THE PEACE-LOVING

I.

The German word friedfertig belongs to those compound words that hide their meaning in the joint. Common usage takes it to mean peaceable, gentle, harmless. But the joint says something else. Fertig means: ready. Capable. Equipped. Reisefertig means packed for travel. Kampffertig means armed for battle. And friedfertig? It means finished with peace. Equipped to handle peace — to manage it, to dose it, to administer it. And, if need be, to prevent it.

The Sermon on the Mount says: "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God." Luther translated εἰρηνοποιοί — peacemakers, peace-creators — as friedfertig, and thereby buried the active core beneath a passive surface. Those who make peace became those who are peaceful. Agents became the meek. Luther, himself no meek man, must have known the difference. He chose the gentler word because he knew: those who make peace disturb the order. Those who are peaceable disturb no one.

Ever since, all who profit from war have carried that word before them as a shield.

II.

There exists an industry whose business model depends on human beings killing one another. It employs millions, generates hundreds of billions, it has its trade fairs, its journals, its associations, its lobbyists, its collective bargaining agreements and its company kindergartens. It is as normal as the automotive industry, and at the receptions of the one you meet the same faces as at the receptions of the other.

This industry does not call itself the arms industry. It calls itself the security and defence industry. It does not produce weapons but security technology. It does not supply warring parties but partners. It does not export to crisis regions but to countries satisfying their "legitimate security needs." Every word is carefully chosen, every euphemism legally vetted, every press release breathes responsibility and prudence.

And above all: this industry is unpolitical. It stands above the conflicts it supplies. It does not judge who is right and who is wrong. It delivers what is ordered and approved. The state decides; the industry executes. Like a pharmacist who does not question the prescription.

The same professed apoliticism with which the VDI — Germany's Association of Engineers — manoeuvred through 170 years of history: through the German Empire, through the Gleichschaltung, through the war, through reconstruction, as though engineering were an activity without consequences. The "unpolitical association" was never unpolitical: it was political in the precise sense that it chose to take no position, and that choice benefited those in power.

The security and defence industry has perfected this principle.

III.

The system works because it is not a system. There is no cartel with articles of association, no consortium with an organisational chart, no conspiracy with minutes. There is something more effective: seven pillars, each acting on its own, each pursuing its own logic, and together producing an outcome that none of them individually intends — and that all of them collectively need.

Industry produces. It develops, it manufactures, it delivers. Its logic is the logic of any industry: capacities must be utilised. A factory that makes assault rifles cannot stand idle for three years and then restart. The skilled workers are gone. The machines are cold. The supply chains are broken. Industry does not need war — it needs constant demand. The distinction is essential. A single large war is worth less in business terms than a dozen medium-intensity conflicts stretching across decades.

Politics approves. In democracies, every arms export requires an export licence. Politics holds the lever. But politics is also caught in the trap: the arms industry employs tens of thousands in constituencies. It pays taxes. It funds research. It sponsors. And it argues with jobs, technological sovereignty, and alliance capability. Politics approves not because it wants war, but because it fears the consequences of non-approval — unemployment, loss of voters, industrial hollowing-out, strategic dependency.

Intelligence services inform. They deliver the situation assessments on which politics decides. But situation assessments are not photographs of reality — they are interpretations. Which information is highlighted and which disappears into the footnotes, whether a threat is classified as "acute" or "latent," whether a negotiated solution is assessed as "realistic" or "naive" — this shapes decisions without dictating them. The intelligence services are the curators of perception. And many of their retired employees work for industry.

The military defines the need. It writes the requirement profiles, it specifies the weapons systems, it tests and evaluates. And its generals, after retirement, move into the boardrooms of the industry they previously oversaw. The revolving door between the Pentagon and Lockheed Martin, between the Hardthöhe and Rheinmetall, is as old as the arms industry itself. Eisenhower called it the "military-industrial complex" in 1961 and warned against it. The audience applauded and carried on.

Banks finance. No arms deal without credit. No tank is paid for in cash. Banks provide export credits, insured by state guarantees. They finance the purchase, they finance the war, and they finance the reconstruction afterwards. Three transactions from one conflict: the means of destruction, the destruction, the repair. No bank calls itself a war financier. There are only institutions that conduct "trade finance" and "project finance."

Media legitimise. Not through propaganda — that would be too transparent. Through framing. Which conflict makes headlines and which does not. Which dictator is portrayed as a monster and which as a guarantor of stability. Whether an arms delivery is narrated as "support for allies" or as "escalation of the conflict." The media do not determine what happens, but they determine how it is understood. And they are dependent: on access, on sources, on exclusive interviews, on embedded correspondents who see only what they are allowed to see.

