Merchants of Death. War Profiteers. Death Dealers. These are the people who fan the flames of war to transmute human suffering into profit. They play one nation against another to sell to both sides. Although the international community condemned these actors as conspirers in the tensions leading up to WWI, no policy effectively curbed their influence. In fact, such is the clout of wealth and power accumulated through arms deals that these merchants of death now litter the administrations of our governments’ institutions. Their presence is felt in the profligate overspending that results in $10,000 toilet seats for military cargo planes, it is seen in the constant rebuke of humanitarian law, and it is revealed through the habits of our politicians who espouse ideals of democracy and freedom while pedaling billions of dollars of weapons into regions rife with human rights abuse and violent conflict.
As our world clings ever more desperately to life, it seems our leaders can think of nothing but death.
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(This is a temporary automatically generated transcript, we'll fix it soon)
Thank you Alexey for this bomb transcript!
[0:06] I'm David Torcivia.
[0:08] I’m Daniel Forkner.
[0:10] And this is Ashes Ashes, a show about systemic issues, cracks in civilization, collapse of the environment, and if we're unlucky the end of the world.
[0:20] But if we learn from all of this, maybe we can stop that. The world might be broken, but it doesn't have to be.
(Daniel starts singing Black Sabbath – War Pigs, David is imitating the drums)
[0:41] Generals gathered in their masses Just like witches at black masses Evil minds that plot destruction Sorcerers of death's construction
(Iconic guitar riff playing)
[1:10] What are we talking about today, Daniel?
(Daniel continue to vocalize the riff)
[1:15] You know, Daniel, sometimes I sit around and I start thinking about things. And the scale of everything around me, sort of, I find overwhelming. You ever do this?
[1:24] The scale of like the universe where I start to question like, you know, my place in this vast Cosmos?
[1:32] Yeah, well, I mean, of course, that's a given but I mean even in just a way that the things come together in our society day today. Like I'll be sitting around and I'll be maybe walking down the street or something and I'll look over and there's like a chain-link fence next to me. And on top of the chain-link fence, there's a roll of barbed wire. And I like disassociate from my body and all of the sudden I find myself wondering like: how these lumps of metal, this like mineral resources from somewhere, got to mined, extracted, refined, shipped, like turned into steel, boxed up, shipped somewhere else, found its way to some factory that specializes in making razor wire, assembled in the giant rolls, shipped out somewhere, cut up, you know. And then it ends up here next to me and like I see this whole thing play out immediately like my life flashing before my eyes, but instead of my life, it's like clumps of dirt turning into razor wire. And I just get overwhelmed and then I start looking around and I realize everything around me is this just like product of endless supply chains, endless logistical things. And then, if that's not enough, I dissociate even further and find myself like spanning past this: not even objects anymore, but so much of the behavior and larger cultural and political things that we find ourselves surrounded by are just the products of these endless supply chains.
[2:55] I know exactly what you're talking about, David, sometimes when I eat, let’s say a slice of pizza and I think to myself: man, this slice of pizza will become like the cells within my body. Crazy.
[3:10] Oh yeah, yeah, exactly, that kind of stuff. Like we're all in this interconnected chain. And it’s not just things, it’s behavior and stuff as a sort of aside before I get to the main topic. The reason I bring this up, some guy at some point decided he was going to make his own toaster and like figure out how to, you know, get every single part of it and see how hard and how expensive will be to actually just like build his own toaster from scratch. So he like mined stuff and refined it and blah blah blah. Enden up costing him thousands of dollars and taking like a year or two to actually finish it, complete.
[3:40] Did he actually mined the material or he just ordered?
[3:43] No he actually went and mined the material. And I guess to play like really fair he should have like built the things that he was using to mine it, but whatever. We’re not going to get picky, the guy built a toaster from scratch. And it was significantly worse than like a $12 toaster that he could have bought at the store.
[4:00] Probably could have cooked a mean slice of pizza though.
[4:02] Who cooks pizza in a toaster? Do you put pizza in a toaster?
[4:08] That's not how you do it?
[4:10] In a toaster? Like the vertical thing that like holds bagels or Pop-Tarts or something? You put pizza in there?
[4:16] Well, not initially it's only if it's leftover and I want to heat it up. You don't eat it cold. I mean some people eat cold pizza, David, but.
[4:22] Doesn't the cheese like melt and drip down into the toaster?
[4:26] Yeah that's why I buy a new toaster every week.
[4:30] Daniel Saving-the-Earth Forkner.
[4:32] That's the beauty of modern supply chain: you can get a toaster for $12.
[4:36] They're disposable, coasters like napkins. When it gets dirty you throw it out, easy. Okay, well, we're getting away. The point I wanted to make before I got distracted by this toaster story is that these incredible supply chains enable not just the things that we're surrounded by but so much of the behavior that dominates our life. And we see this no more I think readily in a way that we normally don't think is connected but absolutely is and really drives his behavior as a whole than in war.
(War Pigs plays again for a few seconds)
[5:08] Well, it's interesting you mentioned war and supply chains, David, because generals have been talking about the importance of logistics in war itself for a very long time. And it's very often the logistical supply chain that sets one army apart from another or one military from another and can actually be the deciding factor in an engagement.
[5:31] Exactly, war is just a big game of logistics if we want to like really ignore all the suffering and death and stuff that comes from it. Logistics is essential to what enables modern combat. And we love logistics on this show: we did a couple episodes on it already, you should check those out.
[5:48] 36 and 37.
[5:50] What we wanted to do with this episode was – take a look at a very specific type of supply chain that is the arms supply chain, the manufacture and sale of weapons and the accessories to weapons than enable war and conflict around the world.
[6:06] Or more specifically, mostly the sale. Because I mean, this is such a gigantic topic, we could spend a whole episode just on the waste that is generated from the accessories of war, all the bombs that are just buried in the ocean, right? There's so much that could be said about that, there's so much that could be said about the inputs to manufacture and the type of pollution that is generated from all our military activity. But I think what's really interesting is when you start to look at the international trade of weapons itself: the agreements that are established, the money that is made in this process. And the motive behind all this trade is perhaps not what we are led to believe: that is that this trade is carried out for the security and economic benefit of a national citizenry like the United States. And in fact, this international trade is enormous, a lot of dollar figures have been put out here and there, but here's one statistic that I think really highlights just how important this international trade of arms plays in our own national economy here in the United States. And that's that of the $2.2 trillion value of our factory output, David, a whole 10% of that goes into the production of weapons.
[7:25] So, what you're saying is: 10% in terms of value of the entire US manufacturing capability is devoted, maybe we're at war maybe we're not, but you know ostensibly peacetime, to the creation of weapons of war.
[7:38] That's right. And as we've talked about, these supply chains often involve many different regions around the world so that doesn't even really get close to showing us the scope of how this plays out around the world. And David, there are a few points that I think we want to convey throughout this episode. And that's that this international trade of arms overall has the effect of funneling the wealth of taxpayers into overpriced and corrupt contracts between taxpayers' governments and these arms manufacturers. It impoverishes people in the less developed countries where these arms are eventually sold – often unnecessarily and always at the expense of something more meaningful that money could be spent on like medicine and social infrastructure. It creates instability and insecurity around the world while also resulting in the massive loss of life for those caught in the inevitable conflict that results from all these weapons that are in circulation. And all of this so that a small group of elite government officials, corporate executives and independent dealers can make lots and lots of money.
