Pressenza publishes the press release from the organisation, World without Wars and Violence.
Today the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute announced that the year 2012 saw an estimated US$ 1 750 000 000 000 spent on weapons and the military machine.
This is in a moment of global financial crisis, billions of human beings living below the poverty line, thousands dying needlessly from war, malnutrition or easily curable diseases and thousands more dying of AIDS unable to access medication.
This is disgusting and World without Wars and Violence condemns it in the strongest possible terms.
The mainstream media will yet again ignore these horrifying figures, instead showing scenes from Syria and from North Korea which serves to manipulate western public opinion into believing that a strong military is a “deterrent” and the only way to achieve security.
Self-serving politicians will call this military spending an “insurance policy against our enemies”, failing to mention that an insurance policy pays you in the case of an unpreventable accident and does not prevent the accident happening in the first place. Also they fail to mention that the “enemies” such as North Korea or Iran that they are insuring against are largely invented by themselves in order to justify the military spending in the first place.
The current situation with North Korea has been created by the USA and their permanent threat of nuclear war, and nations around the world will take the opportunity to call for increased military spending in the face of such threats. This will no doubt be reflected in the figures published in 2014 and beyond.
Personal suffering linked to military spending
And while military spending increases, non-military jobs are being lost, unemployment is rising, banks in Europe are collapsing, people are being evicted from their homes, personal insecurity is on the rise and all of this is reflected in increasing levels of suicide among young people, depression and violence of all kinds.
Personal and social revolution
World without Wars is calling for a personal and social revolution.
Life on this planet is too short to waste time on pain and suffering. We owe it to ourselves as human beings to work together to make a revolution: a revolution that starts from a personal decision to treat others as we would like to be treated and to stand up to those who treat us as objects. This revolution works for peace through nonviolence.
The world we live in continues to inflict violence in all its forms on us because we let it, or rather because we don’t fully understand how we are being manipulated to accept it.
On this Global Day of Action on Military Spending we call on the people of the world to make a nonviolent revolution.
It’s not easy. Everything will change, but we have to recognise that the system we live in today is broken and is irreparable because it does not value human life: it only values money.
