is excluded from the World
Trade Organisation (WTO) banning the use of offsets as a criteria in
large scale public procurements. Why? Because offsets together with
intermediation are key mechanisms through which bribes are paid for arms
deals, so the WTO puts in place this exemption. Politicians are all
thrilled with it, because they benefit from these bribes in exactly the
same way in which you have a world that is dominated by conflict and the
military metaphysic of which we spoke of earlier.
You can’t have the reality of the impact of
that militarism available to people to comprehend, so they can actually
make informed decisions about whether they want such a huge proportion
of their tax dollars, pounds or euros to be used for military purposes,
so it is part of an entire process of obfuscation, of
education/entertainment in which militarism is presented as heroic, in
which those who oppose militarism, who are actually more concerned about
the maintenance of human life rather than its destruction, are painted
as these villainous people who are both communist and nazis all rolled
into one.
The sort of level of discourse and public
discourse about these sorts of matters is so appalling that if we
actually made the military tell us the extent of its contribution to the
climate catastrophe, far more people across the world would be saying,
hold on a moment, here are the costs, what are the benefits?
Unfortunately the benefits column is pretty damn empty. It is part of a
process of ensuring that we don’t have informed public discourse about
the role of the military in our societies and in our world.
We are also presented with these completely
fallacious arguments about how the defence sectors are good for our
economies. I have a number of degrees in economics, and from multiple
studies in various parts of the world, it is absolutely clear that the
defence sector is probably the most expensive and least effective ways
to create jobs that there is in the world. For instance, for the amount
of our tax money that goes to create a job in the defence sector in the
US, we could create three to seven similar level jobs in far more
socially productive sectors, but also sectors that are far more
economically productive like renewable energy.
Diversification from defence into renewable
energy would have a whole lot of obvious economic effects that would be
far better for our local economies and for our global economy, and far
less damaging to them. So yes of course the military’s carbon boot print
should be front and centre at any discussion of climate issues, but for
the political reasons I’ve outlined it is absolutely not going to be.
The cultural hegemony of militarism
Maddox: Arms
manufacturers not only put money into the campaign coffers of US elected
officials, they also create jobs in their Congressional districts, jobs
that politicians are loath to threaten or remove. So what exactly is
our play here, as concerned citizens? How can we re-assert our leverage
over our politicians? Or how can we go around them to seek an end to the
military industrial complex despite them?
Feinstein: The defence
sector is a really economically inefficient way of creating jobs but it
is used as a political stick by the defence contractors and their
political sponsors. Lockheed Martin on the F-35 jet fighter programme
ensured that there were jobs in every single Congressional district. Now
some of those jobs are just two people sitting in a rented office with
very old computers doing absolutely nothing but it enabled Lockheed
Martin and all the defence lobbyists to be able to say anybody running
for Congress in that district, support the F-35 programme or otherwise
we will fund the campaign against you, that you have consciously
undermined job creation in your district.
So it is used for electoral purposes quite
as directly as I have made out. If you are a politician in our current
system thinking I don’t necessarily want the entire defence lobby, which
is probably one of the best funded lobbies on the planet, ganging up on
me in my Congressional fight in that district, what do you do? You go
along with it, which is why you have literally a handful of
representatives who even criticise a project like the F-35.
The F-35 has cost the American taxpayer $2
trillion thus far. Less than two years ago a US inspector general
reported that the brains of the F-35, the most expensive weapons system
ever built, supposedly the smartest weapons system ever built, the
brains of the system, the combat suite, doesn’t work properly and
they’ve got to go back to the drawing board.
This is the same jet fighter that failed
its first fourteen test flights. This is the same jet fighter that when
it was due to appear at an airshow in the UK for its European debut
caught fire on the runway of its American base as it was leaving for the
airshow. This is the same jet fighter that Pierre Sprey, a Pentagon
veteran who was involved in the design of the F-16 jet fighter, said is
the most expensive, biggest – excusing his language – piece of crap that
Lockheed Martin, a company that specialises in expensive pieces of
crap, has ever built. He said the only good thing about the F-35 is that
the only people it is going to endanger is the test pilots.
