HOTSPOT
Can you guess the name of the American leader who said this?
“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvization of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
If you answered Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, sorry but you’re wrong.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower spoke these words in his farewell address on Jan. 17, 1961, from the Oval Office at the White House.
In its introduction to a page devoted to this speech, the US National Archives said: “Those who expected the military leader and hero of World War II to depart his Presidency with a nostalgic, ‘old soldier’ speech like Gen. Douglas MacArthur's, were surprised at his strong warnings about the dangers of the ‘military-industrial complex.’”
Eisenhower, who was Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe and achieved the five-star rank as General of the Army, seemed to be the last person to warn against a “military-industrial complex” but he sure did.
This business side to military might of America and other Western powers is hidden from view in the ongoing hostilities in Gaza and Ukraine. But they’re key to understanding why the wars continue.
It was not widely reported but Pope Francis spoke as much in his Urbi et Orbi address on Christmas Day 2023.
“How can we even speak of peace, when arms production, sales and trade are on the rise?” he asked.
“People, who desire not weapons but bread, who struggle to make ends meet and desire only peace, have no idea how many public funds are being spent on arms. Yet that is something they ought to know! It should be talked about and written about, so as to bring to light the interests and the profits that move the puppet-strings of war,” the Pope said.
In June 2017, Francis called the arms traders “merchants of death” in a video calling for an end to the arms trade.
The leader of the world’s Catholics said: “It is an absurd contradiction to speak of peace, to negotiate peace, and at the same time, promote or permit the arms trade.”
Referring to conflicts then, he asked: “Is this war or that war really a war to solve problems, or is it a commercial war for selling weapons in an illegal trade, and so that the merchants of death get rich?”
The Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network said in a press release accompanying the video that “according to a study from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the commercial arms trade is at its highest level since the end of the Cold War.”
“The increase has been caused by the conflicts in the Middle East, the tensions in the South China Sea, and the perception of the threat Russia poses to its neighbors. The majority of arms sales come from the five permanent members of the UN Security Council: the United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom,” said the group.
The expensive bombs raining on Palestine, and fomenting or purportedly preventing wars and conflict elsewhere come from somewhere: the military-industrial complex and the arms trade. They’re today’s most lucrative business.