[8:51] I don't want to get too far ahead of myself here, Daniel, and then we absolutely will get to this later on the episode. And I really do promise at this time cause I know we say that a lot. It's not just a matter of a small group of people who are getting wealthy off these sales of arms and then impoverishing the citizens of the nations that are paying for these arms, but I mean there's a huge amount of suffering involved in all this too and then we'll actually talk about that. And at the same time there's like this weird sort of cultural celebration of the vision of an arms dealer, it's sort of a sexy thing. When I say arms dealer like we get this image in our head of this like adventurer like traveling around, selling like secretive boxes full of like bombs and stuff to, I don't know, like Rhodesia so a bunch of like white nationalist could murder a bunch of people or whatever. And we make the cultural things about it, there's sexy movies about it like Lord of War which condemns this but also like celebrates it in a fun way.
[9:52] War Dogs, that was a recent movie.
[9:54] Yeah, War Dogs, there's like even references in old shows. Like I remember watching X-Files where they talk about like Soldiers of Fortune, and it's a magazine more targeted at mercenaries. But there's still that that arm sales component of it, it's something that is sexy and exciting and has become a mainstay in media, but really it's always focusing on these people who are traveling around, selling this stuff and living this luxurious Wolf of Wall Street kind of life with also the danger of mercenary and intrigue and breaking international agreements. It's like a spy finance bro or something.
[10:28] And I don't know when this image came up, I don't know why we keep continuing this because these people are really dealers of death and they profit off of death around the world. And yeah, I think we know that, we say that but our actions reflecting them are very different. And I want to absolutely condemn everything that is happening in this whole field, not only just from these like renegade arms dealers which we'll talk about, but also the very like banality of evil which I keep going back to in the last few episodes, where there are jobs that you can go and get at Lockheed Martin or Raytheon or Boeing as a salesperson, as a sales manager for a line of products like a radar system or whatever. And you get paid, you know, like a very low but comfortable six-figure salary, a hundred thirty thousand maybe the max salary, to sell weapons of death around the world. And that that is your job and you come home, you work 8 hours, you go home, you eat dinner with your family and then you like put some money away in a 401(k), in your Roth IRA and then you go back to work the next day. And you can live with this like very comfortably but like you are absolutely spreading death around the world. And for some reason, we don't condemn this. And I've never heard anybody say: hey, you know, you're working at Lockheed Martin, you work at Raytheon, like, what the hell, you are a murderer. But again, I'm getting way ahead of myself so maybe I should stop there.
[11:49] I think there's a reason people don't condemn it, David, that's because, going back to what you were saying about how our culture kind of embraces these ideals, in the public discourse around military weapons procurement and sale there's this underlying assumption that even when costs are too high or when things are not done properly, at the end of the day this industry exists because we depend on it for national security. And that when we're selling weapons across the globe to some country we're doing so because we are helping someone uphold democracy, we are giving people the resources they need to protect themselves, right? This was a big talking point in the war of Iraq where the US military was saying: we need to assist the Iraqi government in arming their army so that they can better protect themselves, it was seen as a very patriotic thing to do. And that's how all this trading gets sold to us as people who ultimately have to pay for it, right? The US military spends some $670 or $680 billion every year on defense. And if you break that down to a per capita figure: that's $2,100.
[13:02] “Defense.” You can't see but I'm doing air quotes: “defense."
[13:07] Right, well, that's another point we could comment on is how all this gets framed in terms of defense when we're building bombs, right? We're delivering weapons that fire bullets that kill people, right?
[13:20] These are defense contractors, not offense manufacturers.
[13:24] Exactly. And so to justify each of us representing $2,100 of our military spending each year we have to believe that it goes to a good purpose. And that's kind of what I think the point of this episode is doing is to address that paradigm and really question if the arms deals that are going on around the world even satisfy what the stated purpose of it is.
[13:48] Yeah and those are all things that we're going to address as we go. And I think the one area though that does get flak in terms of this manufacturing of weapons is those runaway costs that lead to these things like $680 or $690 billion in annual cost for the US Military. And then, of course, even more, if you adding all the other militaries around the world that the US dramatically outspends everyone else that it's not even close. But these giant numbers, the billions and hundreds of billions of dollars are presented to the public by media outlets saying: look how much we're wasting on this stuff. We see things like the F-35 program which has got a lot of flak about its runaway cost, we see things are reporting on like, oh yeah, you know this toothbrush cost $700 or the military's buying $1,000 hammers or whatever it is. And that is okay for people to criticize, but there's never any question about like: should we be buying these things in the first place? It's just like: oh yeah, these planes are too much, but of course, we need the plains, of course, we need to buy them, of course, we need to be ready to bomb stuff, we're actually bombing them anyway. You can't criticize the larger mechanisms of these devices. But you can basically complain or try to negotiate or bargain about how expensive they are. And to be fair, they are extremely expensive and there's a number of reasons why that's the case.
[15:06] Well, let's just start there, David, let's talk a little bit about those overpriced hammers – cause this is something that anyone could immediately connect to, the fact that they pay taxes every year, right? So, Citations Needed, another podcast that we enjoy, did a great episode recently on corruption called Western Media’s Narrow, Colonial Definition of “Corruption” on the paradoxical way that corruption is portrayed by Western media. And that is that the West and other countries in the Global North being incorruptible bastions of democracy and countries in the Global South and in Africa particularly being portrayed as highly corrupt. This is a narrative that almost anyone is familiar with: if you think about politics in African nations, you probably conjure this image of corrupt politicians who are swindling money, right? And this fits the narrative but it's often because of the way that corruption is more explicit in poor countries that we can justify the fact that our countries are not corrupt and these more developing countries are. As an example, I was in a Southeast Asian country a few years ago with a friend and we were stopped by a local policeman as we were traveling about. And we were basically forced to pay a bribe to this police officer to avoid a hefty ticket. And when you think about that type of corruption: that rarely if ever happens in a country like the United States, right?
[16:33] If it did, that officer would likely spend time in jail or at the very least get fired. But that's because the type of corruption that goes on in the Western world is more invisible and it occurs in a much more sophisticated and systematic way.
[16:49] Right, well, we've talked about this and not so much with the language of corruption, but we have mentioned in the past that things like theft in the United States where somebody breaks into your house and steal something or steals your car, whatever it is, is much smaller than the amount that employers steal from their employees in wage theft, where they're not directly taking things out of your pocket, they're not reaching in and pulling out, you know, your wallet and rifling through and grabbing the cash. But they are denying money that you're owed technically according to the law on your contracts. But that kind of crime rarely if ever gets punished. But it's much more pervasive and represents much more than all goods that are stolen ways that we traditionally think of as crime. And I think this corruption that you're talking about, Daniel, is very similar: you have this overt, you know, pay me $50 or I'm going to lock you up in jail that you see in some places versus hey, you know, I'm going to rig this contract so it's in my favor, so I make a million dollars. And nobody ever hears about it.