What we have got to do first of all is find
ways to communicate as widely as possible just how much of our money is
being wasted. Just how much that waste of money is not just creating
opportunity costs when it comes to fighting climate issues, to fighting
global pandemics, but is actually making us less safe even if you accept
a very narrow national security paradigm, which I don’t.
For example, after the tragedy of September
11 2001, it was identified that the Coast Guard was a particular
weakness in US Homeland Security, so Lockheed Martin – a company we have
mentioned a few times today – was given a $11 billion contract to
effectively repurpose and re-equip the US Coast Guard.
After ten years of that contract, and this
is work done by Bill Hartung who I have mentioned previously, what
Lockheed Martin had to show for the $11 billion was one vessel. A vessel
that when they first put it in the water, saw its hull crack, so it was
useless. The contract was reviewed, Lockheed Martin were then given
additional billions to continue its remarkable re-equipping of the US
Coast Guard, so this money is being poured down a proverbial black hole,
it is being spent on equipment that when it does get produced many
years later, in almost every case, doesn’t work properly or isn’t fit
for purpose.
Even the trillions of dollars that are
being spent supposedly on the safety and security of American citizens
is actually fundamentally undermining that very safety and security. I
think we all have a responsibility to figure out how we communicate
better about this, and it is a huge challenge because as the academic
James Der Derian described Hollywood, it is the Military Industrial
Entertainment Complex where everything that comes out of Hollywood
presents anything to do with the military as heroic.
It is where we even have that Tom Hanks
film Captain Phillips, where this brave captain fought off these two
undernourished Somalian pirates, each equipped with a very rusty old
AK-47, required an aircraft carrier and two frigates from the US Navy to
do so. This was somehow turned into a hero narrative in-spite of the
fact that the rest of the crew in the incident on which the film was
supposedly based, were incredibly angry at the real Captain Phillips
because when these two scrawny individuals made their way onto the ship,
the captain of the ship hid himself in a cupboard. We have to overcome
these sorts of narratives.
We have to overcome the sort of cultural
hegemony that militarism has on the US and on the world at the moment.
How do we do that? By more and better engagement in cleverer ways. I am
beginning to think more and more that the most effective way to oppose
this militarism is through direct action. You look at what quite a few
thousand American military veterans do now, is when they pay their tax,
they deduct 30 percent, the so-called Lockheed Martin tax, the 30 cents
in every tax dollar that goes to the defence contractors. They pay the
tax authorities the 70 percent of tax that they owe, and put the 30
percent into a peace and development fund. Far more of us should be
doing that sort of thing.
Far more of us should be saying to our
representatives, if you want our votes, let us stop the corrupt
boondoggle that is the American arms industry, that is the American gun
industry, and actually stop voting for these bloody people who are
making fortunes at our expense, and those fortunes are our tax dollars. I
think we have to improve our communication, we have to improve our
strategy and tactics, but we also at the same time have to focus on
changing our political system, because none of these major questions are
going to change if we have the corrupted, self-serving political system
we currently do.
Impolite direct action should be at the forefront of campaigning and activism against militarism
Cochrane: In
environmental activism circles, there are increasing debates around
tactics, that democratic and peaceful means are not working, and there
is a need for more radical action – monkey-wrenching to destructive immobilize machines, adopting the tactics of the Plowshares movement against nuclear weapons, to Andreas Malm’s recent book How to Blow up a Pipeline. Countering militarism is part of such activism. What is your message to activists?
Feinstein: Many of us have
grown up in an environment where our activism or campaigning has been
fairly polite. When I was involved in the struggle against apartheid
in South Africa, which was ultimately a successful struggle even if our
democracy has only been partially successful, that struggle was not a
polite struggle. The ANC waged armed struggle against a racist
oligarchy, people on the ground made the country ungovernable because
what was being understood by being governed, was being brutally
oppressed by a very powerful military apartheid state.
