TRASHFUTURE - The Atrocity Exhibition feat. Arron Merat

Episode Date: June 30, 2020

It’s a new, slightly less chaotic configuration with Riley (@raaleh), Alice (@AliceAvizandum), Hussein (@HKesvani), and special guest Arron Merat (@A_merat). We’re discussing the British arms industry, how Gulf money backs up the Pound, and how distributed manufacturing allows exporters to avoid arms sale bans in the UK while allowing Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries to devastate Yemen. It’s a sad listen, folks! If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture Here's a central location to donate to bail funds across the US to help people held under America's utterly inhumane system: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/the-bail-project  If you want one of our *fine* new shirts, designed by Matt Lubchansky, then e-mail trashfuturepodcast [at] gmail [dot] com. £15 for patrons, £20 for non-patrons, plus shipping.  *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind GYDS dot com). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/

Hello and welcome back to this week's episode of TF. It is a configuration we don't do very often, but I'm interested to see what it's capable of. It's myself, Alice in Hussein today. And we are talking to Aaron Merritt, who is a journalist who specializes in defense and the arms trade, who's worked for Shadow Difford, and who also served as the Economist Iran correspondent for several years. And you can follow him on Twitter at A underscore Merritt. Yeah, another another thigh slapping episode of our comedy podcast. Oh, yeah, this is

After after we talked about the extent to which the UK supplies riot gear to American cops, we thought it would be a good idea to talk about some of the other sort of implements that we that we sell to facilitate your creativity or whatever worldwide. And with with that in mind, I've selected a reading. It's sort of a long one, but it's a reading for us to open with about the sorts of things that British companies sell and that the British government facilitates the sale of and their use in the ongoing Saudi offensive in Yemen. And I will say this is this is like if you like a content warning or a trigger warning or whatever else you want to call it. If you don't want to hear something quite gruesome, I would skip ahead

maybe a couple of minutes in the podcast, because this will thoroughly ruin your day. But I think it is sort of incumbent on us to see what's being done with, well, our money and in our name. So this is from the New York Times. And it's in this case, it's an American weapon being used by the Saudis. But the British ones are much the same. So I'll start I'll start reading this now. The nose of the weapon hit rock, tripping a fuse in its tail section that detonated the equivalent of 200 pounds of TNT. When a bomb like this explodes, the shell fractures into several thousand pieces, a puzzle of steel shards flying through the air is up to eight times the speed of sound. Steel moving that fast doesn't just kill people, it rearranges them. It removes

appendages from torsos, it disassembles bodies and redistributes their parts, a sphere of expanding gas coming off the bomb. Meanwhile, fills a body's hollow parts with energy, rupturing eardrums, collapsing lungs, perforating abdominal cavities. The blast wave pushes air to such extraordinary speeds that the wind alone can cast limbs off bodies. The back of the tanker truck launched off its chassis and slammed into rock. Jagged pieces of bomb flew thousands of miles per hour outward, and Rebia was almost fully decapitated. The top half of his face was removed, leaving just an open lower jaw. The heat of the blast burned most of his clothes off and charred his skin. So he was left naked, his genitals exposed, his body actually smoking. Next to him, his cousin, Al Qadi, the

judge, was burning alive, his blood vessels expelling water and his body inflating. He began to scream. Fad was picked up, hiss with shrapnel, both of his arms shattering. Metal had bit into leg, trunk, jaw, eye. One piece entered his back and exited his chest, collapsing his lungs. By the time he woke up, he was suffocating. But he wasn't even aware of any of these things, because his brain had been taken over by pain that seemed to come from another world. As the dust began to clear, he saw that the ground was littered with burning chunks of metal. He felt as if he were in hell, as if it were judgment day. When he tried to crawl over the burning material, he fell down to his side because his forearms were pulverized. He began to roll

over superheated metal over the body parts of his friends. He wasn't thinking about his friends. He wasn't thinking about anyone. In that moment, Fad forgot he had children. Raytheon missiles and defense. We are one global team. 30,000 employees across 28 countries dedicated to solving our customers' most complex mission critical challenges. How are we all feeling? Oh, my goodness. Are we feeling like Raytheon is going to solve our most complex mission critical needs? Well, I thought, why don't we ask Aaron that? Aaron, how do you, just by way of introduction,

sort of, what are some of your thoughts about that and about Raytheon's glib PR? So Raytheon is a prime contractor in America, similar to BAE is in the UK. Their marketing spiel and their shareholder spiel is essentially, if you can arm people to the hilt, you create a situation where you deter violence and, therefore, the world is more peaceful. Everyone lapses up even though the sort of empirical evidence to that isn't true because if you arm our Gulf allies, they can use disproportionate power which they wouldn't otherwise be able to use against their political enemies, which is pretty much what we've been seeing with the Yemen conflict which started in 2015. It's important to stress that Saudi Arabia

before 2015 hadn't really used the enormous amount of hardware at their disposal. So they had seen some action in the anti-ISIS war and they had been bombing the Houthis a little bit in wars which became known as the Sada Wars, which was called Operation Scorched Earth. They weren't really hiding what their plans were. But in 2015, they started using these planes and the tempo of the war went up so much they couldn't do it themselves. So they really required UK training, UK logistical support, UK manpower on the ground, contracted by the MOD under long-standing contracts, and obviously UK and US hardware. So it enabled them to essentially launch a shock and awe campaign which has been going on to this day in Yemen.

And I think it's important to remember that Raytheon and BAE systems and so on, they position themselves in these ways. They almost position themselves like tech companies saying, we're going to solve problems, we're going to make the world a better place. But the complex problem they are solving is... How to dismantle a tanker truck that has been used to help borrow well in rural Yemen. And I think that it's important to know, because I remember we talked about this a little bit on our episode about arms export. We said we're going to talk about it more. And I think it's important to know precisely what's going on and precisely, as you say, Erin, how this is being

carried out and how it is intimately connected to American and British politics. Yep. It's an episode that's going to make you feel bad. And hopefully has already made you quite angry. Yes. Hussein, before I jump in, I want to get your thoughts as well. Yeah. I mean, I would say that that extract from Alice Red came from this very long New York Times piece, which took me a couple of days to get through, partly because it is very long and I have the attention span of a distracted goose, but also best because it's very... It's really tough to get through. The pictures are really a lot. I don't really know how to describe it in a way that isn't horrifying. And I think just as I thought there will be talking out through the

episode, I'm sure. But it's one where I think about how when people who are on the labor right or on the centrist right talk about how, when the left talk about imperialism and militarism, that we delve into what they call conspiracy theories. The idea that Britain has no involvement in these foreign wars or their involvement is only limited in humanitarian and it's just about opening humanitarian corridors and that's it. And I think this is a very good insight into not only how we are very involved, but also how just contracting and privatization and a continued privatization of military campaigns obscures that type of responsibility and obscures that type of... It makes it harder for us to talk about militarism and contracting militarism as

policy because of how obscure it is. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but... No, absolutely. This is the kind of thing that the labor right like to talk about as like a muscular liberalism, right? This is what the muscle is doing. Well, I guess the thing I was trying to get at was more like... They'll kind of reasonably say that we want fewer wars or we want... We don't really want to participate in war and everything. But the power of these organizations, whether they are like Raytheon or BAE or even places like Serco and stuff, the increasing use of them as contractors and the invasion that they get, even as they are kind of proven to be not just massively

