On our side of the river, we crowded into our temporary HQ with anticipation, filling out the hall, kitchen, bar, courtyard: old friends and newer ones, many already familiar from the streets of Melbourne, some from multiple video calls interstate, others met for the first time. Preparations for protest filled each day: one room was piled high with banners, paper kites, theatre props, face-painting (at one point there’s a canoe on wheels); the kitchen rattled with seemingly-bottomless pots always filled with fabulous food; and individuals and groups gathered to share experiences, ideas, and stories in an ongoing swirl of conversation. Sat between looming office blocks and apartment towers, this old quirky stucco building — sporting a cement dome that was once a gymnasium – was our home for the week, as we prepared for rallies, vigils, a motorcade, street theatre.

On the other side of the river, across a looping walk-bridge, was the Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre. It was hosting Australia’s biggest weapons expo, Land Forces, although you couldn’t really see it, given it was surrounded by fencing, barricades, and lines of police. From September 11 to 13, corporations responsible for the weapons used in Gaza, West Papua, Yemen, Ukraine, Syria, and so many other places living under the barrages and violations of war, came to hawk their wares.

Should I even bother to ask, between the groups either side of the river, which one was classed as the dangerous threat?

Quite predictably, the greater part of the media coverage has revolved around accusations of protestor violence disrupting the expo, something that most reports proved by showing extensive images of the use of weapons, beatings, and many more actions, committed on camera — by the police.

We see this curious phenomenon every day: how we’re told that the thing taking place right in front of us — police violence — is the opposite of what’s actually happening. This is the well-practised function of spin and marketing, of false narrative and misdirection. In this case, it took attention away from the fact that the most extreme violence, inflicted by militaries and police on communities around the world, was being engineered in deals inside Land Forces — including deals by Israeli weapons makers, sold with the boast that their instruments were “battle tested” on Palestinians.

It also directed attention away from the protestors’ demands for an end to this weapons trade, and for an immediate arms embargo on Israel. An embargo which is, to state the basic fact, Australia’s obligation under international law, following the ruling of the International Court of Justice against Israel in the case brought by South Africa. It bears repeating: the Victorian government deployed around 1,600 police, including forces brought from interstate, reportedly spending around $15 million, to protect an event that contributes to the nation’s violation of international law obligations.

This was a wholehearted exercise in fabricating false understandings, a skill well-practiced by many in our government and in the corporate world. When it works, it’s not so much because the narratives they tell are especially convincing: as the TV footage shows, the actual evidence in front of us can be wholly contradictory. Instead, it’s because the stories they displace — whether those of activist campaigners, or people in Palestine and elsewhere whose communities are under bombardment. This is narrative as an act of silencing, by labelling, by distraction, and by obfuscation: narrative as capture.

When this fabrication fails it’s because the voices they try to erase speak up instead, and insist on being heard.

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We were part of Disrupt Land Forces, the collaborative protests against the weapons expo. We centred the stories of impacted or frontline communities in our mobilisation: at our Peace Fire at Camp Sovereignty on Sunday 8, which launched our actions, First Nations Elders told about resistance from the time of the Frontier Wars to today. In our gatherings and planning we shared other stories, from Palestine, West Papua, Kanaky, Iran, Western Sahara, Philippines, Chile, and the Mapuche nations, among others. These stories are the very reason we were there to disrupt the weapons fair. They held the meaning of what we did.

For the past year, protests in support of Palestine have had a focus on weapons makers, with blockades and pickets exposing corporations large and small in our cities, suburbs, and towns, identifying choke points in the supply chain along the way. They have brought Palestine’s story to the front gates, to the office doors, and to the ports where weapons and munitions are shipped, disrupting the illusion that disconnects “business as usual” from genocide and massacre.

Yet even as this exposure spreads, the weapons industry remains masterful at propagating a number of quite specific false narratives to misdirect attention, not just at arms fairs, but across all their operations. This goes far beyond misrepresentation of police violence on protestors, and cumulatively aims to generate a social license, including for genocide.

