War Business

In light of recent terrible events in Paris I would like to say a few things. While most people will blame radical Islam, religion, this wing or that wing, or will follow a well-known pattern and call for swift action against terrorists and many other things, I would like to mention something else that may be an interesting point of view.

First, imagine one country—it can be any existing country, but try imagining a nonexistent one—and label that country as a source of terrorism, then imagine the people in it without any specific attributes. You may notice that attributes like skin color, religion, or whatever else are not necessarily reasons for hatred.

People are people and they can hate each other for all kind of silly reasons: religion and the race do not have to be, and usually are not, the only reasons. If someone wants to hate someone else, he/she will easily find an excuse. If you would like to argue the opposite, please explore the Rwandan genocide a bit, especially how people split into two groups, Tutsi and Hutu, just because of their different facial characteristics, in this case the size and shape of their noses.

I have named our imaginary country, which we’ve labeled as a source of terrorism, Yellow country in the image below. Yellow country is in the middle and has four neighboring countries, Blue, Red, Orange, and Green.

War in Yellow country has been going on for several years and almost its entire infrastructure has been destroyed; economically speaking they barely produce anything. On the other hand, all the surrounding countries have strong economies and their own weapons factories. Yellow country does not have its own weapons factories, as they were the first things that were destroyed.

If Yellow country does not have its own weapon factories you have to ask yourself:
Where do they get guns, ammo, explosives, and all other types of weaponry?

You could argue that they had stocks from before, but if war has lasted for years these stocks should be long gone by now.

The answer is that all the neighbor countries are supplying Yellow country with arms and thus prolonging the conflict. For every one of the neighbor countries war is a good source of income, and by the logic of maximizing profit, a long-lasting war is a good opportunity to increase the country’s wealth. The longer war lasts the better, as more arms will be sold.

If you’ve ever played any strategy game like Star Craft, War Craft, Age of Empire, or Civilization you know that the easiest way to win the war against your enemy is to cut its supplies of resources, so it won’t be able to build a future army or make any kind of meaningful progress.

As a reminder of something you already know, the best way to extinguish a fire is to suffocate it by depriving it of oxygen, fuel, or heat. When the fire is already started, the easiest way is to deprive it of oxygen: at that point you cannot lower the heat, and fuel is usually everywhere, so the best chance is to cut its access to oxygen.

In war, the heat is hatred, the fuel is people, and the oxygen is arms.

So, if you take the guns out of the picture, the job of stopping war will be much simpler and easier. The only tasks left will be to deal with any ignited fuel, then lower the heat, since it would be desirable to prevent new fires in the long term.

But the current situation is different: instead, it resembles deliberately pumping oxygen into an existing fire while adding new fuel.

The Blue and Red countries were already involved, in one way or another, in military actions against militant groups of the Yellow country. Militants from the Yellow country seeking revenge make occasional attacks within neighbor countries but mainly attack the civilian population, causing panic and unrest. The media in all the neighbor countries disturb the masses, calling in panic for military actions. This propaganda loop is suitable for the weapons industry, because now everyone needs more ammo and more guns, as all countries are involved in war. Even countries that were not involved previously are afraid of terrorism and willingly agree to join in action against the threat.

During wartime, the war industry will gladly supply allies with arms. But, it will do the same for militant groups from the Yellow country, in order to extend war as much as possible and therefore increase profit as much as possible.

At this point one would ask: Why don’t industries just stop supplying militants?
The reason is simple: if any neighbor country stops supplying terrorists, the other countries will fill the market gap. The logic behind this is very simple: “If you do not want to do it, someone else will do it — for the sake of profit.”

In this day and age finding out who is trading and supplying terrorist organizations shouldn’t be overly difficult. You just have to follow the money. If the algorithms behind Amazon can figure out, with just a few items you have purchased, whether you are expecting a baby or whether you are potentially dealing drugs, how difficult would it be to track large amounts of arms? The only thing necessary is to track money transactions for the necessary components or the final “products.” After that, cutting the supply of guns would be easy thing to do.

Unfortunately, you should not discard the possibility that everyone already knows, and everyone is responsible, but they’re just playing the same old game.

And, the next time you hear a politician or public figure saying how we should buy more guns in order to be safer, ask the following question: How many shares does he/she have in the weapons industry?

We have to realize that the system is messing with our minds, and although we do not want to admit it, it’s very easy to pull our strings; it‘s easy to convince masses of people that religion is to blame, race is to blame, a different regime is to blame, or any other thing is to blame. With enough resources and influence you can create conflict in any country, regardless of how civilized they think they are. Whenever people exist it is possible to create polarity about anything. You just have to follow the rules of spreading fire: bring the heat, add the fuel and pump the oxygen.

The question is, is it possible to change this?

Currently the game is to make players fight each other, but if we could change the way the game works for us instead of letting the game turn us against one another, then . . .

and there lies the whole beauty of it: we are the masters of the game — we can change the rules.

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