incompetent, but also like inherently corrupt as well. It sort of just kind of... It says a lot about like how what the next kind of few years of... Especially if you're on the left, the next few years of like interacting with this type of prevailing militarism is going to look like. Oh, yeah. And so I... In that spirit, I want to sort of almost take us back to basics. So we spoke a little bit about how arms export licenses work, but I think, Erin, it's worth our while to ask you in detail how a bomb made in Scotland at the Raytheon factory ends up getting dropped on Yemen and how that is an overtly political decision that is, again, made politically. So, yeah, I listened to your last episode and you were

spot on. And essentially, as you described, the statutory responsibility for the export of controlled goods, which include arms and also some defensive equipment like body armor or anything which we wouldn't really... Anything you really want to regulate comes down to the Secretary of State for International Trade. Previously, it was biz. And this obscures more than it reveals, really, because the actual minister in charge of the criteria which you would be most interested in looking at for arms exports to dodgy countries is the foreign secretary. So they sign off on something called Criterion 2 of the consolidated criteria. It all sounds quite dreary. But what that means, really, is that if there is a, quote, clear risk that the

arms you're selling might be used in the commission of serious violations of international humanitarian law, which essentially means deliberately or recklessly targeting civilians. So, bombing water infrastructure, bombing food infrastructure, bombing markets, bombing hospitals, or just using disproportionate force like they did, for example, in 2015 over SADA, which is the sort of Houthi stronghold, you cannot sell them arms under UK law. And this was signed off by Boris Johnson when he was the foreign minister and then was challenged in a judicial review last year. And the courts found that ministers, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Liam Fox, Sajid Javid had been acting illegally when they signed off these licenses. And the

reason they had been acting legally, because they're very explicit about this, the courts, they had just been totally ignoring all the allegations of deliberate or reckless attacks against civilians. They just decided not to look at him. I pretend I do not see it. Yeah, precisely. And I think you, it's noted notable here, right, that there is a real, a considerable financial incentive for them to do so. So I have some of the figures, which is in 2015, military exports from Britain to Saudi Arabia multiplied 35 fold from just 83 million to 2.9 billion. I wouldn't be surprised if it was considerably higher as well, because as you mentioned also in your last episode, you've got these open licenses which came in,

I believe in the early years of camp of the Cameron government where you can like, there's certain licenses which say you can move X amount of aircraft parts or X amount of bombs to the end user. And that's what your license covers. But then up there are these open licenses which just give people a car company, the carte blanche to export. And in Saudi Arabia, there's a lot of these open licenses. For example, the paveway bombs, which as you described, are built in Fife in a small new town in Glenrothes. They had open licenses throughout the majority of the war. So we don't know, and under open licenses, you don't have to release the quantity. The companies obviously know how many they're shipping, but it's not

incumbent on them to tell the government or the public. So it could be hundreds of times an increase. They don't identify the holders of any of these licenses publicly, which was the thing that I was trying to find out when I was trying to... I wanted to list, if possible, the manufacturers of tear gas in the UK, and absolutely impossible to find. So a letter loan, like you can point to the large companies, you can point to your BAE or your Raytheon. But the ownership structure is such that it will be a subsidiary of Raytheon missiles and defense. And then parts will be made in a subsidiary of a subsidiary, and none of this is public. Yeah. And I think it's public. It's not public for a very good reason. And I think one

of that very good reason, but a strategic reason on the part of the people doing it. And it's not public because it's not in the interest of the government to make it public, because it's not in the interest of the companies to have that be known what it is that they're doing in detail. That's why we have these strange techie PR moves by them, whether it's... Raytheon presents, we're going to have girls in STEM so that anyone could be Major Kong. We're all... And so all of this obscurationism means that no one really knows and no one can know. And part of this also, you quote David Waring in one of your pieces where he says that he estimates a fifth of the UK current account deficit is financed by Saudi cash, which stabilizes an

increasingly vulnerable pound. And that's the way that it comes in. So it is in nobody's interest that anybody in the public be able to understand and critique what is actually going on. The British... It's no exaggeration to say the British economy is propped up by the defense export sector. And this was a deliberate decision made by Thatcher. Like when she brought in monetarism, which decimated a lot of British industry, she intervened to save the defense export industry by applying to Saudi Arabia and signing the Audi Amemar deal, which is known for its corruption. Because obviously, Tony Blair quashed the serious fraud officers' investigation into the terms in which it was negotiated. There were lots of bribes paid, BAE systems paid for

prostitutes for various Saudi princes, like hotel rooms, trips to Harrods. Good self-care. So this Audi Amemar deal is the key. But what is rarely reported on the Audi Amemar deal is the actual terms. And there's a great researcher called Mike Lewis, who was a UN's weapon investigator. And he's basically... Because the terms of Audi Amemar have never been made public. But then there are cabinet minutes, which come out through Q and the National Archives, which sort of refer to sections of the terms of the Audi Amemar deal. And by sort of quite like good forensic inference, he's determined that Britain signed up essentially to underwrite Saudi security.

In the 1980s, where Saudi was feeling worried about the Iranian Revolution, they were worried... Like there were some domestic zealots who took over the grand mosque in Mecca. And they really wanted to get their hands on the top aviation technology so they could see off any challenge. And at this time, Britain was financially in a huge amount of trouble. So they signed this sort of fausty impact, whereby Britain said explicitly under contract that if Saudi Arabia gets involved in any conflict, this is specifically outlined, that Britain will support it through contractors so that they can use the weapons and through the weapons themselves to fight any conflict. So we support Saudi Arabia to the hilt. In exchange, the Petrodollars, which Saudi Arabia

gets from selling oil across the world, are recycled back into the UK economy. It makes Central London very weird because it's now just like a playground for lots of various princes. Also, the other thing that's very funny to me is that we've seen sort of the carrot of these Petrodollars. The stick is that when the serious fraud office was investigating the Aliyama Ma deal, the Saudi ambassadors for the UK threatened to 9-11 us just for funsies. Like what was the actual... The actual threat was that if the probe was allowed to go on, then Saudi would suspend all of their intelligence sharing and security cooperation with the UK. Reading between the lines what this means is roughly the same thing as the Saudi foreign

ministry tweeting that image of the Air Canada plane flying into Toronto, right? When you hear British ministers always like this word robust, so they say we have a very robust arms export control system, and they also say we have very robust conversations with our Saudi allies about the question of human rights. I always think it's robust the other way around. The Damocles sword is hanging over Britain if we mess with Saudi Arabia, and this is a situation we've got ourselves into. I spoke to a minister who was batting for the Saudi war throughout 2016 when I used to work for his counterparts in Parliament on the shadow benches, and he told me that at the National Security Council, which is essentially where these strategic decisions are

made and maintained, he was told by like senior mandarins and that Saudi Arabia had threatened to sort of like pull the financial rug from under Britain unless they didn't support their war in Yemen. And these same ministers, they knew that Saudi Arabia couldn't win this war because no one has ever won a war against guerrilla insurgents with aircraft. Like it just, it's literally never happened. No, but the good news is the longer it drags on, the more guidance packages and the more bombs you get to sell. Got it. Perfect. Oh, incidentally, a question, which I know the answer to, but just as like a general interest, I've told Riley this, do you happen to know what Al-Yamma Ma'am means in Arabic? No, I don't. It's the Dove. I really like that. It's a real case