[17:48] And in the United States police departments across the country are allowed to seize assets that they acquire in the process of detaining somebody or in the process of an arrest and even when someone is found to be not guilty. Oftentimes the police simply keep whatever they took from them. And, in fact, the overall amount of value that is taken by police through asset forfeiture overshadows all forms of violent burglary in this country. So, in a way, our police actually do participate in this very direct overt form of theft from citizens. It's just, again, it goes kind of unreported and behind the scenes so to speak.
[18:30] Well, it's also legal, Daniel. And if it's legal it can't be morally bad, right?
[18:35] Exactly. But to bring it back to this topic and those overpriced hammers you mentioned. There was a 1986 article in the Los Angeles Times expressing frustration at what had been clear corruption between Pentagon officials and military manufacturers to cheat the American taxpayer. And I just want to list off a few of the items that the US military purchased that was cited in this 1986 article. And remember that these dollar figures are not adjusted for today's inflation, okay? One of the items cited was a $640 toilet seat that the military purchased. They had a contract to purchase screws, you know, the things you use a screwdriver to just screw into the wall for $37 each. Lockheed Martin sold the Pentagon coffee makers for $7,622 each. The military was purchasing ashtrays at a price tag of $659. And one of the more notorious items was a plain round screw nut made by McDonnell Douglas: these are the things that you can pick up from the hardware store for about $0.10 each – those were being sold to the Navy for $2,043 each. [19:50] What a steal! And in the United States Lockheed Martin is now the largest benefactor of the pentagon's contracts with arms manufacturers. In 2017 they received $35 billion from the Pentagon which is more than most US federal agencies and about 3/4 of the entire budget of the US State Department. And speaking of those F-35, David, Lockheed Martin also just recently secured the largest arms procurement deal in history valued at $34 billion dollars. Lockheed Martin will deliver almost 500 new F-35 jets to the Pentagon.
[20:28] At the lowest unit cost ever for that aircraft and below what their goals were for the price, Daniel. You're selling them short: they're coming in under budget and ahead of schedule. Well, not ahead of schedule, more like years behind schedule, but.
[20:46] Well, I guess that's a small win for the US taxpayer.
[20:49] Got to take what we can. Not that we ever talk about the fact if we need these planes or not.
[20:56] So, these relationships involving arms dealers who overcharge the US taxpayer, charging them $2,000 for a screw nut, the government and military officials who indirectly profit off of these relationships – I think we could consider this a form of corruption, right? This corruption is paid for directly out of the pockets of citizens just like you, just like me. And it's no different from that bribe that I had to pay that policeman, right? The only difference is it occurs in such a roundabout secret way that we here in America don't even see it. And, in fact, I have one more item for you, David, it was revealed last year in 2018 that the US Air Force had purchased at least three toilet seat covers for its C-5 cargo plane at around, what would you guess? What's the most you would pay for a toilet seat cover, David?
[21:46] Are we talking like heated? Does it have a bidet? Like what features?
[21:52] This is a plastic component, there's no moving parts, there's no electrical components.
[21:58] Is it like bulletproof?
[22:00] I don't think anyone in a C-5 cargo plane has to worry about...
[22:04] Is it tactical? Is it a tactical toilet seat?
[22:09] I’ll include some camo spray paint for you.
[22:12] Okay. What's the most I will be willing to pay? I don't even know what toilet seat costs, I can't remember buying one.
[22:18] But you can pick up an entire toilet from the hardware store for like $200-300 bucks, a $150 at the low end.
[22:22] Okay, let's get a little multiplication there for the government procurement process: why don't we say a cool thousand dollars for a toilet seat?
[22:33] Hmm, why don’t you multiply that by ten.
[22:36] 10 million dollars?
[22:37] No, you multiplied too much, it is $10,000, David. The U.S. Air Force paid $10,000 each for at least three toilet seat covers. And this was such a scandal it prompted a senator to write a stern letter in 2018. But this is a figure that comes directly out of the pockets of ordinary people.
[22:57] I got to admit, I’ve chated here, Daniel, I did read the article you're talking about and I knew the price even though I was playing dumb. But listeners, be happy, the military is now 3D-printing their toilet seats for the low-low cost of $300 each.
[23:13] Another win for the taxpayer. So that's just one form of corruption: the overcharging of things. And, of course, there are many more layers to this, not least of which is the revolving-door nature of how government officials, weapons dealers, military contractors, lobbyists for the arms industry – all kind of go in and out of government positions and back to executive positions at these companies. For example, within the first year of his presidency, George W. Bush had staffed his administration with over thirty arms dealers and consultants from the arms industry.
[23:49] And it didn't end with George Bush, in fact, it's still going, in fact, literally today, earlier, just a couple hours before we started recording this episode, Donald Trump announced that the Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan, who had been a senior member of Boeing before he joined the administration as Secretary of Defense, has been replaced by a man named Mark Esper, who before he got this role, he was the head of government relations and procurement for Raytheon. So basically from one defense contractor to another. And these are the people who are basically deciding what contracts get awarded out, these are the Secretaries of Defense of the United States. It's very much a revolving door between these companies and the people associated with them and the governmental structures that put out these requests for procurement and eventually award the contracts. Thus enriching the people who are stockholders, these very people awarding the contracts, it's a very interesting cycle of money that just goes around and around in circles and makes the people who are lucky enough to be in charge of these things, people like Dick Cheney and his Haliburton ties very wealthy.
[25:00] I think that wealth lies at the heart at what is the ultimate corruption going on here. Overpriced hammers, that's a small fry issue here and really just a symptom of the fact that a larger network of corruption has been allowed to proliferate. And that's that international arms dealers operate by encouraging government to set in motion various arms races so that they ultimately can profit off both the initial buildup of arms and the inevitable response to that build up as other countries or regions attempt to catch up and close that technological gap. The fact that these companies get away with charging $7,000 for a coffee maker is really just a symptom of the infiltration of this process that hijacks our political process, directs our foreign policy and ultimately creates war for the sake of profit. But to illustrate this process, David, I want to introduce you to a man named Basil Zaharoff, have you heard of him?
[26:00] No, but with a name like that, I should have.
[26:02] Yeah, we are about to. So, Basil Zaharoff was one of those people who lived a life more scandalous than probably any fictional portrayal could possibly do justice. Much of his life is shrouded in mystery, he changed his name often. One of his earliest jobs, David, when he lived in Constantinople was as an arsonist for the fire department.
[26:24] Wait. Wait, go back, I don't know what you about to say, but he was an arsonist working for the fire department? He would set fires?
[26:33] No, I said that correctly, his job was to go around town, set fire to buildings like luxury hotels, and then the fire department would show up, they know demand their payment from the owner to put the fire out, and then Basil would get a cut of that agreement.
[26:51] That’s a very ancient Rome style of fire departments, I didn't realize Constantinople had that, I guess, fairly recently.
[26:58] Yeah, the legacy of that Roman innovation lived on. I forgot to mention, so this was going on in the late 1800s: he was born, I don’t remember, 1870 maybe, somewhere around there.
