Review | Monstrous Anger of the Guns

A new work unpacks the global arms industry and how to fight it. Shiraz Hussain details its takeaways.

The mainstream view on the global arms trade is that it is the means of keeping the liberal democracies of the global North and its valued allies safe in a dangerous world. No one attacks a country that is armed to the teeth with the latest weapons of mass destruction, hence having sufficient quantities of such weapons is the best way of deterring a would-be aggressor and keeping us safe. A similar logic is used to justify the market in small arms which can be used for national defense, law enforcement or the personal protection of civilians. Arms manufacturers are in this account merely meeting a demand from governments acting on our behalf.

Monstrous Anger of the Guns sets out to dismantle the above account and reveal a much more troubling picture. Each of the fifteen chapters is by a different author with specialist knowledge of their area. Taken together, they give a detailed picture of the reality of the arms trade and its impact on the world’s people. The book is a mine of facts and stories – facts that the mainstream does not want us to know and stories of people whom they do not want us to see.

The book opens with a wedding in Yemen on 22 April 2018. What should have been a day of joy and celebration is turned to horror when a bomb from a Saudi/UAE plane strikes the groom’s wedding tent. Twenty-one innocent people are killed and ninety-seven more injured. The targeted site is 21 kilometers away from the nearest military checkpoint. The weapon used is a US-made GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bomb containing 87 kilograms of the explosive Composition H6.

The arms trade, which makes such horrors possible, is examined in the first two chapters.

The place of nation states in the global arms trade

The US accounts for over one third of global arms transfers and gives or sells weapons to over one hundred countries. The US also has oversight of a system of alliances and networks which incorporate Western states and many in the global South. Global military spending passed the $2 trillion mark in 2021. The US spent $800 billion, China an estimated $293 billion, and Russia $77 billion. In 2022, US military spending had risen to $1.537 trillion. Although the arms trade is global, participation in it is very uneven.

Debate about Chinese involvement in the arms trade is mainly framed in terms of US’s concerns about China’s influence in the Pacific. But China exercises its influence primarily through trade, loans and development aid rather than military exports. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute describes Chinese levels of military aid to other states in the region as trivial compared to Australian or US military aid. While the US has over 900 overseas military bases, China has only one, in Djibouti, established to assist in a UN mission against piracy.

Nevertheless, China is the world’s second largest military spender, is a significant arms importer and exporter, has undergone military modernisation since the 1960s, and is steadily growing less dependent on foreign technology for its military development.

Although the main players in the arms trade are former colonial powers of the global North, and power relationships between countries reflect this, countries in the global South also manufacture and sell a more limited range of weapons, especially small arms and light weapons. The US itself is the world’s largest importer of small arms.

The arms trade is transnational – as an aspect of capitalism, it is of no country and any country. BAE is a British company but of what country is an overseas subsidiary of BAE?

A perfect illustration of the difference between national interest and the interests of arms companies is Vijay Prashad’s report of his conversation with former CIA operative Charles Cogan. They discuss the death of Adolph Dubs, US ambassador to Afghanistan, who had advised against arming right-wing insurgents seeking to overthrow the Afghan communist government. Dubs took the view that the Afghan communists were independent of Moscow and might drive a social justice agenda. Adolf Dub’s sudden and mysterious death opened the floodgates to a large inflow of US/Saudi money which was used to arm the insurgents who formed the Taliban, imposed a brutal theocratic dictatorship, and eventually defeated the US forces that were sent against them. A defeat for the US, a disaster for the people of Afghanistan, but a bonanza for the shareholders of arms companies.

The arms trade could not function without its network of brokers and dealers, who operate in a shadowy world of bribes and corruption. Five years after the country’s first democratic election, South Africa decided to spend $10 billion on weapons it had no use for, with $350 million in bribes to various officials, executives and intermediaries sweetening the deal. Then President Mbeki announced that his government could not afford anti-retroviral medication for the six million South Africans living with HIV, a decision which cost 360,000 people their lives and has led to the birth of over 30,000 HIV positive babies every year.

There appears to be little real difference between ‘bad’ arms dealers like Viktor Bout, used by Britain and the US because his expertise in challenging environments outweighed his law- breaking, who was jailed in the USA in 2010, and ‘respectable’ arms dealers like BAE which established a global money-laundering network based in the British Virgin Islands and was fined $400 million in Washington DC in 2010 for conspiracy to defraud the USA.

The arms trade also influences foreign policy – US ambassadors are frequently reduced to the role of note-takers in meetings between members of the US military and representatives of foreign governments. Worse, US ambassadors offer their services in securing contracts for US arms companies. In the 1990s, with the USSR gone, the expectation was that NATO would be dissolved. However Lockheed Martin and others formed the ‘Committee to expand NATO’ and lobbied the US Congress to expand the security alliance into Eastern Europe simply because they wanted to sell arms to the new states in the region, a policy which has had consequences.

A telling point about the global impact of the arms trade is the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s 2020 finding that ‘it is often the poorest states that allocate the largest proportion of their government expenditure to the military’. Here is the vicious circle which is seen at play in the conflicts described further in the book – poverty and despair lead to insurgencies which are quelled by military force, and the money spent is no longer available to alleviate poverty, leading to further conflict.

Yemen under the gun

This is well illustrated by the chapter on the war in Yemen, written by members of the organisation Mwatana for Human Rights. Protests in Yemen began in 2011, initially against unemployment, corruption, economic conditions and government proposals to amend the constitution. These protests escalated into calls for the resignation of President Saleh who transferred power to vice-President Hadi in November of thar year under an agreement brokered by the Gulf Cooperation Council.