Think tanks supply the theory. They sit between intelligence services, politics, and media, and produce what none of the three can produce alone: intellectual justification. Their studies bear titles like "Strategic Stabilisation in the Greater Middle East" or "Democracy Promotion as Security Policy." Their authors are former state secretaries, retired generals, emeritus professors — people whose titles lend authority without anyone needing to question the funding. For the think tanks are funded by arms corporations, by governments that export arms, and by foundations whose wealth derives from industries that profit from the management of conflicts. The think tank is the car wash: at the top, interest flows in; at the bottom, expertise comes out. And the expertise always says the same thing — that the world is dangerous and that action is needed. What kind of action is determined by whoever pays.

It is the think tank that forged the most powerful narrative of the last three decades: democracy export. The idea that democracy can be delivered to countries like a product — with sanctions as marketing, military interventions as distribution, and "nation building" as after-sales service. Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya — everywhere democracy was exported, and everywhere destroyed states were left behind, in which the management of conflicts is secured for decades. Democracy export is the perfect business model: it always fails, and every failure generates new demand. The think tank that recommended the intervention subsequently analyses why it failed and recommends the next one. The pillar sustains itself.

Seven pillars. Each unpolitical on its own. Each peace-loving on its own. And together a machine that turns conflicts into wars and wars into revenue.

IV.

There is a moment in recent history when the machine became visible because it stopped: the years after 1989.

The Cold War was over. The Warsaw Pact dissolved. The Soviet Union collapsed. The peace dividend was proclaimed. Defence budgets fell. And in the factories of the security and defence industry, panic broke out.

In Oberndorf am Neckar, in the factory of Heckler & Koch, they attempted what the government called "arms conversion": the switch from military to civilian production. Swords into ploughshares. Or, more prosaically: assault rifles into bread knives. They signed licence agreements for civilian manufacturing technologies. They set up conversion departments. They applied for subsidies. They did everything that had to be done to demonstrate good will.

And then they waited.

They waited because they knew — not consciously, not spoken aloud, not recorded in any document, but as the collective certainty of an industry that knows its market — that the peace would not hold. Not because anyone was planning the next war. But because the structures that generate wars had not been dismantled. Because weapons stockpiles decay and must be replaced. Because conflicts that have simmered for decades do not stop simmering just because a wall falls in Berlin. Because a dozen countries that had previously been stabilised by the East-West equilibrium suddenly stood without any ordering power.

They did not wait long. In August 1990, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. In June 1991, the disintegration of Yugoslavia began. In December 1992, the first US troops landed in Somalia. The peace crisis was over. The conversion was quietly buried. The licence agreements gathered dust.

Heckler & Koch nearly went bankrupt nonetheless — not because the new wars were too small, but because the company did not survive the transition. It was sold, sold again, sold once more. Each new owner bought not the factory — he bought the access: the export licences, the contacts with defence ministries, the customer relationships in regions where no one asks where the weapons come from.

The conversion never had a chance. Not because it was technically impossible — the machines that mill a G3 receiver can also mill a machine component. But because the seven pillars worked in concert: industry did not want to convert. Politics needed the jobs. Intelligence services delivered threat assessments that justified rearmament. The military defined new requirements for new operational scenarios. Banks financed new deals in new crisis regions. The media explained why the world after 1989 had not become safer but more dangerous. And the think tanks supplied the studies that made all of it appear as strategic necessity.

V.

The masterpiece of the peace-loving is the Bewirtschaftung — the management. The word comes from forestry. You do not clear-cut a forest — that would be plunder. You do not simply plant one — that would be idealism. You manage it: you selectively extract, let it regrow, extract again. Sustainable yield.

Conflicts are managed. No conflict may be fully resolved — that would eliminate the revenue. No conflict may completely spiral out of control — that would create chaos, which is bad for business. The ideal conflict is of medium intensity, of long duration, and involves multiple parties that can all be supplied separately.

Yemen is a perfectly managed conflict. Libya is one. Sudan. Myanmar. The Sahel. They all have one thing in common: there is no solution in sight, there is no end in sight, and there is a constant need for resupply. The ammunition is expended, the vehicles are destroyed, the communication systems become obsolete — and must be replaced. Decade after decade.

The international arms fairs are the places where the management is coordinated. Not in secret back rooms — on the open exhibition grounds, between the stands, at the evening receptions. IDEX in Abu Dhabi, Eurosatory in Paris, DSEI in London. Defence ministers give opening speeches. Democracies and dictatorships stand side by side. Everything legal. Everything transparent. Everything peace-loving.

In the VIP lounges, no one speaks of war. They speak of "security architectures," of "stabilisation contributions," of "capacity building." Every word is chosen to invoke peace while enabling war.