[27:11] So he lived a scandalous life, he was born in Greece, he moved to Constantinople, eventually found himself in Cyprus and he moved to the United States. He was always involved in some scandal, he would pose as a nephew of some Russian duke or some wealthy businessmen. At one point he married a rich New York woman but he was then recognized at a party as being the husband of a rich European woman so he had to flee that scene. He worked as a merchant, he brokered young women as factory workers between Ireland and Massachusetts in 1883. Except it was a giant scam and there was no factory work so they ran him out of town there. This was a true con artist but it was through armament sales in the late 1800s - early 1900s that he eventually found his niche and became one of the richest men in the world. He worked for an arms dealer, a manufacturing company, and one of his early infamous deals was convincing his home country Greece to purchase a defective Nordenfelt submarine. After which he quickly traveled to Constantinople and told them that Greece had purchased the submarine, it was super deadly, they needed to defend themselves and, of course, this was a bitter rival of Greece at the time, so they purchased two submarines. And then he sped off to Russia where he convinced them that the Ottoman Empire was patrolling the Black Sea with these two submarines and got them to purchase two of them.
[28:37] And then it was only later when one of these countries actually attempted to test one of these submarines by firing a torpedo, which was its main selling point that it could do that, that's when their submarine capsized and sank, ultimately none of these submarines were ever put into service. But in this process the Zaharoff learned that you can make a lot of money by pitting nations against one another, really playing up to that nationalistic fear and profiting handsomely. By 1911 he sat on the board of directors for Vickers, a major weapons company, and he became wealthy by fueling the tension between countries in the lead up to World War I and supplying all of them with his products.
[29:18] So, this guy, Daniel, it sounds to me like he almost had a hand in leading up to all the tensions and like fucked up treaties and arms deals that enabled World War I to happen in the first place.
[29:31] And that's in fact what many people after World War I concluded. There was a 1921 League of Nations report that condemned heavily the arms companies that were involved in this lead up as being responsible for “fomenting war scares, bribing government officials, disseminating false reports concerning the military programs of countries and organizing international armament rings to accentuate the arms race by playing one country off against another.” This was a major concern internationally, countries came together and they realized: oh wait, we got played, these arms companies created tensions amongst ourselves so that they could profit. And at the end of the day though nothing happened, in fact, many of these companies were effective at preventing international agreements on disarmament from ever taking place.
[30:28] Well, it’s interesting that they condemned anything at all. And I think it's worth noting here because that was really, the idea of the war was fresh in everybody's minds, the war was just so catastrophic and terrifying compared everything else that happened previous to this. And we talked about this a little bit on the show before how the fact that the Great War, which is what they were calling World War I at the time, was just so dramatic and over-the-top, they really did do a good job putting in treaty saying like: no, we're going to ban chemical weapon uses, and no, we're going to ensure that that there's rules to war even if ultimately most of the time they're broken and we have war criminals everywhere running around willy-nilly like it's nothing today.
[31:07] But there was at least an attempt to try and "civilize", and it's a disgusting word to use here, the actions and these wars against each other. And part of that was the condemnation of these dealers. There were several who were involved in this, of course, Zaharoff was, I guess, one of the most major of these men. But today, you know, I was reading earlier this week these articles about everything that's going on with his arms deals today, and it's interesting how differently we talk about them now. I mean, in this time they were saying: this is a man who fomented war and that what his actions as an arms dealer were. But earlier this week, for example, I was reading this headline and I was reading into news publications like NPR and Bloomberg saying: oh yeah, we're going to send $2 billion dollars worth of arms deals to Taiwan. And, of course, at the same time, you know, there are escalating tensions between China and Taiwan which are fanned in large part by the United States to serve its own imperial purposes, even more so because of things like these arms deals that are happening right now. But it's sort of like: oh, now Taiwan will be able to defend itself – ignoring the fact that you're adding a huge amount of weapons and tools into this already hot-bed action area. And ultimately these tools will either end up being useless or used to kill people. There are only these two options. And we don't talk about it like this is a problem. We don't say: this is linked to escalated tensions in the area. We say: $2 billion worth of arms deals have been secured, these are the companies involved in this, please buy their stocks, they are going up. And we talk about this as a celebration and an economic victory. And I don't know when this shift happened exactly but absolutely today almost every talk that we have about arms deals, even ones where there is some pushback like we'll talk about with Yemen and Saudi Arabia in a little bit – they're seen as little economic victories, as pushing things forward for the United States' economic interests. And we've lost sight of this fact that, you know, these people are encouraging war. And all the tragedies and terrors that go along with it. And the fact that journalists and reporters aren't talking about this, that we're seeing this in just a very dryest "here's what benefits us" is disgusting.
[33:20] Yeah, I think you hit on a number of points there, the way the economy plays into this, but also the way this subtly, or not so subtly actually, affects foreign policy. Let's talk about another issue going on right now which is you mentioned Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Which currently is being described as one of the worst humanitarian crises going on in the world today. And Saudi Arabia has conducted numerous bombings that have killed thousands of innocent people. And in fact journalist, Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by the Saudi government last October for condemning Saudis role in these terrible killings.
[33:56] Hey, there's another arms dealer named Khashoggi.
[34:00] Maybe that's his brother.
[34:02] Maybe it’s his father. Yeah, it is. Oh no, it's his uncle. He's a famous arms dealer worth $4 billion.
[34:10] Maybe that's how he knew so much, David.
[34:14] And I guess in addition to that uncle factoid right there, I think it's also worth noting that bombs and weapons don't have to be used directly to be causing lasting damage. In this case, the blockade that Saudi Arabia has set up in order to prevent aid and other resources from entering Yemen have caused what you're talking about, this terrible humanitarian crisis. And yeah, there are thousands and thousands of people who've been directly killed by Saudi Arabia but there are many millions more are being starve to death or who are actively dying from starvation in Yemen because of this blockade that Saudi Arabia is running with their military, with the full support of the United States and other countries who are providing some of these arms to them.
[34:54] Well, in response to this crisis and the murder of that journalist in particular Germany implemented a ban on weapon exports to Saudi Arabia which it has since extended to September 2019. And so what's interesting here, David, is that Germany plays an important role in these supply chains for BAE Systems which is a British weapons dealer and one of the biggest in the world. And it just so happens that Saudi Arabia is BAE’s largest customer. So Germany's decision to stop taking part in arming this government, that is actively murdering journalists and causing the death of so many innocent civilians, has meant that BAE will have trouble fulfilling promises it made to deliver weapons to Saudi Arabia. So, in response, Jeremy Hunt, the UK foreign secretary, caught up Germany's foreign minister to implore them not to do that, saying that Germany's decision will hurt several companies in the war machine supply chain. And I think we should just stop and think about this for a second.
[35:58] We have here a major democratic government saying: yes, this is a terrible humanitarian crisis and yes, the murdering of the journalist by Saudi Arabia is reprehensible, but if we don't continue to supply them weapons then the companies that exist for that purpose will lose market value! And, in fact, the same month he said this to Germany a unanimous report by this select committee on international relations, which is a subset of the UK Parliament, concluded that UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia violated the law. "We assess that the UK government is narrowly on the wrong side of international humanitarian law. Given the volume and type of arms being exported to the Saudi-led coalition, we believe they are highly likely to be the cause of significant civilian casualties in Yemen risking the contravention of international humanitarian law.
