by Enza Plotinus
See you next time European elections there will be a stone guest: the arms industry which managed, through intense lobbying, to obtain rivers of money from the European Union to arm wars. In Italy, there is a race to ignore the issue. Just sift through the electoral lists of the parties of left (on the right, weapons are a resource, not a problem), in view of the European elections in June to realize how thorny the word peace is, with a Democratic Party that is nominating authoritative and staunch defenders of the stop the warbut continues to vote in favor of sending weapons to Ukraine, and a few other timid overtures on the other lists.
Solo Michele Santoro he gave the rejection of all wars the importance it deserves and with his list he made peace his political-electoral manifesto, denouncing wars as the worst humanitarian catastrophes and pointing the finger at governments that are no longer able to stop the manufacturers of weapons (bringers of death) who now have the fate of the world in their hands and in their wallets.
We are in the hands of a global industry that profits from death and no one can stop it anymore. A global lobby that enriches itself by maintaining and fueling all ongoing conflicts. European policies today are increasingly distant from the peace projects of the past, precisely because they have placed the armaments industry at the center of the common strategy. According to the report “Peace finance. War Finance” commissioned by the Ethical Finance Foundation (Ethical Bank Group) e by the Global Alliance for Banking on Values (GABV), carried out by Merian Research, “in three years over 959 billion dollars they have been used by global financial institutions (half of which are American) to support the production and trade of weapons.” An interweaving of increasingly close ties with European politicians and institutions has led to an exponential increase in the influence of the arms lobbies in recent years, resulting in European support increasingly growing to the “requests” made by the military industry, in particular from 2022, the year in which the war in Ukraine began.
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The European Disarmament Network counted between 2019 and 2023 well 536 gun lobbyist meetings with members of the European Commission. The French aeronautical giant Airbus reigns supreme, while the Italian one Leonardo she is third after Safran. A “revolving door” mechanism then ensures that the war industry always has its own representative in the governments of all European countries. In France, Thierry Breton, head of the Directorate General for the Defense Industry and Space (DG Defis), is also former CEO of the French Atos (military technologies). On the contrary, Jorge Domecq moved from the European Defense Agency to consultant of the military branch of Airbus in 2022. In Italy Guido Crosetto, before becoming Minister of Defense, he was president of Aiad (confederation of Italian aerospace and defense companies), the group representing arms manufacturers in Italy.
This system is favoring growing rearmament of the countries of the Old Continent which, “thanks” to the wars raging from Eastern Europe and the Middle East, rush to purchase fighter planes, frigates, tanks, missiles, drones and advanced electronic warfare systems. It is easy to imagine that for the merchants of death and their supporters, diplomacy is a disaster, while the conflicts that are inflaming the Middle East, touching Iran and extending with their tentacles of death to the coasts of Yemen on the Red Sea, swell funds and their portfolios and reinvigorate global markets.
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If we European citizens have not already “fried our brains”, surrendering to a future of death, we support the protests of young people and let’s give a boost to conflict resolution by voting for parties that declare themselves against the war.
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