of the subtext of becoming text. The Saudis love a good codename, which is why, incidentally, the Eurofighter, which they bought as part of this deal, is codenamed in Saudi service as a salam, peace. Just very, very cool country full of normal decision makers. They just, they just, they just like irony. Yeah, I mean, we've been making fun of Gulf militaries on the show for a while. It's one of my favorite running gags. Like the idea that like the Emirati military is like, it's 80% of its budget is like Dior leather belts, right? But like the Saudis, there is, there is a certain special circle of hell for I think a lot of the top Saudi military people. And you see this, right? And you know, like you say about robustness, this is all very explicit

on one side. It's only the British who have to, who have to pretend to be like, oh, well, we have these conversations about human rights. Saudi Arabia is coming back and saying like, yeah, no, they told us about human rights. It's like, no, of course not. It's, it would be ridiculous. It's, it's perfectly evident what the, what the balance of power is there on one side. But for some reason, we have to like save our blushes and be like, yeah, no, we're being very responsible about this. Well, it's, it's, you know, all friend of the show, Ali Thorn came on and we talk, and if you remember, we talked about this concept of the intellectual lacuna, something that as many times as it can be said and evidenced is never really allowed to be known. It's not allowed to

be publicly known. And so it is by just sheer refusal to stop engaging in PR. The conservatives essentially are able to say, and the conservatives and, you know, the sort of members of, you know, what I think Derek Davidson quite helpfully calls the foreign policy blob that sort of advocates for endless war, you know, they are, everyone knows it's not true, but it's not allowed to be publicly acknowledged that there is that this relationship is anything but a constructive mutual defense pact between the U.K. and Saudi Arabia. Mutual ally, yeah. Yeah, where, and it's not, and it's all of the civilian deaths that happen just seem to slide

off of the topic because it just goes back to them saying, actually, we don't, it's against the rules for us to report to war criminals. In order to like articulate this relationship, I want to use a metaphor, but I don't want to suggest as this might do, the Britain is blameless or a victim in this because as you say, and we got ourselves, we got ourselves into this right in the first place, this is a series of British policy decisions, but Saudi Arabia is a key strategic ally of Britain in the same way that Don Corleone is a key strategic ally of like a China shop that pays protection money, right? It's perfect, yeah.

It all comes down to, like, I mean, this can be overdone a little bit, but this sort of sense, particularly in the 80s, the sense of sort of imperial grandeur, like the idea that Britain needs to have its own independent heir deterrent and like when it look when it ship, because we have the typhoon, which we, which we, we have a tornado rather, which we produced independently. And then when it came to the typhoon, we couldn't afford to produce it, even in consortium with the Italians and the Germans without an enormous export market, which was Saudi Arabia. So the Saudi Arabia export deal was built into the very, to the very structure of the UK's independent heir deterrent. We would not be able to have one without selling to monsters in the Gulf who want

to use it, whatever they need to. I'm also very, very interested in this idea of imperial power, because it brings it into sort of my specialist subject, which is the whole debacle around Libya, right? Part of the reason why Libya has become so fucked over the course of, well, literally the last 10 years is because of this sort of, I think, almost reflexive tendency within, within the intelligence services, within the blob generally, to try to like, essentially to get one over on the Americans, right? Like the Blair going to the desert and Gaddafi's sort of come to Jesus moment, followed by MI6 sending people to Libya to torch them and so on and so forth. All of that was premised on the idea that like, if we can get in there first, if we can become friendly, then we

can sort of, we can undercut the Americans and have our own special strategic ally. And it will make us feel very important again. And then subsequently, when the Arab Spring happened, we started, you know, sort of training and arming various unsavory people on the basis that everyone, we wanted to be trained and armed. If you wanted to be trained and armed, we would do it because we loved feeling like we were like, yeah, we love feeling like a teacher. No, that's not, not even that, not even that really, because like, there's, there's, I think, part of the reason why I love talking about Libya so much is that it really lays bare a lot of the hypocrisy in that when Cameron decided that he wanted to get his war on, right, there was a great

deal of talk about like, transition to democracy, right? Libya was going to be like, I don't know, it was going to be like Spain, a little bit south, right? It was going to be, it was going to be nice, it was going to be representative and wholesome. At the same time that that was happening, we were flying in SAS patrols and SAS officers to talk to quite possibly like some of the same people who would later be in ISIS or Al Qaeda and like North Africa or whoever else. And it was like, it was, again, it was one of these lacunae, right? It was instinctively known within the British state that whatever, whatever sort of power structure formed in Libya after the revolution, it was going to be Islamist controlled. And therefore, those were the people that we wanted

to cultivate. But of course, we never actually said this. And so you would still have, you know, various NATO leaders and heads of state going on television and talking about how, you know, the Libyan people's struggle for democracy was going to like be assisted to fruition. And it was so cynical that I just, I remain sort of in awe of it, really. I want to be slightly careful here. But when I was working for this minister, I was asking a lot of PQs about the relationship between the Manchester bomber. I don't have to be careful because I am an idiot and I work on like entire guesswork. But it's very, very funny that you can just sort of, you can cultivate these absolute pet headbanging

psychopaths, walk them through the airport in both directions. And then as soon as you import them back to Britain, you say, well, you promised to hang up the suicide vest, right? And it turns out, yeah, not so much. Yeah, it's just the way the ministers respond to questions about a baby and his father, because they were part of, I think it was called the Libyan Islamic fighting group. And they were one of, and they were, they were a group which was meant to sort of be liberating Libya. And it seems that he was an asset of the UK. And then he came back after we opened the doors for him and many other sort of like Libyan diaspora to go and get rid of Gaddafi. And then he came back because he was pissed off. It's like the Boko Boomerang thing.

It's like they come back and they cause all sorts of hell for you when, when you don't need them anymore. Yeah. Well, I mean, it was ever thus, right? Like that's the, it's, it's trite even to say this about Bin Laden, right? It's that like, you think that you have this sort of this pet jihadist that you can kind of keep on a leash. And the whole time he's just getting madder and madder and madder about the fact that you're, you know, stationing troops in Saudi Arabia or whatever else. It's, it's ultimately, it seems like a kind, if you want to sort of look at a psychological reason for this, it seems like a kind of, a kind of anxiety and arrogance. Yeah. Anxiety about the departure from sort of some Halcyon day where we could go and, you know,

kill all the inhabitants of any island we wanted to and no one really, and everyone kind of thought it was good. Is it nostalgia for that and anxiety that not only is it not going, is that not coming back? It's getting worse. And I think like number one, we talk a lot on this show about how, about Britain's relationship with its former empire and its psychological relationship with his empire. And I think it's important to know that there is a clear line to be drawn between imperial nostalgia and what happened to that, that truck in Yemen. Oh yeah. This is why I'm, I'm so curious about the figure of the SAS in this, right? Second of all, I have a side of the second point here as well, is that we are, is that we,