[36:56] But the drama isn't just in UK and Germany, Daniel, there's a similar one going on here in the US right now. So typically, weapon exports must be approved by Congress, but lately, they've been blocking these exports to Saudi Arabia, specifically because of the way that they've been ending up used and that is to kill innocent people. But then in May, President Trump announced that he was going to circumvent Congress by declaring a state of emergency so that this $8 billion worth of weapons contracts could, in fact, be shipped to Saudi Arabia. And this has angered both sides of the House, Republicans and Democrats, and so new legislation is being pushed to prevent this abuse of power right now.
[37:34] And, of course, this is just an additional shipment that's going to Saudi Arabia after years and years of some of the largest arms sales in US history that has been going to the despotic state. And I saw this interesting thing when doing research about all this stuff and just consuming my general news media.
[37:50] For those of you who aren't super aware of what's happening in Yemen, it's sort of a proxy war: Saudi Arabia is fighting the rebels in Yemen and the rebels are backed by Iran. And every now and then Iran will send a missile or something to the rebels, the rebels will fire it, it will damage something, it'll maybe kill some civilians. And you'll see it reported in media: "Iranian-backed missiles blow up subway station" or "Iranian-backed missiles blow up mosque", whatever it is. It's always an Iranian-backed missile because Iranians are the ones who manufactured missiles. But any time a Saudi Arabian plane drops a bomb that blows up a hospital or camp or whatever, it's never in the headline saying American-backed bomb kills dozens in hospital detonation, it's something that mysteriously happens from this bomb that appeared out of nowhere that Saudi Arabia managed to drop. And the media very carefully manages the way that we talk about these things. If somebody else is doing it that threatens US hegemonic power, of course, they're the ones that are guilty, even if they're doing exactly the same thing the United States is doing, in this case fighting a proxy war in a country that it has no business doing anything in. And at the same time supporting these egregious human rights violations, all the while saying that: oh yeah, we're not the aggressors, we're here fighting for good and democracy.
[39:06] And speaking of American hegemony: another interesting thing happened just a couple months ago, in April of this year President Trump set in motion the removal of the United States from the Arms Trade Treaty which is an international treaty designed to regulate the export of weapons by countries around the world. And in particular, it is designed to prevent the sale of weapons that are at risk for being used to facilitate terrorist attacks or otherwise violate human rights or facilitate genocide and crimes against humanity. I think this is what happens, David, when you wake up in the morning, you look in the mirror, you're putting your uniform on, you ask yourself: wait, are we the bad guys?
[39:49] Are we the baddies?
[39:50] Are we the baddies and then you just say: well, whatever. And what's interesting about this treaty department is that the Arms Trade Treaty was set up to be in America's best interest because it regulates other countries' ability to export weapons. We don't want other countries to export weapons to groups that we as an American country define as terrorists because that could harm our economic interest or whatever. But the current Administration has decided that it's better to free ourselves up so that we're not bound by these rules so that we can export weapons to whomever whenever we want. Which in a way kind of goes against what is in our own interest from this national security standpoint.
[40:36] We'll talk about the national security perspective in a moment. But I just want to point out here that, of course, the United States is the one creating these treaties, making sure everyone signs them and is abiding by them. And then immediately, once it benefits our own interest, we back out of it. And, of course, you know, we could just actually ignore the treaty and operate rogue and no one would be able to enforce this, but specifically, I think the decision that Trump has made to pull us directly out of it, to make us no longer a signatory of this thing is much more insidious because yeah, these treaties are mostly toothless. What is someone going to do if United States decides to sell weapons to something, are they going to sanction us? Are they going to ruin their economy to sanction now? Or they going to attack us? No, they can't do anything. And US knows that when they write these treaties. But the choice not to just ignore it but to completely remove ourselves from it is really important because it gives not just our ability to ignore all this stuff as the US government, but also the corporations that serve these interests the ability to do so without having their funds overseas threatened or their procurement contracts with all sorts of nations around the world threatened. And that means that we can make sure that money is always flowing into this military-industrial complex to further feed these weapons of war while also at the same time regulating the ability to do so for the rest of the world. We can become a de facto monopoly sort of in terms of making sure that we are the only ones on the block providing these guns.
[42:03] So, it is sort of like: we come in here, we make sure we're selling guns to everybody or making sure that if we like you more you get better guns, you have access to more advanced equipment. So we're going to sell instead of the old F-16, you can join our F-35 development program and have the latest 5th generation modern aircraft, you can have access to all this if we let you. But you're going to pay out the nose for it. And those of you who are oppressive governments, who are using these weapons to control your own citizens, to kill people who are innocent and have no reason, well, we’ll still sell to you, it's just going to be inferior equipment that you can use easily on your own population but not so much to cause trouble outside of your borders. And then it’s sort of at that point becomes very obvious that the US is not just selling these things for defense. Like what is somebody going to do with the weapon that can't actually defend itself from a modern military that might have an interest in your nation? The only people that you can use it on are those less armed than you and that is maybe ostensibly rebels but also your own civilians and those frequently are the people who suffer the most at the hands of these weapons that we provide to these regimes around the world. And I say regimes but that's a very American way of defining somebody as unwanted or somebody who goes against American policies. But in many times they are just governments, they use these tools just as much as anybody to oppress their own citizens.
[43:25] This brings up a question in my mind, David, and that's: so, who are we selling these weapons to? And are we discriminating in any way against those who are displaying human rights abuses or otherwise mired in violent conflict? Because this treaty departure suggests that we are more interested in our economic interests than any notion of human rights. But I think that's a pretty big charge to levy against any government, especially one that espouses democratic and moral visions for itself, right? So I did find a paper specifically on this question that looks at data on arms sales around the world over a historic period to try and tease out: do we sell weapons to countries who abuse them or do we at least attempt not to do so? So, this paper is from 2010, it's titled “The organized hypocrisy of ethical foreign policy: Human rights, democracy and Western arms sales.” And authors are Richard Perkins and Eric Neumayer who wanted to know the answer to that question I just mentioned.
[44:33] “A defining feature of geopolitics over the past two decades has been the extent to which Western political leaders have placed ethical and moral considerations at the heart of their foreign policy discourse which has invariably included a heightened commitment to promote human rights and to a greater or lesser extent discursive endorsement for the principle of protecting or advancing democracy and extraterritorial spaces. A central question is whether this scalar construction of state morality, responsibility and geopolitical interest laced with utopian visions of a world society built upon universal values, shared rules and mutual gain amounts to anything more than empty rhetoric.”
[45:21] And so, to help answer this question the researchers looked at international arms deals to figure out the difference between our governments' stated ethical visions and their own self-interested economies. Their measurements have two simple variables: have the major Western arms exporters which are US, France, Germany and the UK historically: one – halted weapons exports to human rights abuses, or two – decreased the share of their exports to those human rights abusers. And based on the data they conclude that there has been no systemic discrimination of any sort. Western countries have sold to whoever regardless of the human rights implications so long as it satisfied their domestic economy or some conception of their own security. And this occurs, as the authors point out because those inside exporter countries are competing with themselves to acquire wealth and power for themselves. And therefore prioritize domestic concerns over abiding by those toothless international standards, like you mentioned David. Case in point: when Donald Trump announced that he would be withdrawing the US from the international Arms Trade Treaty, he did so at an annual National Rifle Association meeting.