As activists and campaigners we have to ask
ourselves, if people aren’t getting angry about our forms of activism
and campaigning, are they having any impact? Because, especially in
so-called Western countries and the Global North, polite activism and
campaigning is important for our governments to be able to hail the
freedom of the press, of opinion, freedom of political activity that
they trumpet. The fact that they do this at the same time as imprisoning
a man (Julian Assange) who through the practice of journalism exposed
their war crimes, and hope to imprison him for at least 176 years,
suggests that when the provision of information, when campaigning and
activism becomes impolite, and actually having an impact, then our
liberal democracies are far less keen on it.
The forces of power that control our
societies are a combination of economic and political power that has
become completely intertwined and inseparable, are remarkably powerful,
they control the media, they control public discourse, they control our
political processes. They are not going to give up that power because
someone politely asks them to. They are not going to give up that power
if the vast majority of people ask them politely to. They are only going
to cede power if forced to do so.
I have seen that both in the environmental
movement and I’ve seen that in a small example of it in the arms trade,
on the environmental side – a variety of environmental groups have over a
period of time been sort of bringing the main business district of
London, known as the City of London, to a halt, by occupying bridges and
other key thorough fares into and out of the city. This has caused
outrage, obviously on the Right, and among liberal commentators, and it
has caused outrage as actually having an impact on the bottom line. So
now we are actually threatening that power.
The traditional media, the established
media, is demanding that these activists and campaigners re-think the
politeness of their campaigning because it is actually having some form
of effect. Let me give you the arms trade equivalent. There is a small
group in the UK called Palestine Action. They decided that all the
campaigning and activism they had been involved in on the issue of
Israeli apartheid and the occupation of Palestine as well as the global
military’s role in that, have fallen on deaf ears, and the situation in
the Occupied Palestinian Territories has actually been getting worse and
worse. We have seen over the past two days, at least 14 people murdered in Jenin
by Israeli occupying forces. Our governments dare not even mildly
rebuke Israel for its actions in the Occupied Territories, for the
pogroms that are being carried out by settler movements which have the
support of the fascist Israeli government and of the Israeli occupation forces.
With all this in mind the group Palestine
Action says, well, how can we show solidarity with Palestine in a
meaningful way? They identify the fact that the Israeli arms company
Elbit Systems, which is the pioneer of drone technology, that continues
to manufacture drones that are used in the Yemen conflict, that are used
in the Ukraine-Russia conflict, but most notably are used in the
Occupied Palestinian Territories. They started occupying Elbit factories
in the UK, of which there are ten, producing parts and components for
drones that actively enabling violations of international humanitarian
law and committing war crimes, and these people are saying this is
unacceptable.
They occupy those factories, and over a
period of less than a year and a half, they have caused the permanent
closure of two of those Elbit factories in the UK. The biggest remaining
factory in Leicester is currently under siege,
and has been since the beginning of May (2023) not been able to
operate. Elbit Systems lost a £280 million ($366 m) contract with the UK
Ministry of Defence as a direct consequence of the actions of Palestine
Action. Hundreds of people have been arrested, but most of the cases
were dropped before they ever came to court because Elbit Systems didn’t
actually want the reality of what they do and what their factories
produce to be raised in court case after court case. Both the Crown
Prosecution Services and Elbit Systems itself, British law enforcement
and British intelligence, do not know how to react to this direct action
by Palestine Action.
It is probably the most effective campaign
against a specific arms trade entity that has committed huge atrocities
around the world. I am beginning to think more and more that it is this
sort of impolite direct action that should be at the forefront of our
campaigning and activism against militarism, against the despoliation of
our environment, and against the political-economic system that
requires both militarism and climate catastrophe to continue its
profits.
Rejecting the Occupation Industry
Maddox: What do you have to say about Israel’s occupation as a commodity for export?