is that Britain especially is almost acts neurotically from a foreign policy perspective in order to try and assure and fix and control things. Like, for example, trying to manage Libya's transition to democracy and so on. Well, at the same time at home, sort of undermining, undercutting and sort of ruining the democratic institutions that we do have. Well, it's, it's even just abroad. It's pathetic, right? Is in some sense, right, we would genuinely be a more psychologically healthy country if we pursued the kind of post-colonial policy that France does, where they just straight up still occupy countries and just assassinate a prime minister of some African country every like year and a half or so. Instead,

we still have to do this thing or we convince ourselves that we're like, we're more, we're above this, we're more important than that. And it's not demonstrably untrue. So I just, I want to focus us a little bit back on, on Saudi. I mean, these are all deeply connected issues, of course. But I want to go back to the finding in 2019 that Britain, that Britain had signed off arms export licenses illegally, that ministers are acting illegally when they did that. And Liz Truss' excuse for doing that was, sorry, I pork markets. Sorry, it's my first day. I'm not very good at my job. Yeah. So as I mentioned, it was found that ministers have been acting illegally and the

court sort of, they found this sort of mutually accommodating fudge review executive, basically, where they said, okay, you can't issue any new licenses to Saudi Arabia until you do a review. This was over a year ago, and we still haven't seen the review done. And as you mentioned, they violated the term, they violated those terms by issuing new licenses anyway, a small amount of them. But like, I went up to the Glenn Rosses, a Raytheon factory, and I spoke to a few of the people who work there and people who have worked there. And the impression I get is one guy told me that 90, 90% of the trade of these Paveway bombs goes to the US to the parent company. And my suspicion is, is that the sort of like the fix considering this court order has been to

just send the arms to Saudi via America, because they have got no court case binding them. So it just continues because the arms trade is like a web, you've just got like, you've got people producing components across Europe, like the, what do you call it? The warhead is produced in a small poor town in Sardinia. And then it gets shipped to a poor small town in Scotland. And then it gets mounted onto a missile, which is the fins are produced in a small in Brighton. The racks are produced in Portsmouth. And then they go to America and then they're re-exported. So there's no real way to, if the defense procurement industry is a web, if you try and stop one sort of thread of that web, it will just go around, it will just go around another

way. It's the, I am, I, it is notable, I think, right, that that a lot of these, this production is done in poor small towns and that the involvement of British workers directly in building these and building these bombs, the requirement of the British state to sign a deal with the devil, where they're willing to underwrite anything Saudi does, I think it is something you absolutely cannot disconnect from the long-term institutional decline of this country. And it's turning into a fundamentally unwell place. The way I put it in this prospect piece was that it's sort of like a moral contagion. Like it was, it was, it was signed off in the 80s. And then now we're bound to whatever Saudi Arabia does. And like the civil servants are all complicit in this because they

aren't forced by ministers on pain of losing their job to like sign off these bloody licenses, even though they know that they're, even though they know the weapons under the licenses are being misused. Like, and, and the workers themselves, they, they train to be electrical engineers, they train to be metal fabricators, and they, they live in a deindustrialized part of the country, they live in Scotland, where they used to build all sorts of other defense equipment, and they also used to build a lot of like consumer goods as well. And these people don't have anywhere else to go. And even when they're in the factory, like they don't actually know what like the circuit boards they're producing goes and what all they know is how to build them. And the information

is kept very, very tight at the top. Just another thing which I want to mention, just because it's funny, and this is meant to be a comedy podcast. But the, I went to an arms fair in, it was about six months before the High Court order. And I was always trying to get in touch with the people in the Department for International Trade, the officials who actually like do most of the signing off of these licenses. In controversial cases like Saudi Arabia, it goes up to ministers a lot of the time, but a lot of the like day to day signing off of these licenses are done by officials. And then I found this official, and he was giving this little talk to prospective exporters about like, this is the British law, and these are the criteria which you've got to

jump through if you want to actually like export weapons across the world. And this guy was a total lunatic. He was like, he spent half the speech talking about how these, how the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps are the worst things in the world, like totally politicized like anyway. And then I caught him at the end. And I told him who I was, I told him I was a parliamentary researcher. I didn't also tell him I was a journalist. And I was like taping our conversation. And he said, Oh, yeah, like, I said, Well, how can you be exporting to Saudi Arabia when like there's literally hundreds of like violations of international humanitarian law, they're bombing markets, they're bombing hospitals, try and then and he he starts to get squirmy, obviously. And

then he told me that like, Oh, yeah, like, I'm just doing what I'm told. And then apropos of nothing, he tells me, but I'm also aware that there was a man called Adolf Eichmann, who said the same thing. Like, they know what's up. Oh, my God. I am, I have like a story which is more like, it's an anecdote than anything else. But we were talking, I think Riley mentioned earlier about like, you have lots of people who live in very poor areas of UK. And I'm sure this is like the same in other countries as well, where the one of the very few sources of income comes from places where they kind of manufacture parts of weapons. And often the time, they don't realize it. But one of the most interesting things, I have friends who like

went on to work on like graduate schemes at some of them at like BAE Systems, but some at like various other engineering organizations. And I had a friend who worked on this project for six months, which involved kind of creating what he later found to be like wings for particular missiles. I'm not sure if that's like the right technical term. So Alice, Alice, please correct me if that. Some of them do have wings, cruise missiles do. Not really important. Yeah. It was just like, he didn't really like for six months, he was working on this thing. And like every time he sort of asked like, what's this for? He told me like his boss would just give him like a serial reference number. And that was it. So there was no way for these people to

even know what they were spending so much of their time doing. And it was just like, yeah. I love to go to the racism factory, which is the only factory in my town and build part number four 2069, which is going to end up in some Yemeni dude's face. It reminded me just of like the Raytheon segment at the beginning of this episode, where they talk about problem solving, and how when they view problem solving, what they're like the problems that they're trying, the problems that they, they get very smart young, like I presumably like graduates from very good universities. Oh yeah. The video that I pulled this from was like all like young dudes and lab codes walking through like glass and steel offices and stuff. It was great.

Their problems are like, you know, how do you streamline something better? Or how can you like, you know, I didn't study physics, but how can you kind of like make a particular object fly at a level, you know, a level place? Like their problems are very, very, they present as being theoretical to the point where people who are like really people who kind of work for these companies to make a living, but also by extension are helping like local economies sort of stay afloat are completely unaware that like this is the system that allows them to kind of live these semi normal lives where even then they're struggling. You could even you can pull that up a level as well, right? Because if you know, this might be difficult to hear it might be even difficult for a lot of

people like, you know, people I know and labor to hear. But if Saudi Arabia is under, underwriting a fifth of our current account, you know, it's, it's not just these sort of, you know, these, these people who are making a choice to work in a factory for a system they don't understand. Like we have to accept that there is quite a bit of a public of social democratic public spending that is underwritten by what's happening to FOD. That's hard to confront. What's happening to what? Sorry. What's happening to the, the, the man who we, we, we talked about in that excerpt. I simply, I refer, I refer back to him because I, because it is so easy for this to become entirely theoretical when the, this is all enabling the killing and dismembering of