[46:36] And to the cheering crowd he said: “we will never allow foreign bureaucrats to trample on your second amendment freedoms, I hope you're happy.” Which is telling because that treaty in no way impacts the ability for American citizens to acquire firearms for themselves. But it could impact the revenue for US weapons companies trying to export as quickly as possible to anyone who will buy their product. And in a way, David, this paper perfectly predicts the drama that is Germany's weapons export ban to Saudi Arabia and the UK's response. From the paper: “there will likely be exceptions where human rights abuses in potential recipients states are especially acute or where leader show blatant disregard for democratic principles. State rulers may respond to normative obligations regarding humanitarianism and democratic freedoms by enforcing export restrictions. International outrage, increase domestic pressure and heightened concerns about reputation might push self-interest towards action that protects humanitarian goals. We believe that such instances are likely to be rare. For the most part, governments will seek to meet normative expectations to protect distant strangers through symbolic politics: that is talking about their values, making public pledges to consider human rights and democratic conditions and endorsing non-binding principles. Actual behavior is likely to be largely decoupled from these commitments. Accordingly, we expect Western powers will generally be no more likely to transfer weapons to third world countries with good human rights and democratic ideals as bad ones, nor discriminate in terms of the volume of sales.”
[48:24] And this is exactly what has happened, right David? On the one hand, Germany has considered it within its own self-interest to respect what has become international outrage over the Yemen crisis. However, the UK which has a much larger economic stake to hold onto has publicized symbolic outrage over Saudi Arabia's action while simultaneously doing everything in its power to keep the flow of weapons to them.
[48:50] Well, that makes me wonder, Daniel. So, if it turns out that we don't even care whether or not we're selling to human rights abusers or violent dictators, and if we're not going to respect these international treaties created to try and prevent the sale of weapons to terrorists, well, then this must all be because we're getting some serious economic return from all of this.
[49:08] Cha-ching baby, I would hope so.
[49:10] And so, well, that got me thinking: it's only fair for us to ask a question: do our economies even benefit from all these international arms deals? So we started digging and we found a handful of analyses that were carried out to determine if spending on defense actually does benefit the economy. I mean, in a naive way you would say: well, of course, it's creating jobs, it’s selling stuff, there is money coming in that wouldn't have otherwise so there's definitely a benefit to the economy, right? Well, one paper published in 2001 by the Center for Defense Economics at the University of York in England is titled “The Economic Costs and Benefits of UK Defence Exports.” And they predict what would occur in the economy over just two years if UK defense exports were decreased by 50%. Based on data from the late 90s during which time defense exports fell 30% and defense employment fell 35% they claim that: number one, in terms of jobs a 50% decrease in defense exports would result in the loss of 49,000 jobs in the defense sector but an additional 67,000 new jobs would be created over five years outside of the defense sector.
[50:18] And number two: the economy as a whole would experience an immediate cumulative adjustment cost between £2 and £2.5 billion as the shareholders of these defense industries write off their investments. The government will pay short-term unemployment benefits and other costs such as the loss of tax revenue from the defense sector, but those costs are balanced as they conclude: the significance of results for the wider debate about defense exports is two-fold: firstly, they suggest that the economic cost of reducing defense exports are relatively small and largely just a one-off thing.” That's what we’ve talked about a second ago with those very quick write-offs of their investments.
[50:52] And back to the quote: “secondly, as a consequence, they suggest that the balance of argument about defense exports should depend mainly on non-economic considerations." And that's the key takeaway that we want to look at from this paper that the economic impact of these defense contracts is relatively minor because most of the people who employed, who are generating money in this industry would then quickly find work elsewhere. There's only a limited number of qualified scientists and engineers who are available for the economy at all. And the fact that some are held up in the defense industry means that we are paying a large opportunity cost while they create weapons that could be put into other sectors of research and investment. There was another paper from 2003 that also examined the role arms exports play on the UK economy titled “The Impact of a Responsible Arms Control Policy on the UK Economy” about what you'd expect. And the authors look specifically at what would occur economically if the UK actually lived up to their ideals of ethical and responsible arms trading: that is avoiding exports to the areas with ongoing human rights abuse and conflict. And from the paper, the authors point out: "the UK government is committed to an ethical responsible arms trade policy that in practice has failed to live up to expectations.” At the time, out of all the UK's export licenses for arms 58% of them enabled sales to highly sensitive or intermediate sensitive regions involving human rights abuses.
[52:19] All in all, the authors conclude similarly to the previous paper we cite: the halting of those exports would have little to no negative consequences for the UK economy.
[52:27] So, David, basically to summarize: if we were to dramatically decrease the weapons exports that we pay for, not only would we get a net benefit in terms of jobs but we would free up that money for other areas. And it turns out that that would allow us to live up to our ideals of like not selling weapons to human right abusers, right? And I was just want to point out: that's actually a huge number, you said 58% of all UK exports go to regions that are highly sensitive to human rights abuse? That seems like it a large chunk of exports that shouldn't be occurring in the first place.
[53:04] It also conveniently lines up with that figure from the first paper, more or less suggesting that in fact if you stopped exporting this amount of arms to these countries, well yeah, you'd have like a year or two adjustment period while these defense industry companies would lose a lot of money in the stock market. But after that, because we would recover and, in fact, be better off than when you started. But that doesn't behoove the shareholders, many of which, as we mentioned throughout the show, are high-ranking members of the government.
[53:35] It also stands out to me, David, that in terms of these papers, when we consider economic costs of the defense industry, the economic considerations are kind of limited, right? It is really just confined to jobs and like tax revenue and I guess investment. Which perhaps would be fine if you're thinking of, you know, like a software company or like a typical white-collar industry of just supplying a product. But it kind of ignores the fact that these products end up destroying things and that has to have a cost too, right?
[54:08] Yeah, this is one of these unforeseen externalities that we talk about a lot on the show, where typically we’re saying this in environmental context where most industries, is not all, are unprofitable when you account for the unaccounted environmental externalities. That is the damage these industries cause on the Earth. So if I'm flying an airline and I'm polluting the Earth and I'm causing all sorts of climate change damage from that, if you counted for that math, which is difficult to impossible to be fair, then no airline industry is even remotely profitable. And this is true of almost every single industry that we as humans have created. And we've extended this idea a little bit in the past to not just limited itself to the idea of environmental destruction and externalities there, but also to human destruction, to the suffering and then ultimately the quality of life and actual life itself of so many people that these various industries extract. So, the fashion industry, we’ve talked about slavery that it is so depended upon in order to stay profitable. But the arms industry is maybe the most egregious violator of this idea because their weapons that they manufacture are explicitly used to kill people. And even if a bomb is fortunate enough to never be detonated, it has environmental externality cost. There's a lot of materials in there that were mined from the Earth, that were combined – that's bad. The bomb itself, if it's ultimately dropped and it doesn't kill anybody, it's going to pollute that area and damage that for future generations of not just humans but also all life on this Earth. If it is ultimately taken somewhere and disposed of "safely", that oftentimes leads to huge amounts of local pollution that impact local individuals who live there as well as the wildlife of that area. When we take these disparate elements of the earth and we combine them into tools that are used to kill – they are ultimately going to do just that, whether it's in an act of war, in the act of defense or just in the routine disposal of these products from the arsenals in which they ultimately find themselves. This industry as a whole is built upon the idea that it profits from suffering. That is what the arms industry is: it is an industry designed to make money out of human suffering, to convert that into dollars and shareholder value. And the fact that we celebrate this in articles and publications like Bloomberg announcing 2 billion dollars of arms sales to Taiwan: it is a great thing, that we should be investing in the companies that have their hands in this sale – is ridiculous. These are tools of war and so we've packaged them up and sold them as things that we need to defend each other. But as we'll talk about it a little bit oftentimes the very act that these exist in the first place make us more insecure than we would have been without that.
