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(From a reading on behalf of Dove Tales at the Big Lit Festival, Gatehouse of Fleet, July 20th 2025)

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The absence of war is no guarantee of peace, but its presence obviously renders peace a nonsense. ‘War there for peace here’ we are told. Though we’ve not declared war, we’ve chosen to take sides in the two most recently publicised so-called wars, which makes us allies. Ergo, we’re not at peace.. But what puts us on one side or another?

 

I had my car serviced last week. Mike, my mechanic, was waxing lyrically about his distaste for, quote: “post 2018 cars with brains only the dealer can access. You have to spend 4 grand on a diagnostic kit just to see the problem”.

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When I questioned John Cooper MP about the Israeli Tech Hub being located, since 2011, in the UK Embassy, employing multiple ex Israeli government staff with tax payer money, he answered that it had “facilitated over 250 partnerships with an estimated £1.2 Billion impact to the UK economy”. He didn’t mention what was being supplied, impacted or demanded. The fact that it generates money seemed enough. It’s now a model for other UK Embassies.

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Anyone who hasn’t seen Al Jazeera’s ‘Palestine Laboratory’ about how Israel tests military tech on Palestinians should do that before disputing that modern industrial war is a trade fair. Ironically, the trillions it generates are then used to facilitate so called risk reduction — both real and financial — which means more war. The whole point of remote tech is to surveil and kill without risk to the user. Total domination is what’s for sale. And risk perception is what sales are based on. Even as I was writing this a malware pop up warned me: “Cyber attacks may threaten your life. Accept the risk — or pay the price…”

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Alongside global tech hubs are global conglomerates: hedge funds specialising in ‘investment instruments’ including things called distressed securities. These are investments in companies who cannot meet their financial commitments. A smart investor can be paid even when the firms fail but can make huge returns if they ‘recover’. Now, if you happen to be an investor who also has your boot on the neck of the failing firms… isn’t that just a protection racket? I put my boot on your face, then I charge you to remove it so I can place it somewhere else — with a bigger boot. Some of the faces aren’t even private companies — they belong to countries. That’s what a Private Finance Initiative is. A promise to pay a hedge fund for funding public services — healthcare, defence — for a long and diminishing return over 20 or 30 or more years. Nobody wants to be a distressed security. ‘Country at peace’ has a much more enticing ring..

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Another question to the MP was about why the government doesn’t own many of the military assets it employs. The Voyager aircraft Palestine Action now famously vandalised, for example, actually belong to Polygon Global Partners (now rebranded to Acasta), a Hedge Fund. They co-own the seven companies (including Trump International Partners) SEVERAL OF WHICH ARE based at one London office, who in turn own Airtanker, who then have an office at — RAF Brize Norton.

It’s important to swap boots regularly.

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My MP’s either misinformed or highly disingenuous response when charged to identify a reason for not recognising Palestine was: “The UK’s recognition of a Palestinian State should only come at a time when it is most conducive to the peace process”. Would that be a peace process demanding an immediate ceasefire we just vetoed? Would that be a peace process and a statehood which was mandated by the League Of Nations in 1920, ratified by the UN in 1922 as a Class A Mandate, which saw every other similarly mandated country gain full statehood by 1946? Yet my MP still waits for a ‘conducive moment’! Can you see the boot?

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​                                                                  Ralph_Photos, http://bit.ly/3IyktuX

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​If we know that it is contracts based on money lending which keep us at war, why do we consent? Is it because we assume that money systems are some natural entity, like air or water? No — money is just a set of human agreements. Is it because our pensions seem to require it — maybe. But still, we can change how we use money — easily. But we don’t. Why?

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War has been rebranded as ‘Security’. Israel sells itself as: “Leaders in defence and homeland security’. India had voted for many years to recognise Palestine as an independent state, but has abstained ever since it entered into security contracts with Israel.

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It is only the misrepresentation of money — as if it can measure value whilst also being a commodity in trade — that perpetuates this seeming need to treat ‘risk’ as a driver for economic activity. What if the need to generate the money is the real risk? Financial risk is an invention — pure speculation — but real risk exists, as a fact of life. Once we treat them as separate entities, entering actualised risk in a column marked: ‘Costs’, wars and killing can be measured by those costs to life — rather than misrepresented as generators of ‘wealth’:

Arundhati Roy said: “Once weapons were manufactured to fight wars, Now, wars are manufactured to sell weapons”.

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For peace in your time, your tax Dollars, Pounds or Euros have to be able to record you saying: “no thanks” to starting or joining a war. But you don’t own the instruments of war — or the license agreement, which insists you’re already in it: “Cyber attacks may threaten your life. Accept the risk — or pay the price…”

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The answer to: ‘which side are you on may well be in a license agreement — which you probably haven’t read. It most definitely won’t have been in any manifesto and we never have referendums for little things like wars. If you want to decide which side to join, or maybe better, to refuse and be on the side of peace, you are going to have to learn to do it at the level of the license agreements…. or let the ‘smart’ tech decide for you.​

       

                                                             Liam Murphy, 2025

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