civilians in Yemen. Oh yeah. I mean, like this is, this is a sort of like, it's very difficult to start talking about it in moral terms, because once you do that, you, you find yourself turning into this sort of civil service Eichmann who thinks, well, you know, if, if I don't sign it, I'm out of a job and then the next guy signs it and it hasn't delayed it at all. So what's the difference? Well, in fact, this is, this is where I want to bring in another quote from one of your articles, Aaron, where you, you talk about Jeremy Hunt, who spoke about this in moral terms as well, that it would be morally bankrupt to cut the Saudis off from British arms. The argument that Britain needs to be involved so that we can somehow influence the course of events in Yemen

to make them somehow. Yeah. We are, we are the friend holding the drunk guy back outside the club. Well, that's, that I find that really revealing that quote, because he's like, this is what you were talking is what you're talking about imperialism. It's like when, when we had a colonial empire, we felt just by our own virtuousness would be is better, it's better for the natives for us to be there than for them to be sort of like running their own affairs or like managing their own defense. And it's the same thing with like, with Saudi Arabia, we have like these things called liaison officers who sort of like train Saudi Arabia, like Royal Saudi Air Force people about human rights. We have, we have defense attaches,

we have sort of like high level meetings. But at the end of the day, Muhammad bin Salman came in as the defense minister, and he saw a path to become the crown prince. And now he's, and he succeeded in doing that. And he did it because he wanted to climb to the top of the like, of the Saudi hierarchy. And he and his people do not give a shit about what Britain says about anything. We provide the weapons and we provide 6,500 BAE people who are contracted directly by the MOD to be there to make sure that they can use these toys. And they don't like talking about that either, do they? That was the thing which blew my mind because outside of the defense press, it's rarely reported that it's not just arms, like more seriously than arms, it's people,

like you have target ears there, you have the people who are supervising the putting other bombs onto the planes, you have the people who are fusing these bombs, you have an incredible amount of infrastructure in these forward operations in Saudi Arabia. And they're not all British, it's a British company, a lot of them are like Malaysian, they're Australian, they're just like these sort of like, they're just, you know, they're mercenaries. Fucking Serco presents a genocide, great. And that's the thing, the Saudi Arabians have learned actually a little bit more because they've been fighting this war for so long. But if it wasn't for contracts, contractors,

which are, which contracts, which the MOD has signed themselves, these planes wouldn't be taking off. That's also part of the design, right? That is a design consideration is that you need a lot of the like, complex electronics and a lot of like user unfriendly stuff so that you can like, exercise some level of control over who's still supplying this stuff. Yeah, it's value adds. And people keep saying that like, oh, if we didn't provide the bombs to Saudi Arabia, the like, the Russians or the Chinese would and they would be, and like, because they're Russian or Chinese, the war would be considerably worse. But I would argue that the war would be exactly the same, because the argument often goes like, well,

we provide them with precision guided weapons. And if and the Russians would just provide them with sort of like, crude weapons, which you just like push out the back of a plane, like, you know, the barrel bombs in Syria or whatever, but like, if you are using precision guided weapons to precisely target hospitals and schools, it doesn't make a difference whether they're precision guided. And at a certain level, if you are the guy who is like rolling across a field of burning metal, you don't care that much whether or not the burning metal came from crazy Vaklav's house of kerosene, right? And also like, isn't the point about like precision, precision weapons are not like, you can't precisely control an explosion.

So even if you get your guy, like, you're still fucking blowing up. Like, it's also, it's also like a problem with targeting, just to talk about this briefly, is that like, a lot of the targeting is of the form, you know, a Saudi jet loitering on targets sees like a truck, and they decide, I can bomb this truck and I can go home, or a guy sends a WhatsApp message or something like that. You don't have Saudi Arabia certainly doesn't have the kind of intelligence sources inside Yemen to be able to do anything pinpoint that was also true of Libya, which is why we had to use so many special forces to go in and like designate targets. Yeah, the hubris because they have these incredible sophisticated arsenal just makes them

more violent really like the amount of money they're spending on a war which everyone but them seem to believe that they would definitely lose is mind blowing. Like there was some credible figure going around that they're spending 50 billion US dollars a year on this war. And if you think about what 50 billion dollars could could do, I mean, at the end of the day, you had a civil war in Yemen, the Arab Spring came along, they swept away a strong man, and then there was a power vacuum. And that strong man, I don't want to get too much into the domestics, but like, he he put in his uncharismatic deputy, Sala put in a haddie, and then Sala went and joined the Houthis, we've been fighting for 10 years

to take back over the state. And then there was a civil war. And if that wasn't, and that is a bad situation, and that is on that is on yet that is on Yemen. But internationalize the war as we've seen now. As soon as you internationalize local conflicts, you just protract them. And the British knew perfectly well that when their arms were going to be used to internationalize this war, it would go on longer. And they presumably told the Saudi Arabians that they thought this is going to happen, but they knew they weren't going to be listened to. But they think we knew that by that Saudi Arabia's intervention in 2015, would make it a lot longer and a lot bloodier. And it's face saving. But the Saudi Arabians cannot leave Yemen without saving face. And the

Houthis control Yemen now. So, and the Houthis have to live there. So unless Saudi Arabia can't find a way out, so it will just go on as long as as long as Saudi Arabia is humiliated. Yeah, which the Houthis are very good at doing. I particularly enjoyed because like Iran doing the sort of agents of chaos stuff that Qasem Soleimani excelled at huge fan, by the way, was like, no, genuinely was was like supplying surface to surface missiles to the Houthis. This is this is overhyped a lot, right? A lot of them were not very good, or a lot of them were homegrown. But still, though, they did manage to like partially blow up an airport terminal and upper, which is like, I want to say like a Saudi resort town for like the like Saudi 1%. And that

really rattled a lot of people in Riyadh very deeply. And so like, I appreciate how much the Houthis are willing to sort of twist the knife at these at these fuckers who are who are trying to starve them out. I think an instructive way to see the Iranian relationship with the Houthis is sort of like maybe Reginev's relationship with the sort of like nascent communists in Afghanistan, like they didn't the Russians didn't want to go in. They like the whole the whole idea of a sort of like communist revolution was based upon an urban like sort of like working class, and it just wasn't happening in Afghanistan. And I knew it was going to happen. But like, there was this like mission creep. And it's the same thing with Iran, like Iran didn't want to get involved in Yemen. It had

like the Houthis have got like heterodox version of Shiaism, which is very different to the Iranian version of Shiaism. They considered them sort of rubes, like the Houthis used to send delegations to Tehran and the Iranians are like chauvinists. And they used to like embarrass them. They're like they're racist. And they essentially like didn't feel like that it was really worth the candle to piss off Saudi Arabia in the Arab in the Arabian Peninsula. But when the war started, Tehran for this is such a cheap way to keep the Saudis occupied. And this is exactly my point. This is this is why I why I admired Salamani's instincts so much is like he is probably like the single the single biggest driver of this Iranian sort of almost like premonition for when is going to be

a good idea to like watch somebody make a really stupid foreign policy decision like bombing Yemen. The Iranians are like they're not really imperialists that they just do deals. They find people who are subjugated and obviously this the big exception is Syria, which is a real which is a real sort of like moral contagion which exists even in the sort of upper echelons of the Iranian state like but that's a whole other question. But the in terms of Iraq and in terms of Yemen and in terms of Lebanon and in terms according to press reports in in Venezuela and some parts of Africa, the Iranians just find groups which are hard on hard on their luck and they provide support to them when things are going badly. So when so when these groups are in the

