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What is the need for a careful analysis of the arms industry with all its suppliers, logistics, financiers, researchers and lobbyists? Is it not sufficient to know where the major manufacturers of weapons and war equipment are located in order to be able to attack them? Just as the Disarm Rheinmetall campaign, for example, has decided, at least in principle, to focus its opposition to the arms industry primarily via one of Germany’s largest arms companies, the Rheinmetall Group? Of course, it would be a great victory to successfully shatter the major arms corporations whose core business revolves around weapons and war materiel, but if one remains realistic for a moment, the barbed-wire-armored, camera-surveilled and security patrolled factory premises of companies like Rheinmetall, Krauss-Maffai Wegmann, Heckler & Koch, DIEHL Defence, Airbus and Co. offer only a marginal scope for (precise) sabotage and attacks. Certainly, it is the producers of tanks, fighter planes, machine guns, missiles and bombs who are a particular thorn in the side of all of us, who most visibly produce the equipment used for murders, genocides and slaughters perpetrated elsewhere in the world, which always stirs up social protest, but only because the arms industry has halfway succeeded in hiding the rest of its structure, its logistics and its profiteers. We, as anti-militarists and anarchists, do not have to fall for this deception as well.
A careful analysis of the arms industry, revealing its networks, entanglements, suppliers, logistics, its research and lobbyists, and last but not least its financiers, can on the one hand show how closely intertwined technology and production are with war, and counter the myth that any (arms) corporation can simply be „disarmed“ and go on to produce civilian goods for general prosperity. On the other hand, such an analysis can also point out those weak points where sabotage and attacks are possible in a much more low-threshold way, where there is no need for barbed-wire fences to be climbed, cameras to be tricked and, finally, security personnel to be messed with before even standing on the spacious premises of one of the production sites of organized murder. And yet, other attacks can cause exactly the same impact, namely idle production facilities and/or the destruction of manufactured war materiel before it even reaches one of the battlefields of this world. Continue reading An Introduction to Mapping the Local Arms Industry and its Vulnerable Points →
7TH OF JUNE 2022