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Weapons corporations do not generally promote themselves here on a large scale, but instead target specific, segmented audiences. One of the reasons for this is because, as war profiteers, they are a stigmatised industry, and big corporate celebrations of their presence risks bringing extra attention to that stigma: far better to leave it to government to be the militarism promoter-in-chief, and so provide them a level of cover. But they do still need to reach some groups, and false narratives for these audiences have their own supply chain, as it were: we can track how they are made, and to whom they are delivered. Such a “map” of weapons corporations’ social licence operations can help clarify vulnerabilities and the points of intervention where we may be able to disrupt them more effectively.

One of the most obvious and pervasive of these narratives is the “freedom” narrative. It holds that “we” (Australia, the US, “the west”) fight wars to make the world a better place. It’s everywhere in our mass culture, whether as a backdrop, or front and centre in movies like Top Gun. The reality is quite the opposite, and again, the evidence is before our eyes: for example the invasion of Afghanistan was called “Operation Enduring Freedom”; the invasion of Iraq, “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. Neither country currently experience freedom as a result.

Yet the allure of this narrative, the crucial “raw material” of its manufacture, is equally obvious: it grabs hold of the individual desire to do some good and, especially, to be part of something bigger. This is its power as cultural capture. How many civilians would support a war without it, how many soldiers would enlist? We explored elements of this in a podcast we worked on last year, Get Your Armies Off Our Bodies, and this article evolved from that series, along with the work of many other productions and campaigns. In one episode Afghan peace scholar Mujib Abid recounted how, as a schoolkid in Kabul, he seized on the “freedom” narrative enthusiastically at the time of the US invasion, and it took years living under the terror of night raids and suicide attacks for him to let go of that belief. Former US Marine Matthew Hoh, who now campaigns against war, told how that exact “freedom” story is why he enlisted, and how — when he realised that instead of being a hero, he’d become a perpetrator — the moral injury drove him close to suicide.

Another narrative which we hear a lot is that weapons corporations bring “quality jobs” to communities. At a basic budgets level this is a bizarre claim: per person, every job in the weapons business costs orders of magnitude more than positions in health, education, or renewable technology, to name just a few of our areas of most need. (As an example: coverage after the Land Forces expo celebrated an enormous contract for British weapons corporation BAE Systems, which at $270 million would deliver … a whole twenty-four jobs; plus a total of four apprenticeships.) This is public money, mind: every subsidised weapons manufacturing job means less funding for public sector jobs.

This narrative creates a direct pathway into our political and industrial system: once a factory is in place, politicians leverage workers’ existing positions to secure still more public funds, to sometimes ridiculous levels. For example the factory for French company Thales’ Bushmaster vehicles gained additional orders by dubious means, even when nobody was buying what was produced; the government ended up giving some of the production away to Indonesia. Thales also boasts that it has manufacturing in ‘every state and territory’ in Australia, which means it has local political pull across the board. It is far from alone – it’s a method refined especially in the USA, where behemoth Lockheed Martin holds pre-eminent position in capturing the political system in this way.

The employment narrative is also aimed at tying parts of the union movement to the militarist agenda. Weapons manufacturing helps some unions expand membership, and so increase their influence within the Labor party while at the same time stifling opposition to that agenda. Becoming snared in these contradictions can lead to uneven responses that ultimately lack both moral and strategic clarity: for example, among the many blockades and pickets in support of Palestine, one union voiced support to campaigners for actions targeting large corporations such as Lockheed Martin — but asked that a smaller company in the weapons supply chain be left alone, because they were “a good employer”. (To further spell out that lack of strategic clarity: any success against large weapons-makers would inevitably have to flow through to smaller suppliers as well.) This strategy of division also reaches into communities: social bonds prompt workers and their family and friends to defend this industry, while other locals who reject something as basic as killing for profit become opponents. It’s stating the obvious to say this is deliberate: something that is done to communities, unions, and workers.