ascendancy they are true allies but they're not like looking to mow down the neighborhood in order to take control of it. I mean they're in a very different position from Saudi Arabia because they're a global pariah and they're economically isolated so they don't have another choice to have learned to do this. So they've they just learned sanctions busting, they learn how to sort of like move money, they learn how to move arms, they're very industrious with not much money but yeah like Saudi Arabia has really so I was going to say Saudi Arabia has walked into their trap but like Saudi Arabia just sort of like trap themselves. Yeah it's an unforced error. Yeah exactly and it is if we want to understand if you want to peer into the future a little bit

right I think we can't talk about this without also talking about the DFID FCO merger and to give us a little bit of a flavor. Number one for American listeners, most of our listeners are American still, DFID is the Department for International Development, it's like our version of USAID. Yeah it's our version of USAID but imagine if USAID was officially not a field it's fully disaffiliated from the State Department and that is now ending because it's being absorbed into the blob. Yeah the blob. So this is this was a speech from at the that was made by Ann Marie Trevelyan who has been International Development Secretary since February but this was a speech made a year ago at the previous DSEI arms fair. She says outside the Excel Center today there are

campaigners whose wish for a safe and peaceful world leads them to misunderstand how defense works. Sith Lord our sentence by the way. It is only by showing strength and credible deterrence that those who wish our citizens harm are persuaded not to attack our way of life. I want them to understand that by investing in the equipment and kit which gives our armed forces the ability to defend our citizens against our enemies the government can provide the vital insurance policy and preparedness against unthinkable dangers that we create. Yeah the equipment we purchase allows our armed forces to do global good 24-7. Citation needed. Whether working to protect trade routes in the Straits of Hormuz, combating extremism in Africa or defying Russian

aggression in Eastern Europe. So this is. Oh yeah I forgot that the fucking the dumbest part of us thinking we can punch above our weight is sending like a battalion of Welsh guards to train Estonians how to like march up and down is defying Russian aggression. Defying Russian aggression. The British army of the Rhine wasn't capable of defying Russian aggression and everyone knew that but suddenly we send like I don't know an advisory working group to go and like look at a sand table and all of a sudden Putin is quaking in his shoes. I appreciate that very deeply. But so the overt closeness, the ambition to make a big part of Britain's international development agenda essentially one of arming every party in every conflict nearly. I mean I think

that's one that's been brewing for a while and it's sort of finally snapped into place officially with the announcement of this merger right. I mean we fucked around so hard that we accidentally armed some communists in the form of Rajava so like that's a sign of like there's your mission creep. So I think I want to I want to say that if you want to understand what's going to be happening with DFID all you have to do is look back in time to the Pergao Dam scandal which I imagine people listen to this probably won't be familiar with but Aaron I imagine you're familiar with this one particular earth shattering scandal in the history of foreign aid. Yes so the idea it's a distinction between tide and untide aid basically and in 1997 Tony Blair one of the best things he

did actually was to set up the department for international development and take the power to spend aid out of FCO control and put it into an independent department which essentially runs I mean it's basically kind of filled with lefties they spend aid according to the 2002 International Development Act and it's got to be designed to reduce poverty like it's sort of it's the 90s live aid like poverty was a sort of like hot-button issue and like as you know poverty hasn't gone away but the but when aid is tied as it was before 1997 you basically use it to lubricate arms deals or commercial deals for the UK it's like so in this Pergao Dam scandal Margaret Thatcher's aristocratic defense minister of chat by the name of George Younger

struck a deal with the incumbent Malaysian prime minister and he said and the Malaysian prime minister wanted a dam and in exchange the UK paid 200 million towards that dam but they wanted an arms deal as well so the Malaysians had to buy arms in exchange for that aid money and that disappeared with the foundation of DFID it was set their short was the first the first secretary of state and since then DFID has done it's considered internationally a pretty good actor in spending aid money it spends some aid money on on Yemen it's a shame that like the Department of Defense um yeah I'm using I'm using this pipette with one hand to empty this bucket that I'm filling up with a jug with the other hand but um perhaps perhaps I'm being a bit

verbose but essentially uh it seems to be that Boris uh is taking his cues from the Tory right to do away with um untied aid uh is under under Cameron there was a sort of aid review which said that all aid must be spent in the national interest which was one step towards that and now it's um aid will be spent um more directly in the national interest under um a more powerful FCO next perhaps for 0.7 commitment of GDI will disappear and perhaps there will be um some legislative changes to make aid essentially sort of a lubricant for um for what Britain does best which is um which is security work security training counterterrorism stuff uh under the SEO SEO currently spends a bit of UK aid they've been given more and more of DFID's budget and

they've got this thing called the CSSF the combined security something fund and that is essentially for counter counterterrorism work training training equip like give loads of money to be Egyptian military and this is this is like a famously unproblematic act yeah so it's not it's not looking good and there's a lot of very upset um civil servants obviously in um DFID and it's going to be a it's going to really impact what is left of sort of like um Britain's sort of like international reputation isn't the thing that like I mean you know again the whole thing about the right wing trope of like you know we need to cut international aid we need to like cut you know money that you know we need to keep all we need to like invest more in our country and stuff

and this is really actually like that being made into policy in a weird way but it's one which kind of basically benefits one industry um that has historically been a priority for this country anyway right yeah I'm in in agreement and it's it's it just seems to be that like I think there's a misconception about like um what aid like aid is like uh it's it's supporting um the poorest people in the world in order to not be totally um totally impoverished to get just above a poverty line and that is and that is like good for global security like that is a good thing if you don't have a lot of inequality and poverty fuels revolutions and it fuels um it fuels chaos and I think that people it's not just it's not just pissing the money away but it's one I mean now

we're we're we're heightening we're heightening those contradictions we're turning the big contradictions dial up and so I can I can only assume that the the logical end point is that we uh take the stamp away from um from Difford the big stamp that they put on the pallets of MREs that says like there's a big union jack and uh this is a gift from the British people and we just start stamping that on the missiles well I mean I think like the way the way I understand this right is that there is that the fundamentally what Britain has done since Thatcher um is look for ways to recycle money that gets spent right so the Al Yamama deal in many ways if most of the West relationship with Saudi Arabia was defined by a need to repatriate money that was being

spent more and more and more um as the oil crisis caused prices and there's there's no like original sin here you go back far enough like who put the Saudis in power right in the 20s but but uh so the I don't see the Difford FCO merger as actually anything new we've always been finding ways to recycle money that goes out of the country back into it this is just um if we are going to be using aid money to lubricate trade deals where we say you know yes we'll give you a hundred million dollars but you have to spend a certain amount of it you know buying bombs to destroy what you're going to build with the rest of it you know that's it is essentially a way I think to just keep those plates spinning because the plates must continue to spin because if they stop spinning it will be bad

and so we are just looking at ways to to recycle this and effectively I think that I I understand this as a way for the conservatives to do Keynesianism but where they accept that like yes we need to have you know some jobs in Glen Roth's we need to have this money coming back into the economy we need to like we need to be building up these companies and so on but doing it in a way where any possible good that comes to people from having good jobs or these companies from being more valuable or whatever all of those goods must be offset by causing incalculable suffering abroad because the world is a bad and evil place and we cannot allow ourselves to be good no it's it's the same thing as Greensome it's that you don't want to do any kind of formal stimulus yourself you don't

