MILITARISM
There is hardly a country in the world, no matter how poor it is, that doesn’t have an army, and only a very few of these are professional: the others feed their ranks on obligatory military services of different shapes and sizes. The arms sector is one of the biggest economic industries in the world, not forgetting an extremely important black market. Militarism therefore has many sides to it, from imperialism to totalitarian belligerence, and never completely succeeds in disappearing from the different levels of “defence” policies (almost all armies in the world claim to be defensive forces guaranteeing a tacit agreement of non-aggression, yet the aggressions continue to occur). The Utopia of a demilitarised planet still seems a long way off.
Although the last decades have seen a drop in the number of world wars, today they still amount to over thirty, mostly in Africa, nourished by the weapons produced in the richer countries. Coups d’état and dictatorships based on armies that usurp the will of the people are also one of the worst expressions of militarism.
The thing is that war is, above all, a narrow and totalitarian attitude towards reality and the human being, converted into a simple way of affirming a desire for power. It relegates democracy and plurality to second place in favour of direct action always taken with the intention of achieving the submission of those who can be overcome by force.