VI.

The peace-loving need no conspiracy. They need only the agreement that everyone does their job.

The engineer at Rheinmetall designs the best infantry fighting vehicle he can design. He is proud of his work. He is peace-loving.

The civil servant at the Ministry of Economic Affairs reviews the export application under applicable law and grants the licence. He follows the regulations. He is peace-loving.

The retired general advises the Saudi army on the "modernisation of their armed forces." He shares his expertise. He is peace-loving.

The analyst at Deutsche Bank assesses the risk profile of trade finance for the export of armoured vehicles to the United Arab Emirates. He does his work conscientiously. He is peace-loving.

The correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine reports from Yemen on the "Saudi-led coalition" and its "military operations against the Houthi rebels." He reports accurately. He is peace-loving.

And in Yemen, children starve.

Every single person in this chain has clean hands. None wanted a war. None dropped a bomb. None killed a child. The system did it. And the system is made up entirely of the peace-loving.

VII.

There is an experiment in social psychology that explains this mechanism. Stanley Milgram showed in 1961 that ordinary people are willing to administer painful electric shocks to others when an authority figure instructs them to do so and assumes responsibility. The experiment has been replicated thousands of times, across cultures, with variations. The result is stable: most people do what they are told, as long as the responsibility is distributed.

The management of conflicts is Milgram's experiment on an industrial scale. No one presses the button alone. The engineer designs, the civil servant approves, the general advises, the banker finances, the journalist explains. Each turns the dial one notch further. And the responsibility? It lies with the system. And the system is no one.

Hannah Arendt called it the "banality of evil" — the insight that evil is not the work of monsters but of bureaucrats doing their jobs. Eichmann organised the transport of millions of people to the extermination camps, and he did so with the same bureaucratic diligence with which he might have organised bus timetables. He was, in his own self-understanding, unpolitical.

The peace-loving are not Eichmanns. The proportions are different, the crimes are different, the intentions are different. But the structure is the same: the decomposition of a moral act into so many technical sub-steps that at no single point does the whole become visible.

VIII.

The peace-loving have an argument that is hard to refute: the world is dangerous. There are aggressors, dictators, terrorists. Those who do not defend themselves will be overrun. Disarmament is a beautiful dream, but it only works if everyone participates — and everyone never does. Therefore there must be an industry that produces the means of defence. Therefore this industry must be profitable so that it remains innovative. Therefore exports must be approved so that the industry achieves the volumes it needs to amortise development costs. Therefore one must also supply countries that do not quite meet democratic ideals, because "strategic partnership" is more important than moral purity.

The argument is logical. Every single step is comprehensible. And the result is a planet on which at any given moment more than twenty armed conflicts are taking place, in which people are killed with industrially manufactured weapons approved by democratic governments, financed by reputable banks, and commented upon by serious media.

The argument of the peace-loving is the argument of the VDI in 1933: we only do engineering. What politics makes of it is not our concern. And as with the VDI, the claimed neutrality is not neutrality but a decision — the decision not to look. Not to ask what the customer does with the product. Not to ask why the conflict one supplies is never resolved.

The peace-loving have a second argument: if we do not supply, others will. The Russians, the Chinese, the Israelis, the North Koreans. This argument is irrefutable — and it is precisely the argument with which any moral responsibility can be delegated. If I do not sell the liquor, the shop next door will. If I do not run the brothel, someone else will. If I do not deliver the tanks, Moscow will.

The peace-loving have many arguments. For every starving child in Yemen, they have an explanation. And every explanation is peace-loving.

IX.

There is a way out. But it does not lie where one would expect.

It does not lie in disarmament — for disarmament treaties are concluded by the same governments that approve the exports. It does not lie in regulation — for regulation is shaped by the same lobbyists who then circumvent it. It does not lie in the media — for the media report on the war, not on the chain that enables it.

It lies in language.

The peace-loving are powerful as long as language is their accomplice. As long as "security technology" may be said where "weapons" is meant. As long as "stabilisation contribution" may be said where "participation in war" is meant. As long as "capacity building" may be said where "rearmament" is meant. As long as "democracy promotion" may be said where "regime change" is meant. As long as "peace-loving" may be said where "profiting from war" is meant.

Whoever names the euphemisms destroys the protected space in which the seven pillars work undisturbed. It does not resolve the conflict. It does not prevent the next war. But it makes it impossible to narrate it as a natural event.

The peace-loving fear nothing so much as the naming. Not the accusation — accusations can be denied. Not the protest — protests ebb. Not the law — laws can be shaped. But the exact word that says what is.

Bewirtschaftung. Management. The word says what is.