[56:45] But ultimately, every single person who is part of this supply chain, to go back to the very concept that we began this episode with, the long chain of small acts: from removing things from the ground, from the education of someone receives to combining all of these different things into weapons designed to kill, to main, to disable, to destroy – is profiting off his ultimate externality of human suffering. And that should not be acceptable. Everyone involved in this chain should realize that: they are part of the process of creating evil on this Earth. And we as this culture, as a world should shame this, not celebrate it, not move these people from these companies of death and put them into high-ranking positions in our government able to decide what actions these governments are taking for the future of everybody who lives in these nations. Right now they're trying to push us into war with Iran, the war that most Americans don't want, a war that Iran doesn't want. Calling Iran the aggressor when the US has spent decades trying to go with this country into conflict.
[57:45] When the US at one point shot down an airliner over Iranian airspace filled with Iranian citizens operated by an Iranian company and then gave the captain of the ship that shot this plane down, that killed everybody on board, a medal for distinguished service.
(Audio clip of George H. W. Bush speech)
“I’ll never apologize for the United States of America. Ever. I don’t care what the facts are. I will lead her, I will do my level best to stand up for freedom and democracy around the world by keeping the United States of America strong and by keeping our eyes wide open. As we welcome change in the world, we’re keeping our eyes wide open.”
[58:30] That's the kind of bad guys we are, Daniel, you mentioned earlier looking up, waking up one day and looking in the mirror and realizing: are we the bad guys? Yes, we are. And although some of us are more bad than others, the people who are actually selling these things, that people who are actually declaring these wars, the people who are conspiring to figure out: how can I push conflict forward so I can profit, so that I can push forward my political career – people like Donald Trump, people like Michael Bolton, people like the senators and the representative who attempt to get these military contracts, put in their own districts in order to provide jobs for these people who live in their districts. They're guilty just as much as everybody who ultimately pulls the trigger in the end, we are all complicit in this chain of evil and suffering. And the fact that all of this happened without any accountability, without any sort of thought of the suffering that every single person in this process is enabling, is disgusting. This is the kind of thing that makes me wish there is some sort of divine justice, that there's a karma, that there's an afterlife, that somebody somewhere could finally take into account all these externalities that we can't take into account in the way that we’ve constructed our economy and the justice of our world. And I don't think that's the case, unfortunately. So, we're going to have to do that ourselves. I don't know exactly what that means but I encourage you to consider this idea and to think about it and to put something into action, I don't know what. I don't know if it's a phone call, I don't know if it's a scorn, I don't know if it's spitting in the food of somebody who is enabling this process to happen, but these types of actions are important to fight the banality of evil. These little steps that add up to these great acts of death can also be stopped by little acts that slow down these little bits of evil. And I'm firmly convinced that that's the case.
[1:00:10] There's no doubt, David, that evil is involved in this process. There's no doubt about that. But if I can offer perhaps a corollary perspective to this. You said something about the way we design our economies and I think this is really at the heart of this problem. We somehow gotten away from the idea, I don't know, maybe in America we never had this idea, but there's this popular conception that everything should be run like a business. And business knows how to do things most efficiently and that's how we should run our government agencies, that's how we should run the post office, that's how we should run healthcare. But when it comes down to it, I don't know how this idea got so much traction because businesses exist to make money. And we have to admit at this point that there are a lot of things that should not be profitable. There are certain things about civilization that are pure cost and there's no way around that. We talked on this show about the American healthcare system, and the reason why the American healthcare system is so bad is because it is treated like a business. Healthcare is not something that you can profit off of unless someone is suffering.
[1:01:19] And so, we have in America right now healthcare providers, health insurance companies and other companies that make up this marketplace for health care who are profiting hugely, who are making a ton of money. And on the flip side of that is medical bankruptcies – the number one cause of bankruptcy in America, and people are dying left and right because they can't even afford their own medicine. Healthcare is not something that should make money, ever.
[1:01:48] And I think we've made the mistake of thinking that security is also one of these things that we can make money off of. Security like healthcare should be a cost. It's something that we incur. If we're profiting off of security, how is that any different from Basil Zaharoff’s first job as an arsonist for the fire department? Should the fire department also be able to make a profitable return on investment for putting out fires? I don't think so. And we had we don't set that up in our economies anymore cause we recognized: oh, there's a conflict of interest there. If you pay fire departments based on how much fire they put out, guess what? They're going to start fires. And in America it is against the law for police to set quotas and try to increase their budgets based on the number of tickets they get, even though they still do this, it's very common. But imagine if we just told every police department: hey, you need to increase the revenue you make from prosecuting criminals by 8% every year.
[1:02:47] You think that would solve crime? No, it would increase crime because the police department would then profit off of creating criminals or at least criminalizing people who have done nothing wrong. And we have created a global international arms marketplace that does the exact same thing.
[1:03:02] The very fact that you can buy shares in a weapons manufacturing company makes no sense because you're demanding that that company make more money than we have entrusted it with which requires this profit accumulation that is only possible when violence occurs. How can you demand a bomb-making company to return profit to you if there's nothing to bomb? And so, yes, there's a lot of evil here. And every company that is involved in this supply chain is complicit in this evil and every lobbyist who tries to convince a political leader to deregulate this industry is part of this evil. But we as citizens have to recognize that our money, our tax dollars, our tax euros, our tax British pounds are being siphoned off to be accumulating in these companies that only exist to profit off of something that should never be profitable in the first place. And if we can recognize that and at least hold people accountable to this idea, that running security, running defense, running war as a business is not a good idea, just as those world leaders recognize right after World War I and which we quickly forgot – at least we'll be moving a little bit towards a better direction.
[1:04:19] But there's one more question I think that's in this larger economic talk about the arms industry, which is: if we could have more jobs and there is no economic cost to decreasing these arms exports to countries and regions with human rights abuses, why does it continue to happen? And the obvious answer is because people are getting rich off of this: whether that's the people who run companies like Lockheed Martin and the way that money trickles down to the government and military elite, who have established themselves within those webs of power, or people like Basil Zaharoff who we’ve talked about, who profit off the violence itself.
