Wars have a cause - a main cause. We tend to think state against state confrontation, but across all nations the arms companies have sold and promoted industrial weapons for a hundred and fifty years encouraging these confrontations. They need wars to flourish and usually they get them. War or Peace? tells the story of how Western arms companies have militarized the world by selling and promoting arms. The evidence piles up - Russia, Japan, Turkey, the Congo, Paraguay, Afghanistan - first the arms come in and then the war arrives. It especially shows how these companies generated the two World Wars. The arms companies engineered four arms races which sparked and fuelled World War One. This was the normal understanding after World War One. Weapons, supplied by the merchants of death, lead inevitably to wars. After 1918 the threatened arms companies faced world-wide disarmament, especially in the Great 1932 Disarmament Conference. They were not going to be defeated. They destroyed disarmament politically and promoted and funded Fascism to create the disorder they needed for another war, the Second World War. Two World Wars = Same Cause - selling arms and faith in them. The world-wide problem was not "appeasement", but the promotion of weapons and militarism. This book unfolds this ignored history, largely buried since 1939. The promotion of arms has dominated world history and caused most of two hundred million deaths but its role remains hidden. Here it is exposed, making the choice between War or Peace a real one for us now.
About the Author: Alan Storkey has a 2:1 economics degree from Cambridge, an M.Sc from the London School of Economics and a PhD in economic epistemology from the Frije Universiteit, Amsterdam. His focus is on Christian perspectives in the social sciences which he has taught at universities and theological colleges. He was Chair of the Christian Movement for Democracy for a decade and his books include A Christian Social Perspective, The Meanings of Love, Foundational Epistemologies in Consumption Theory, Marriage and its Modern Crisis and Jesus and Politics. He lives with his wife, Elaine, near Cambridge.He has worked on militarism for a decade or more.