Another less well-known narrative, is that working in the industry delivers “creativity and self-fulfilment”. This especially targets the future scientists and engineers that corporations need to design their weapons systems — meaning STEM students, or those studying science, technology, engineering, and maths, not only in university but also far earlier. The report Minors and Missiles, by the Medical Association for the Prevention of War, does a great job documenting this, especially showing how participatory science competitions are a mainstay: for example, the biggest weapons corporation in the world, Lockheed Martin is the largest sponsor of National Youth Science Week, the country’s largest STEM competition for secondary school students.

But this effort starts far earlier than secondary school: children as young as four are targeted with activities like Lego League competitions, sponsored by weapons companies. The industry isn’t trying to recruit kids at four years old; rather, this shows how much effort they put into fabricating their social licence. If young children associate positive experiences with weapons brands, even before they know what the brands actually do, this association sticks —
a mainstay of marketing practice — and lays the ground for future engagement. Again, this is a long-term effort to counter the industry’s inherent stigma, and is sustained in actions large and small. One campaigner against weapons corporations in universities tells how engineering students are targeted by a consistent stream of emails from the industry — invitations to special events, a recruitment pitch saying they could join “the best of the best” in their field, and so on. Some students on the receiving end of this, troubled by the industry’s stigma, described it as a slow drip-drip-drip approach that aims to incrementally normalise the business.

That effort at normalisation against stigma doesn’t let up once people are recruited: if you take a look around several weapons corporation websites you’ll find an emphasis on staff diversity, on hiring women, and on First Nations reconciliation action plans. Again, this displaces and attempts to erase other stories, including those of First Nations communities whose lands are once again — or rather, still — being militarised. For example First Nations Elder Aunty Sue Coleman-Haseldine recounts how whole new swathes of Kokotha Country in South Australia are now being used for missile testing. The dissonance for the employees of these companies doesn’t disappear: one friend relates how, in an internship with a major industry player, he was shocked by a staff email celebrating a massive weapons sale to Saudi Arabia. He asked a colleague about it, and the colleague responded by saying he just didn’t think about “that side of things” — a tiny illustration of a much bigger pattern.

A narrative about freedom that instead delivers oppression; promises of jobs that take jobs away; creativity dedicated to destruction. The level of doublespeak is profound, but the actual character of these false narratives is also key. More than any other, the weapons industry is about dominance, force, and power over others. And yet these values rarely appear in its direct marketing. Instead, the false narratives largely emphasise helping people, or community, or fulfilling yourself in cooperation with others. In other words, these narratives are not “fabricated” from the selfish, ego-driven parts of us. Instead, they aim to capture our best human qualities, and divert these to their own, contrary purposes.

It is this that makes the dissonance so strong for many of those who become involved, and which also often helps make it so hard for them to later reject. The military-industrial complex, and the weapons industry specifically, sets out traps of moral injury for soldiers, or engineers, or any number of other individuals who become involved. War for Profit: no matter how buried, or how far displaced, the stigma from that cannot be erased, and the mere intimation of such looming moral injury can be enough to ensure people stay in denial, and so remain “on the team”.

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As a side note: an under-appreciated feature of the weapons industry is that it is likely the single most corrupt on the planet. Information on this is by definition hard to get, but studies estimate it could account for as much as 40 per cent of global corruption — with large, complex deals, a small, cosy coterie of decision-makers, and a process wrapped up in national security secrecy. A quick search will find plenty of reports: bribes worth hundreds of millions or billions of dollars involving Thales, or BAE Systems, or others; a staggering level of “revolving door” jobs-for-mates for Lockheed Martin, and so on.

Corruption is not only a way of getting hold of even more public funds for private profit, and so massively boosting the global scale of the business: It is also how the industry captures political influence, and degrades democratic systems of transparency and accountability. In other words, the corrupt practices of the weapons industry are the very mechanisms that manufacture impunity for its crimes, all the way up to genocide.