Feinstein: I do a lot of
work on Israel, as I do on Saudi Arabia, the US, the UK, and Europe,
because Israel plays an incredibly important role in the global arms
trade. It effectively acts as both a research and development centre and
a shop window for the US arms industry and for the European and UK arms
industries.
Not only does the US government provide the
Israeli government with around $4 billion a year, money which
interestingly never leaves the US, as it is used on Israel’s involvement
in R&D for American defence companies. How is that R&D done? It
is done in the Occupied Territories and on the Palestinian people. Some
of the stuff that is tested in the Occupied Territories is explicitly
banned by international treaty, but Israel still uses it, and often the
US, (as they) are not signatory to those treaties. Sometimes even the US
uses cluster munitions, and Israel still uses cluster munitions
constantly in the Occupied Territories.
Whenever there is a major incursion into
the Occupied Territories, Israel will hold an arms fair in the immediate
aftermath and often what happens is there will be special invitees, you
don’t get to say I will come to one of your arms fairs, you need to be
invited, and it is key military personnel, key procurement officers,
from all the world’s countries, particularly the least democratic most
oppressive countries in the world.
I have been to one of them, before I
started publishing on this stuff, and they actually show footage of what
has just happened in the Occupied Territories and they have people
telling you as you sit there, individually, exactly how effective the
weaponry has been and how it has worked in eliminating targets. They lie
pathologically about how such hi-tech equipment does not affect
civilians, whereas exactly the opposite is the case.
Jeff Halper
has done some extraordinary work on occupation as an economic
commodity. Israel sells aspects of its occupation philosophy, equipment
and methodology to the rest of the world, and especially to that part of
the world that buys in to the sort of ethno-nationalist project of
which Israel itself is a part. You have this extraordinary circumstance
in the world today where somebody like Viktor Orban, the prime minister
of Hungary, who is an out-and-out anti-Semite, who uses anti-Semitism,
caricatures of George Soros and other Jews to win election after
election in Hungary, is greeted with adulation in Israel every year. How
the current Indian prime minister (Narendra Modi), who himself is
conducting an ethno-nationalist project, is a great friend of Israel.
How the president of the Ukraine (Volodymyr Zelenskyy) can describe
wanting to turn his country into the Israel of Eastern Europe, with
nobody asking the question, what do you mean? A racist occupying state?
And where criticism of Israel is now seen as anti-Semitic even when it
comes from life long anti-racist Jews, many of us the sons and daughters
of Holocaust survivors who understand exactly what anti-Semitism is.
Jeff Halper’s work shows Israel very
cleverly markets itself as a sort of all-in-one solution. We will do
everything, if you are an aspiring politician in an African country, we
will come and help you develop a political party, we will develop your
election materials for you, we will keep you secure, and once we have
got you into power, you will then buy all your military, homeland
security, and torture and surveillance equipment from us, because we use
it all, we make it all and we know what will be good for you. The
Israelis did this in the case of a politician called Mrs (Joyce) Banda
in Malawi, an extraordinary story I won’t go into here, but it is worth
looking at.
Israel effectively markets itself on the
very worst of what it does in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and
any of us who oppose not just anti-Semitism, but Islamophobia,
anti-Black discrimination, racism and discrimination of any sort, have a
responsibility to call this out. At a time when our governments in the
Global North are trying to make it illegal to protest against Israel, to
criticise Israel, to boycott Israel, because the reality is that the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions
(BDS) movement, which I regard as a form of direct action, which was
absolutely central to bringing about the end of apartheid in South
Africa, will do the same thing in Israel.
I think for those of us that are
anti-militarist and anti-racist, we have got to take this entire
complex, and I think the word Occupation Industry is probably
appropriate here, and we have got to reject it at a human rights level
and also reject it because of the impact it is having around the world
where Israeli spyware is being used by the world’s worst intelligence
agencies to oppress and repress entire populations and extraordinary
activists around the world.
