Arms, the “reading” of the war in Ukraine as a struggle for democracy and an increase in military spending: just one piece in the grand strategy of the armaments lobbies
If you kill the enemies of the West the weapon becomes “sustainable”. That is, the weapon is “good” if he kills Saddam Hussein or Gaddafi or those who support a regime. It is not bad. Weapons played a key role in helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian invasion forces. Shooting and killing to defend it is ethical. For some, even killing Putin is ethical, we heard it listening to the news of the war in recent days. US torture in Guantanamo prison, “the gulag of our times” (definition by Amnesty International), is also at this rate will they be considered “sustainable”? And who knows if we rewrite history and the Chilean President Salvador Allende, who is so disliked by the United States and overthrown by the CIA, will he become worthy of being killed because hit by “good” weapons?
If today these considerations remain in the context of more or less delusional opinions, in a not too distant future they could become reality. This is because the new war in Ukraine has produced an acceleration in the EU. The Union does not exclude the Defense sector from the European social taxonomy. “The taxonomy of the EU”, writes the website of the European Commission, “is a classification system, which establishes a list of economic activities that are sustainable from an environmental point of view”. The European Union is doing a deep job in the common language to arrive at “a clear definition of what is ‘sustainable'”. Also because “sustainable” means “green” and “green” is a word that the EU likes so much: European Green Deal means rivers of money.
“Last summer we saw intense lobbying by the defense industries, for the arms industry to be described as a ‘substantial contribution to social sustainability’”, He explained to the French online newspaper Mediapart Thierry Philipponnat at the top of the NGO Finance Watch. Insiders argue that this has happened because for some time the arms companies, given that they are subject to mass ethical boycotts, have found themselves cut off from many pension funds and various sovereign wealth funds.
But the Ukrainian conflict of 2022 has changed the cards on the table. Previously, few EU countries allocated 2% of their GDP to defense, the minimum level set by NATO. Over the past decade, world military spending has grown by 9.3% and after the war in Kiev, Germany has declared that it will bring its budget to 2%. Denmark, Sweden and Italy want to do the same. Although a study by the European Parliament had described EU countries’ defense spending as inefficient, fragmented and with duplication of costs.
For now, with the term “sustainable” the EU speaks of the protection of ecosystems, transition to circular economies but given that the field of EU taxonomy has also taken into consideration defense and nuclear energy and therefore also power plants, who knows what images seen in Ukraine do not definitively meet the demands of arms manufacturers, so as to transform their economy into “sustainable”.
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