want to have to do any monetary policy yourself and so you funnel it through this network of outside actors in the form of BAE or Raytheon or whoever else and they take their cut and then you use this to like offshore some more and cut some more things and emissary some more people and destroy the prospect of any other jobs in Glen Roth's or or wherever else turn all of Britain into into one gigantic arms factory DSCI is Christmas truly we are we are living in the racism factor I mean the the only way in which you can do the foreign policy of presumably like of the 2040s 2050s where we turn Britain into sort of an unsinkable gunboat is if you have the guns and well that's you know that's going to be a growth industry we've we've guaranteed that for ourselves

so something to feel very good about something to feel very positive about invest in Raytheon and yeah no this is this is a sign of a healthy country and can we talk now about DSCI for something wiser so I I have some some quotes from you Aaron from your article on DSCI where you say at last September's DSCI arms fair in London so the same one that Emory Trevely gave that fur brain speech before I asked as you saying this I asked Adam Fico Raytheon's head of government relations how the firm's code of conduct quote unquote do the right thing respect human rights squares with the products being found in the record of schools and hospitals after evading the question several times he said I can only tell you I can tell you I certainly didn't kill anybody

and rushed away into a tiny room mark staff only pimp this is like this is my favorite thing about DSCI is that it is an incredibly surreal thing not just on the inside on the outside it's surreal too because the protesters like the extent to which protesting against Britain's involvement in the arms trade has been like a political thing it tends to be like people on the left the kind of people who will like chain themselves to buses and stuff and so you get this tremendously weird situation whereby on the inside you'll have a guy doing the Simpsons bit where like name name non-war crimes uses for a paveway bomb number one is a humorous substitute for your own lips and on the outside on the outside you have a bunch of like grandmothers and stuff like

tying themselves to the DLR well a bunch of like bemused cops going like fetch hacksaws and it just if everything about DSCI if you haven't been I recommend getting as physically close to it as possible because it will like it is it's one of those spaces it's like Dubai it's like it all of the sort of contradictions of living in and then 21st century just all sort of leaf house at you at once oh yeah it's an Adam Curtis film made material yes Aaron please please please do describe more your experience I think it's like to buy a spot on it's literally owned by the UAE government the excel center in which it takes place and I was distraught by this the the scale of the place like it would take you perhaps maybe 20 minutes to walk

from the top to the bottom of it and then maybe 20 minutes to walk east west as well you couldn't get around it in a day it goes on for five days and it's got everything from people who manufacture the springs at the bottom of the supply chain to people who manufacture the helicopters at the top of the supply chain and the one thing it struck me there's this fantastic arms anthropologist who's made the arms trade his sort of like field of study called Jonathan Newman not the not the musician and he he was chatting to me in in the canteen and he was saying that it's sort of like an ecosystem like these people are there to create threats like you need this weapon because there's a threat and it could come around the corner at any moment

so there's a huge amount of r&d put into this technology and then and then and then once that threat has been done the other side creates sort of like countermeasures for those threats so like across you'll be having sort of like someone will be making landmines on one side of a corridor room and someone will be making counter landmine measures and these and this technology just spirals upwards and upwards and upwards and this is sort of like the ecosystem in which the defense sector like exists like it is and it's it's it's like and it's also kind of like strangely like spooky like for example like like sort of banal like there will be sort of like a bullet manufacturer and then you have to like put your hand you you guess how many bullets are in the jar and he gives

you a 50 pound M&S voucher or there's like sort of there was there was an Italian company which was selling some sort of small arms and there was literally a woman in an Italian flag bikini holding a gun to like get the attention to get the attention of like all of these sort of like pale male and stale people like wandering by but like I can't believe identity politics has come to DSER yeah DSER is a fun time I catch me at the like police and security section grabbing a bunch of free hats like key rings and stuff little like scale models like as as I look at like the long-range acoustic deterrent salesman blasting directly across the the aisle into the long-range acoustic deterrent counter measures store blasting the way back and creating a total

dead zone of silence I just I just look at that and I think capitalism is the most efficient distribution of resources that it's possible yeah man thank thank goodness you know we we broke the power of all those unions because now we have now we can make an orchestra of different LRAD there was there was a one of the one of the um companies that I found when I was looking at the riot police thing was called a black Cerberus and they manufacture it's awesome yeah it's fucking awesome they manufacture a handheld LRAD that you hold like a like a like an anti-tank launcher it's cool yeah what the fuck uh little note on DSEI like the FCO has a list I think it's sort of like bound by law to produce a list of like human rights um like problematic countries

human rights and sort of israel's on there um like indonesia's on there rushes on there are even Saudi Arabia's on there so this is a sort of list it's made a little bit more impartially and you see the name tags of the delegations going around and they're the same people so like so so the the home office which runs this event is inviting people which the foreign office says themselves are repressing their populations or or oppressing other populations and they are just going shopping and you know who's leading them who pick they get picked up from a hotel by UK military personnel and all of their like camouflage with all of their medals they're picked up from a raddison they're driven to the arse end of canning town and they're and

that's what the UK military does they go they take these people shopping yeah I love to I love to like explore the alternate career path I took when I was like the realities diverged when I was 18 and I just like I just do this for a living now instead of doing a podcast I just like ferry a bunch of emirates around to buy like surface to air missiles um and this is tremendously tremendously cool yeah um and I also right I think that the the the the glibness with which DSEI is carried off the glibness to which protests to its protests against it are responded to and the glibness with which um all of the high-flown moral language about doing the right thing muscular liberalism respecting human rights etc etc again it feels to me like parody oh yeah it

feels really like an insult like also the the the other thing the other list that I wanted to talk about besides uh lists of like problematic states is lists of problematic items like the the um I think it's the fco still decides what you have to get a license for and this changes based on like who makes enough of a fuss to like notice so like the big change that I remember was that like I think they started putting leg irons on the list of things that you couldn't sell to like a repressive state because you would torture people with them but like you can still go to DSEI and they'll be like it's very much like the kind of illegal fireworks vibe where like even where this stuff is is is formally you're not supposed to sell this you can be like no actually