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The most important narrative though — the one that politicians, military leaders, and weapons corporations all deploy — is based on fear. The industry doesn’t often use the word directly; instead it lurks underneath, in promises to keep us safe and secure. But no matter the phrasing, fear is what it is about: the fear that someone else, another power, will invade and take everything we have and all that we love.

More specifically, we’re now told to be afraid of China. Dismissing this can’t afford to be trite: people from Tibet, or Xinjiang, or Hong Kong’s democracy movement, can tell us plenty about the nature of that regime. Yet the people of Iraq, or Palestine, or before that Central America, Vietnam, and many others, can equally tell us about the nature of “our” regimes. This is not a choice between perfect good guys and ultimate bad guys: every militarised state tells its own people that the weapons are needed to keep them safe. Every regime is also prepared to recruit, or inveigle, or conscript those same people (us) into an eventual regional or global war, in the name of that supposed safety.

If we spend our billions and our trillions building for a war between superpowers, then we will get that war. If we allow weapons corporations and their profit motive to drive this — a motive that can only be a perversion of even the most conventional understanding of “defence” — then we will incentivise them to make that war more and more likely. Maybe it will start this decade, or maybe not. Eventually, though, the war will come, and the weapons that supposedly make us “safe” will ensure that it is bigger and more destructive than any before it.

A narrative promising safety from fear, instead creates and ensures exactly that which we fear the most, ensnaring us within different regimes’ deadly contests for hegemony. Warmongers disingenuously claim peace campaigners want a unilateral disarmament that would invite invasion; what they’re actually saying is that the way we’re doing things now, the direction we’re already headed, is the sole option – by definition a failure of vision, of imagination, and of leadership.

This is the practical outcome of their false narratives of displacement. They don’t so much aim to capture our imagination — that phrase usually means something else — but rather to incarcerate it, tie it down and hold it hostage, so that their way actually seems reasonable and logical. So that building ever-bigger weapons, and organising our communities, our education system, and our politics around this industry, seems normal, and inevitable. The only way forward.

How do we counter this scenario in a world that is already so fighting many wars, and is always preparing for more?

The first step is, quite simply, to listen. To the stories of frontline communities and campaigns among First Nations people from this continent, and peoples from Palestine, West Papua, Afghanistan and more. To the campaigns and movements against war that have taken place over history, and which continue today. These all contain extensive histories, philosophies, and visions of resistance and renewal, and it is these which strip the false narratives bare, expose the social licence for the fabrication that it is, and point to ways forward. Whether that’s mobilising against weapons corporations at expos like Land Forces, and at their factories in our neighbourhoods, or getting those corporations out of our universities and schools. Whether it’s civil society campaigns like the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement for Palestine, or others for democratic accountability, which can expose the corruption enabling war-crimes impunity. Or whether it’s a foreign policy and multilateral effort that actually prioritises the methods of diplomacy, treaty, and disarmament, instead of incentivising war for profit.

If it sounds strange to claim that seeds for peace are somewhere in the middle of all this warmongering — that’s the only place they are ever found. The corporations may be strong, but they are also vulnerable. When it comes to their stigma and dissonance, in important ways their vulnerability is in fact a function of their strength. Indeed, that’s the very reason they insist so loudly on narratives of displacement that silence others.

Stories that move us from waging war, to waging peace. For anyone who says what we’re asking for is too radical: to stop the genocide in Palestine and prevent more genocides in the future, and to change a status quo that quite frankly is hardline extremist, radical is what we truly need. The alternatives simply can’t be countenanced, or maybe even survived.

Right now that can be as radical as following international law and imposing an arms embargo on Israel, as just the first step towards justice for Palestine — a step away from the world they’re imposing upon us, and towards the one that we truly need.

Header image: Avery Barnett-Dacey

You can check out some of the stories of movements against militarism, from Afghanistan to the US and UK, from West Papua to First Nations on this continent, on the podcast “Get Your Armies Off Our Bodies”