All parties in Yemen were brought together in March 2013 in a National dialogue conference in order to bring about reconciliation but a political dispute over the regional division of the country led to the outbreak of armed conflict in September 2014. 

By the end of 2021, the conflict was estimated to have cost Yemen’s economy $126 billion. 377,000 people had been killed, of whom nearly 60% had died due to indirect conflict-related causes such as lack of access to food, water or healthcare.

Five million children under 5 are estimated to require treatment for acute malnutrition in 2024. Almost half of the imported wheat used to come from Ukraine and Russia so the war in Ukraine has had a further impact on food supplies. Almost 90 percent of the population has no access to publicly supplied electricity. Less than 5 percent of health facilities provide clinical management of rape or other forms of gender-based violence. Landmines and unexploded ordnance continue to kill people and prevent resumption of normal life. Education has been severely disrupted- as of October 2023, 2426 schools remained destroyed, partially destroyed, or used for non-educational purposes, such as shelters.

The humanitarian crisis in Yemen is the result of the arms trade’s role in prolonging the conflict. It is not only weapons that have been supplied by the US, Britain and European countries but also personnel and expertise necessary for maintenance, support and training of coalition forces. A former BAE Systems worker revealed in 2019 that if such personnel were not present, jets would cease flying within 7 to 14 days.

Above the law

While international treaties and laws are supposed to prevent the sale of weapons destined for conflict zones, they appear to make little or no difference in practice. The chapter on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) of 2014 examines this in more detail.

A report from the World Peace Foundation found that the difference in arms export practices between exporters such as Russia which make no reference to human rights or humanitarian law in their policies, and the US and Western European suppliers is relatively minor. The limited success of independent lawyers in enforcing international treaties and domestic laws that are meant to regulate arms exports on these grounds indicates that ways are found around legal constraints, such as arms companies establishing subsidiaries in countries not bound by the ATT, or governments simply ignoring the law when it gets in the way of foreign policy.

The most obvious example of this is the US supplying arms to Israel with no conditions, in spite of US domestic laws prohibiting such transfers where serious violations of international law are suspected.

India and Latin America show us a different aspect of the arms trade. There are no wars in India or Latin America, but they share the feature of widespread gun ownership by citizens. India is currently the second most heavily armed nation in the world and the world’s biggest arms importer, with an estimated 71.1 million guns in private hands and a further 3.9 million held by government defence forces. Brazil has one armed citizen per hundred, who collectively own around six times more weapons than the 360,000 in the hands of the security forces.Far from keeping anyone safe, all this weaponry produces an exceptionally high homicide rate. According to 2021 data from open Democracy, 38 of the 50 most violent cities in the world are in Latin America. The US-sponsored ‘War on drugs’ is an aggravating factor.

The US military occupies Hawai’i

The chapter on Hawai’i tells a story we are not told in film and TV depictions of that country. The independent kingdom of Hawai’i was invaded by US Marines in 1893 and its government overthrown in support of a cabal of sugar barons and other capitalist elites. Since 1959,Hawai’i has been falsely claimed as a US state and is now the headquarters of the Indo-Pacific Command, the largest command area of the US military on the planet, controlling more than 200,000 acres of land acquired by evicting local communities, and seeking more. Every two years the US military hosts the Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) military exercises with the forces of other nations involved in the Anerican global project, including live- fire exercises, mock invasions and the sinking of ships. All of this is fuelled by a storage facility at Red Hill which has so far leaked 200,000 gallons of fuel and toxic chemicals into the drinking water of O’ahu and poisoned over 100,000 people. RIMPAC concludes with a weapons fair for fellow travellers of the imperial project.

The Hawai’ian sovereignty movement has existed since 1893 and has never renounced the aim of restoring the independence of their country. Their struggles against the military have included the occupation and reclamation of Kaho’olawe at the cost of the lives of two brave revolutionaries. They fight not only for their independence but for their brothers and sisters in other countries who suffer under the imperialist axis.

The chapters on opposition to the arms trade cover strategic litigation (discussed above), the Stop the War coalition, action by unionised dock workers against the arms trade, student campaigns opposing universities being used as recruiters for careers in the arms industry, and the highly effective campaign of direct action against the Elbit factory by Palestine Action.

If the production and importation of weapons keeps a country safe then surely no country should feel safer than the US, the world’s prime weapon producer and exporter, protected by two vast oceans and with enough firepower to incinerate the planet several times over. And yet the US imaginary sees threats, domestic and foreign, everywhere. Graphic media aimed at young people present the solution – it is the comic book superhero who deals with all adversaries by deploying overwhelming and unanswerable force in a violent confrontation. The source of such narratives is no mystery. And the result, both in the US and globally, is that wealth that could be redistributed to end poverty, address injustice, and make a better world is instead funnelled into a self-perpetuating cycle of violence, destruction and human misery from which no one, other than those who profit from the arms industry, gains any benefit.

A different point of view is needed. One that looks beyond ‘national security’ (class interest wrapped in the national flag) to the idea of ‘human security’ formulated by the UN in 1994 and summarised, in the chapter on militarism and the climate emergency, as freedom from fear, freedom from want and freedom from indignity. How are we to reach a world where such an outlook is the mainstream one, and where, to paraphrase Marx, our eyes have become human eyes? Silencing the guns and challenging the power behind them must be the first step. This book points the way to that first step.

Monstrous Anger of the Guns is published by Pluto Press.