Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know I can see Through your masks.
You've thrown the worst fear that can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children
Into the world
For threatening my baby
Unborn and unnamed
You aint worth the blood
That runs in your veins
- Bob Dylan (1963)
The dead-end of our human imagination
Arms, weapons and war are the dead-end of the human imagination; the end of being human and the beginning of being inhuman. The huge elephant sitting in the world is the armaments industry.
The number
of deaths in wars are in the order of magnitude of hundreds of millions. Millions
of people died in 19 century wars – the War of the Triple Alliance in South
America wiped out more than 60% of the population of Paraguay.
What if we applied the human imagination to prohibiting and abolitioning the manufacturing of all instruments of destruction, all guns, tanks, cannons, revolvers and machine guns? This should immediately begin with a prohibition of all children’s toys and games linked to the making of war. What are we doing when we give a 3 year old a plastic gun?
More light needs to be shone on the dark, murky global industry of arms manufacturing. Even though there has been an apparent decline in global spending on arms it is estimated that over 1.5 trillion US dollars are spent on manufacturing worldwide. We have a multibillion dollar international arms trade generally lacking in transparency.
The modern arms industry arose in the second half of the 19th century with the creation of large military - industrial companies about which we know very little. Governments may come and go but the arms industry shoots on. It is time to question this.
It is no surprise that the largest exporters of weapons are Russia, the United States and China. The biggest importers are India, the UAE and China. The largest arms manufacturing country is the United States. We need far more determined disarmament and non- proliferation agreements. Ultimately a prohibition on all manufacturing.
Accepting the manufacturing of arms as a reality is denying the reality of the human imagination. We can surely think our way out of confrontation and conflict?
The reason we have arms is that people in high places have vested economic and political interest in fuelling physical conflicts.
There is
some good news however. In a remarkable book The Better Angels Of Our Nature, author
Steven Pinker, reveals that there has been a tapering off of wars and atrocities
that killed more than a tenth of a percent of the world’s population.
The deaths decline as we come closer to the present. He says, The landscape of 20th century
values was a resistance by the populations of democratic nations to their leaders'
plans for war. The late 1950’s and early 1960’s saw mass demonstrations to ban
the bomb and public protest condemned the nuclear arms race and the Vietnam War.
Let's begin the conversation around the question:
How do we start a global movement to lobby and protest against all companies manufacturing guns, bombs and bullets?
We should start by demanding the complete transparency of manufacturing companies, their export destinations and the deals made between them and governments.
The other conversation is how to use our imagination to prevent a turning to arms as the quick fix to solve human conflict.
His brain has been mismanaged
with great skill.
Who's going to take away
his license to kill?
- Bob Dylan
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