[1:04:53] And Basil Zaharoff was a so-called merchant of death. And what's important about these merchants of death stories is that they profit in more ways than one: yes, they contribute to the build-up of arms between major world powers by stoking fear and aggression between them and then profiting off the arms race that takes place between them – that process typically involves legitimate companies and quasi-legal deals.
[1:05:20] But it is very important to recognize that once these weapons have been stockpiled, once the arms race has taken place and continues to take place, the door is now open for an inevitable black-market to emerge in which new merchants of death can come in and leverage these stockpiles to stoke conflict in smaller developing nations all over the world. Two infamous examples being Victor Bout and Leonid Minin who each profited handsomely off the caches of weapons that were stockpiled during the Cold War arms race. Victor was a Russian-born entrepreneur who got his start in the arms business by taking advantage of military cargo planes that were abandoned on airfields throughout the former Soviet Empire which he used as a front for an air freight service, while in reality smuggling weapons to war-torn countries around the world. He ignored international embargoes to deliver weapons in Western Africa, he sold weapons to both sides of the Angola Civil War and he oversaw a complex supply chain that linked stockpiles of military weapons in Eastern Europe to conflicts in Africa and South America.
[1:06:33] The other merchants of death, Leonid Minin, this was another larger-than-life character similar to Basil Zaharoff, he was actually discovered, David, on accident in the year 2000 when Italian police entered his penthouse suite in Milan to find to their surprise half a million dollars worth of diamonds, four prostitutes, a whole bunch of cocaine and detailed paperwork outlining Minin’s sales of millions of dollars of weapons that he made to Liberia in exchange for diamonds and lumber. And this is important because for much of the 1990s Liberia had been in one of the most brutal civil wars the African continent has experienced. And less than one month before a very infamous massacre that occurred in Freetown on January 6th, 1999, Leonid Minin had personally delivered weapons to the violent forces that killed six thousand innocent people, maimed many thousand more and drove 100,000 people from their homes. But this conflict made this man a lot of money, right?
[1:07:39] And so, that's just two men, two merchants of death responsible for so much violence. And there must be countless many more who will never make it into the history books but there is evidence of their work. For example, during the Cold War Ukraine was a major source of weapons manufacturing for the USSR up until the collapse of the Soviet Union. And according to a Ukrainian government-backed report that was subsequently silenced, between the years 1992 and 1998 $32 billion worth of weapons and other military equipment were stolen or disappeared.
[1:08:17] No doubt to be used in the type of deals that Victor and Leonid made, to fuel civil wars somewhere around the world, so that they could profit handsomely. And so, I guess my point in bringing up these characters, David, is just to point out that the arms races that we as big superpower countries engage in, the stockpiling of these massive weapon caches to compete with our rivals – those arms races are what enables the smaller dealers, the independent rogue companies to then siphon off those products, create their own little micro wars somewhere around the world and fuel violent civil war, violent conflict and profit off of the killing of so many innocent people. We cannot sit here and say that we have treaties in place that prevent this. As long as we're going to be stockpiling weapons, those weapons will be used for violence.
[1:09:13] Well, we’re seeing some that violence plays out right now, Daniel, I mean you're talking about things that happened in the 90s, in the 80s in terms of civil war going on in Africa. But literally right now as we speak the conflict that's happening in Sudan is enabled in large part by these private companies who are still supplying these countries with arms, in many cases as proxy companies operating on behalf of the governments who can't directly provide arms to Sudan because of UN embargoes on it. But China, Russia, the United States: all their weapons and manufacturing exports are ending up in Sudan right now to actively oppress civilians. There's a giant conflict going on right now, people are being tortured, silenced – it's awful. And this is enabled by people who are selling these arms to this nation that gives them the opportunity and ability to actively suppress people with this violence.
[1:10:08] But it’s not just these strange named men. And every single one of these arms dealers we talked about today has a very exotic name, Daniel. And I think maybe if you or I wanted to become an arms dealer, we’d have to change our names first apparently. You’d be like, there should like an app like “find your arms dealer name”. But I guess it goes back to this like mythification that we have of alarms dealers in popular culture. But there are a lot of benign corporations that we don't think about as complicit in this arms process that are major military and defense contractors. And I even hate using the word defense contractors here because it assumes that the United States is only producing the stuff for defense which time and time and time and time again has been shown to be nothing but the opposite. But this is Microsoft, HP, IBM – these tech companies that we think about as “oh, they make operating systems”. Well, they are also giant military contractors: Verizon, iRobot, the people who are making Roomba – they are a huge military contractor. In fact, one of the top 100 military contractors United States. Companies that we like to look up to like “oh, this is a great company doing good things, companies like SpaceX who are putting spy satellites, military satellites into orbit in order to better help the United States kill people all around the world. These people are complicit in this process, fuck you, Elon Musk, fuck you, Bill Gates, you are part of the process of making the world a worse place despite whatever philanthropy you claim that you're doing with your Gates Foundation.
[1:11:38] These people are happy to profit off the suffering that I keep talking about when it's something that's hidden out of sight, when they can distance themselves from the deaths that are happening because of their position farther down on this chain of evil that eventually builds up to an actual act of death or maiming or whatever type of suffering, torturing that happens on the other end. And the fact that they just get a pass is ridiculous. And it’s not only corporations either, huge part of this are the labs that are in universities around the United States, universities like MIT, Georgia Tech, places where they are actively being funded by the US military, by the Department of Defense by organizations like DARPA in order to create new technologies to better help the military kill people around the world and ultimately patent these technologies on behalf of universities to license to arms manufacturing companies like Raytheon, like United Technologies, like Boeing to then export ultimately at some point, decades down the line, to this developing countries and create conflict and war there. It's a chain of violence that starts even in places that are supposed to be about ethics, about knowledge, about making the world a better place – they are some of the core centers of the creation of these acts of evil down the line.
[1:12:51] But they get a pass, all these things get a pass for some reason. And we can't keep letting this happen. We need to emphasize over and over again that you participating in this process as ultimately just another part of somebody pulling the trigger or pressing the button that fires the missile or gives the violence necessary to a dictator or to a despot somewhere that enables them to cause a genocide, that enables them to torture without any fear of actual resistance or reprisal.
[1:13:21] There is another really important concept about this international arms trade that we want to convey, but this episode is running super long. So, we're going to go ahead and stop now and release a part 2 tomorrow on Friday.
[1:13:36] Yeah, we're trying something new because our episode length keeps creeping up. This is going to be a slightly abridged thing, and if you've been listening so far, you really want to finish this next part, it's not going to be too long, we promise. But I know when I sit down and I see podcast that’s like an hour and a half or two hours long and I’m like: what are these guys doing? There's no reason that we should be listening this long. So maybe mentally breaking this up will help some of us. So we're going to try this second episode thing and see how it plays out. If you hate this, let us know. If you love, we’d also like to know, we’ll tell you how you can contact us in just a moment.
[1:14:09] This is, of course, a lot to think about and tomorrow will be more to think about. So, think about it in the meantime before you think about it some more tomorrow.
[1:14:20] And tune in we hope you'll do. You can find more information about these episodes as well as a full transcript on our website at ashesashes .org.
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[1:17:12] Next week we’ve got another great episode and we hope you'll tune in for that. But until then, this is Ashes Ashes.