I'm just advertising this this uh stumbaton it's fine uh don't worry about it yeah well and it's the the way I see this right is I see all of this all all of the language around this is the reason I keep going back to PR is that essentially it is representing the UK especially to its own citizen not just other countries but to its own citizens as something it is fundamentally not it is it is about it's a and I think you know there are I'm a bit heterodox about this I think that the explanations for this are deeply psychological rooted in our collective neuroses about no longer being important they're also uh it's also just simple denial and it is I mean you could you could write a thesis about just the use of the phrase punching above our weight

in British defense thinking yeah but it also it is it is quite simply if you are going to run a country this way you need to have these cash cow industries but that don't give anyone that don't create sort of um confidence and solidarity among the working class of your own country so it's like it is as though it is just this perfect encapsulation I think of why of one of the this is a big patch of black mold in as much as Britain is a country with sick building syndrome as to say Alice well like also think about think about Glenn Roth that's right um if you say if you want to unionize those guys and if you if they want to say no we're not comfortable making uh part number four 2069 because we have read about just decapitating a dude which which to be fair that

did happen in Scotland at the Rolls Royce factory where the workers refused to replace planes for Pinochet so there are there are there are solutions to this that's my my question my question is at first of all to what extent did that hurt Pinochet second of all um especially now when that that power imbalance has like been further imbalanced if you try to if you try to unionize one of these sort of these cottage industries that like make circuit boards or like make fins um what's to stop Raytheon or BAE or whoever else from saying okay well we'll just move to the next shithole town 10 minutes down the road and you have now lost your last factory and the only job available to you is I don't know like heroin dealer yeah there's no yeah there's no

bargaining power so yeah these people are these people are living a hand-to-mouth existence if they don't work for that's but they're the only good jobs in town like in Raytheon there's a real real like deprived place it's like sort of like built into utopianism of the sort of like new town movement and it's all just decayed and this one factory is the only real jobs left in town and these people who work there know that like because they're like brothers and sisters and wives are working in like in home bargains as a cashier and like they are they're earning nothing so it's like I mean who's going to kick up a fuss against that well it's it's it is I think at this point it is it is essentially desperation all the way down it's desperation on the part of the of the

country it's desperation on the part of the factory it's desperation on the part of the individuals and when you are made weak like this then the of course the Raytheons of the world just come in and take over because that's what they do yeah and in a very real sense the fascism is already here right like the the strong doers they will the weak sufferers they must what we have identified here is absolutely no kind of solutions merely several like spokes on a Buddhist wheel of suffering right like we've just like found ways in which it's shit for everyone worldwide unless you're like one of these fucking suit guys who can be like well I haven't killed anyone those guys are fine I was going to say it's probably like worth also noting that even

we're talking like this episode is obviously about weapons but like one of the big things especially like in the context of unionization is obviously surveillance technology right so not just in terms of like surveillance drones but also the you know types of like software and network software which facilitates that and I think I was thinking about this in the context of all the kind of right like leftist support for unionizing like companies in Silicon Valley and I guess like the tech companies that still exist in Silicon around about but like other areas where you have those bit you know you kind of have like tech hubs and everything um yeah and I just I kind of wonder if this is like more of a question to all of you like

what as if you're like a leftist like what how do we sort of interact with that because I feel like there's one trajectory or one pathology when we talk about what we think about what we think about like companies that and corporations that are developing physical arms that physically destroy people and physically destroy villages and cities and weddings and stuff like that but what about like the kind of broader consensus around surveillance software and you know the stuff that facilitates the arms trade and I think will just be definitely become much more prominent and much more difficult for leftists too oh yeah for like you have four people who are sort of on the left to really kind of reckon with I think it's it's much more difficult also because like

programmers uh like even more than like guys who make circuit boards are very sort of institutionally hostile towards asking is this tool that I made a thing that should exist yeah yeah erin I'm interested to know sort of how how you think of this broader conception of the arms and armament foreign policy blob that Hussein's describing so yeah I think the only way out of the morass we're in is for a really um a really like well resourced industrial policy which diversifies the skills which are used in the export of arms or the manufacture of surveillance technology into civilian uses or or domestic procurement for like arms like there's no like the the defense sector is so weighted on on on on export markets like why are we why are we why are the South Koreans

building our frigates for example when we're building Saudi Arabia's bombs like why don't we build our own frigates and why don't we uh it's it's about like education and it's but it's also about retooling like it was the famous um the famous case uh it was in the 70s there was a uh the workers who were going under word truck work did lots of proposals to retool um a factory which they're working in producing arms and um it was actually a labor government um which which uh which didn't which didn't follow through on that but Corbin when he was in power had a defense diversification agency plan it wasn't very fleshed out but someone needs to think very seriously not just because of um the bloodshed which the British export industries are involved in but in order to create sustainable

jobs which are actually producing things which people need uh whether it's in energy or renewables or it's in like consumer goods or it's in domestic domestic defense procurement you just need to uh have a well resourced shift away from what we're doing now and that can only come from central government I think that's I think it's a really great point because it like apart from everything else and this is way down the list of things to be upset about but it is on there is thinking about all of the expertise uh like all of the skill that's going into manufacturing in this country and what it's actually going to build is like they're brilliant designers like oh yeah you know it's incredibly an incredibly skilled way of in this case firing metal shards at several hundred

miles an hour into like a wide area and I'm like this this is what we're we're using all all of that engineering potential to do uh it's grim so uh erud I'm noting noting that we're going slightly long here but this has been a fantastic conversation I would just say do you have any uh do you have any any final thoughts on on our subject matter here or anything you want to leave our listeners with um let me think about it for a moment you can cut my thinking can you yes of course we can cut everything you think about I just think that um in terms of foreign like in terms of foreign policy we really need to stop believing that we like we need to reconfigure our geostrategic relationships

particularly in the Middle East and at the moment there's a huge cold war going on between um between Saudi Arabia and Iran which the Americans are getting involved in on the Saudi side and I think it would be um at our peril to be supporting it either diplomatically or through the provision of equipment um and manpower to run that equipment because there's only one way that goes and that is going to be the violence which we so abroad um will be um reaped on our own shores and it's not a controversial thing to say whatsoever it's what happened during French colonialism in Algeria it's what's happened with a war on terror from uh for the US and we've seen domestic terrorism happen here and um it's uh and there's a there's a there's a right wing

appeal to that it's just like even the right can understand if you mess with other people they're going to be um disgruntled and humiliated and want to fight back so I think that the left should be really using the language of blowback and security uh and uh weaponizing it against the notions of security which be um which the right pushes like also I'm very um I'm reminded of Robert Paxton's sort of back of the envelope definition of fascism as colonial violence applied to the imperial core and I don't think the like uh insane like uh gun rights people in America are wholly wrong when they say that if you like if you give a standing army these tools eventually there is the possibilities that they'll be used against you too and we see that with like whether

that's elrads being turned on protesters or um or whatever else and all of the disgruntled American service personnel who have been fighting 20 years on the war on terror and are coming back with no no veteran rights uh an enormous culture war they're all armed to the hilt they're very well trained like I mean it's not improbable but this is going to be sparked violence in the US now with like everything we've been seeing yeah con con de terry what is that a side dish uh anyway um I think that's that's as good as a place as any to uh to leave it Aaron thank you so much for coming on and talking about this great this was I I can't say I've had a good time but um I think this this has been very eye-opening and very very interesting thank you I'm a big

fan of a podcast as well so I'm really pleased to be on thank you oh thank you very much also given me the idea I really badly want to do an episode about like uh like the fry core of the 21st century whether that's like three percenters or like the democratic football lads alliance so I'm gonna I'm gonna think about this because those guys fascinate me oh yeah anyway uh so you know I I feel weird to do all of the usual plugs and promotions at the end you know what they are the only one I'm gonna do this time is bail funds that people are still getting you know shackled and and shit so you you just you gotta keep it going to those um other than that uh yeah we'll uh we'll catch you on the patreon on thursday I I sort of psychologically need to do like a funny

episode now um anyway so once again Aaron thank you so much for coming on it's been a real pleasure talking to you um and to all our listeners thank you for listening uh and yeah we'll catch you in a couple of days all right bye bye