ON THE PURPOSE OF MILITARISM AND OF THE
WORLD AROUND WHICH IT TURNS
“That the proprietors are chauvinists in the name of their
mansion; that the financiers praise the army that, for pay,
stands guard over the cash box; that the bourgeoisie hail the
flag that covers their merchandise, this is understood without
effort. Even that certain semi-philosophers, people of
tranquility and tradition, that coin collectors and
archeologists, that old poets and prostitutes prostrate
themselves before power—this is also comprehensible. But
that the helots, the maltreated, that the proletariat would be
patriot—why, then?”
—Zo d’Axa
Militarism is at the center of this society.
Militarism is not merely an ensemble of institutions (the
police, the army…) created to defend the established order
with force; it is also a culture—a culture of obedience, of
discipline, of submission, of the planned negation of every
individuality.
Militarism is every order shouted and carried out, every act
carried out by those who have not decided either the reasons
or the means, every uniform of cloth or of the mind, every
hierarchy, every sacred cause that stirs flags and calls to
sacrifice, every profane cause that exploits with the rhetoric
of rationality. Militarism is the boss at work and the police on
the street.
Militarism is anyone who is indignant about war without being
indignant about its reverse, about a peace made of hierarchy
and exploitation. It is anyone who begs us to stay
calm—because everything is already so difficult, because the
world has already changed so much, because there is nothing
else left to do than to light candles and play
ring-around-the-rosy around the military bases.
Militarism is anyone who speaks and acts in our names;
anyone who wants us to be soldiers, even if in the so-called
“revolutionary” army; anyone who promises us a bright
future—provided it advances itself in tight ranks in the
shadow of his or her flag.
Militarism is anyone who tells us that it is impossible to
combat militarism without using its same means.
THE SPIDER WEB
In this society, a clear separation between civil institutions
and those of the military is impossible. The economy scatters
the world with corpses through the game of financial
speculation. The multinationals that decide the fate of that
which we once called agriculture with their seed rackets are
the same ones that produce and sell arms. Many
technological innovations enter into the civil market only
after having been elaborated and tested by the military. In
addition, the production of arms is possible only thanks to the
collaboration of numerous non-military enterprises such as
those of transportation, of electronics support and of
precision optics, to mention only a few. This doesn’t count
those which allow the everyday functioning of the military,
from the restocking of food to the supply of clothing, from the
systems of communication to the maintenance of machinery.
To give another example, the nuclear industry—even leaving
out the problem of its use by the military and that of its
poisoning of the earth—has need of an organization and of
control similar to that of the army. More generally, economic
activity turns increasingly toward the technobureaucratic
administration of the existing order and toward the informatic
control of the population. Every day we hear talk of
video-surveillance, of the gathering of information through
every sort of magnetic support, of communication between
medical, advertising and financial data banks and those of the
police.
THE KNOTS IN THE WEB
The bombing in the former Yugoslavia and the massacre of
the Kosovars have been among us from time immemorial in
all that we do not call “war”. They are in the calculations of
the industrialist and in the submission of the worker, in the
voice of the teacher and in the obedience of the student, in
the rally of the politician and in the boredom of the citizen.
They are in the ticking of the clock; they are in every social
role.
But if the war machine, that which every day renders war
possible in the world, appears to us as an untouchable
monster, it is because from here we don’t see the concrete
presence upon the territory, all the tiles—even the least
evident—that compose this mosaic of death. It is because
from here we don’t see the principals, all the political and
economic institutions, all the businesses and financial groups
that set it in motion.
With a more discreet presence in its structure and with the
future professional army, the military machine becomes
increasingly “invisible”, but the more “invisible” it becomes,
the more it absorbs and penetrates the social, giving it the
aspect of an enormous barracks.
This is why all the discourses about the separation between
the economy of peace and the economy of war have no basis.
In the same way, the purposes of civil reconversion of
military structures or those of fiscal objection to military
expenses are abstracted in an abstraction always functional
for power. (On the other hand they are impossible to
distinguish given the global nature of the state budget.)
TO CUT THE KNOTS
Genocide, institutionalized and gregarious violence, the
hierarchy of the sword, blind obedience, the complete
deresponsibilization of individuals are unmasked and fought:
they are the means of war. Together with these, the plans for
division by the powers that be, by the capitalists and the
states, are refused—it is worth mentioning the objectives of
war, even when these are reached through diplomacy. In the
same way, it becomes necessary to refuse not only the
objects of mercantile production—profit above all and from
all—but also its methods: the division between who decides
and who carries out, specialization, the domination of the
machine over humans, the submission of nature and the
alienation of relationships.
To sabotage their war then, one must try to attack their
peace: in all the thousand threads and all the thousand knots
of the web of the military spider. But without creating
organizations and without creating leaders. Otherwise, even
without uniforms, even in times of peace, we would all remain
like soldiers, accomplice and victim of an immense enterprise
of death.
Ready, aim…fire!
And the soldier, Masetti, shoots…
.But at his captain.
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