kagablog

(photo suzy bernstein)

After a few years of decline at the end of the Cold War, arms sales have turned around. The world market in weaponry, with total sales of $40 billion, grew 8 percent in 1996. Leading the list of buyers was Saudi Arabia at $9 billion. For several years that country has also led the list of countries that violate human rights. In 1996, says Amnesty International, “reports of torture and ill-treatment of detainees continued, and the judicial punishment of flogging was frequently imposed. At least 27 individuals were sentenced to flogging, ranging from 120 to 200 lashes. They included 24 Philippine nationals who were reportedly sentenced for homosexual behavior. At least 69 people were executed.” And also: “The government of King Fahd bin ‘Abdul ‘Aziz maintained its ban on political parties and trade unions. Press censorship continued to be strictly enforced.”

For many years that oil-rich monarchy has been the top client for U.S. weapons and British war planes. Arms and oil, two key factors in national prosperity: the healthy trade of oil for weapons allows the Saudi dictatorship to drown domestic protest in blood,

while feeding the U.S. and British war economies and protecting their sources of energy from threat. A skeptic might conclude that those billion-dollar purchase orders bought King Fahd impunity. For reasons that only Allah knows, we never see, hear, or read anything about Saudi Arabia’s atrocities in the media, the same media that tend to get quite worked up about human rights abuses in other Arab countries. Best friends are those who buy the most weapons. The U.S. arms industry wages a struggle against terrorism by selling weapons to terrorist governments whose only relation to human rights is to do all they can to trample them.

In the Era of Peace, the name applied to the historical period that began in 1946, wars have slaughtered no less than 22-million people and have displaced from their lands, homes, or countries over forty million more. Consumers of TV news never lack a war or at least a brushfire to munch on. But never do the reporters report, or the commentators comment, on anything that might help explain what’s going on. To do that they would have to start by answering some very basic questions: Who benefits from all that human pain? Who profits from this tragedy? “And the executioner’s face is always well hidden,” Bob Dylan once sang.

In 1968, two months before a bullet killed him, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared that his country was “the world’s greatest purveyor of violence.” Thirty years later the figures bear him out, every ten dollars spent on arms in the world, four and a half end up in the United States. Statistics compiled by the International Institute of Strategic Studies show the largest weapons dealers to be the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia. China figures on the list as well, a few places back. And these five countries, by some odd coincidence, are the very ones that can exercise vetoes in the UN Security Council. The right to a veto really means the power to decide. The General Assembly of the highest international institution, in which all countries take part, makes recommendations, but it’s the Security Council that makes decisions. The Assembly speaks or remains silent; the Council does or undoes. In other words, world peace lies in the hands of the five powers that profit most from the big business of war.

So it’s no surprise that the permanent members of the Security Council enjoy the right to do whatever they like. In recent years, for example, the United States freely bombed the poorest neighborhood in Panama City and later flattened Iraq. Russia punished Chechnya’s cries for independence with blood and fire. France raped the South Pacific with its nuclear tests. And every year China legally executes ten times as many people by firing squad as died in Tienanmen Square. As in the Falklands war the previous decade, the invasion of Panama gave the air force an opportunity to test its new toys, and television turned the invasion of Iraq into a global display case for the latest weapons on the market: Come and see the new trinkets of death at the great fair of Baghdad.

Neither should anyone be surprised by the unhappy global imbalance between war and peace. For every dollar spent by the United Nations on peacekeeping, the world spends two thousand dollars on warkeeping. In the ensuing sacrificial rites, hunter and prey are of the same species and the winner is he who kills more of his brothers. Theodore Roosevelt put it well: “No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war.” In 1906, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

There are thirty-five thousand nuclear weapons in the world. The United States has half of them; Russia and, to a lesser degree, other powers, the rest. The owners of the nuclear monopoly scream to the high heavens when India or Pakistan or anyone else achieves the dream of having its own bomb. That’s when they decry the deadly threat of such weapons to the world: each weapon could kill several million people, and it would take only a few to end the human adventure on this planet and the planet itself. But the great powers never bother to say when God decided to award them a monopoly or why they continue building such weapons.