1. The Triumph of Militarism
1.1 The Question of Responsibility
At the end of the Second World War, some 60 million people were killed. The logical consequence was the founding of the United Nations (UN) and the grand promise of its Charter to "free humanity from the scourge of war." Yet to this day, 81 years later, the world has not come a step closer to this goal.
The blame for this total failure lies with groups of people who wield significant influence over the policies of the Allied founding members of the UN. In January 1961 President Dwight D. Eisenhower clearly warned about the growing influence of the MIC, the military-industrial complex comprised of high-ranking military officers, representatives of the arms industry, and politicians.
But the world did not realize that this was both a huge opportunity and an urgent necessity to permanently curb the warmongering influence of this clique of vested interests. The ongoing stagnation in the global implementation of nonviolent conflict resolution can be attributed primarily to this failing. Lasting peace would clash with the business model of the MIC, or rather, the MIFC (with the F for the financial sector).
While the UN provides a platform for diplomacy and international law, its resolutions and interventions lack enforcement power. The world organization's practice has demonstrated that various Charter articles lack sufficient clarity to be effective as instruments for peaceful conflict resolution. In particular, there is an urgent need to clarify the priority of three core legal principles, as they currently face a rivalry in application. The point of contention is the claim to sovereignty under Article 2, which conflicts with the right to self-determination under Article 1 and also with the right to self-defense under Article 51. https://www.frieden-freiheit-fairness.com/en/blog/uns-guilt-terrorism
Although these gaps and weaknesses in the Charter have already claimed millions of lives in armed conflicts, reasonable consequences have been lacking, just as in the case of the unchecked activities of the MIFC. A thorough analysis, systematic improvements, and an accompanying reform package are long overdue.
1.2 A Market for Violent Solutions
The inadequate enforcement power of the UN's peacekeeping instruments has opened up a growing market for violent resolutions of conflicts. The business of death became one of the most lucrative in the 20th century and is on the verge of driving its profits to new heights in the 21st. Its inherent logic is not programmed for conflict resolution, but rather for perpetual polarization and the escalation of war.
The system is formed by a symbiosis of three forces. These are, firstly, the financial system's dominance; secondly, the geopolitical interests of the military-industrial-financial complex (MIFC); and thirdly, the ability of the mainstream media to shape public opinion. The latter have long failed in their role as guardians of freedom and democracy by prioritizing the interests of war profiteers over those of citizens. This happens, among other things, through information filtering (see point 3), taboos, and other psychological means, including fear-mongering and the creation of guilt.
1.3 History of Monetary Power and the MIFC
The modern driving force behind war is the result of historical automatisms. Even the author of the US Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, warned of the existential threat posed by the unchecked influence of financial institutions and rampant militarism. Both dangers are closely linked to uncontrolled expansion of power.
• 1600 The Birth of Corporate Militarism: Queen Elizabeth I grants the East India Company exclusive sovereign rights. As the largest corporation in history, it maintained a private army that was at times twice the size of the British state army – the prototype of commercialized warfare.
• 1913 Institutionalization: The Federal Reserve Act introduces the US dollar in the USA and places the right to create new money out of thin air in the hands of large private banks.
• 1917 The Profit-Driven Entry into the War: During the First World War, the J.P. Morgan bank brokered and financed gigantic US arms deals with France and Great Britain. To secure the entry of the previously pacifist USA into the war—and thus guarantee the repayment of the loans—Morgan, along with other bankers, influenced leading newspapers, transforming them into tools of war propaganda. https://cdn.mises.org/The%20Merchants%20of%20Death_2.pdf
The Discord Treaty of Versailles and the subsequent career of Adolf Hitler, also co-financed by Western banks, are causally linked to this fateful dynamic.
• Lend-Lease and the Accepted Competing Superpower: The Lend-Lease Act of 1941 raised arms production to a historic maximum. However, the supply of war materiel to the Soviet Union by the USA and Great Britain for the defeat of Nazi Germany went beyond the requirements, only serving the interest of business profits. Besides weapons, also machinery for their production and vehicles (including 400,000 trucks) fell into the hands of the Stalinist regime. https://docslib.org/doc/2902487/national-suicide-military-aid-to-the-soviet-union
After the war and until 1947, deliveries continued for modern production facilities for civilian goods, some of which were also suitable for weapons production (dual-use). This supported the rise of the USSR to a rival superpower. The media simply switched from friend to foe and treated the Cold War like an unexpected twist of fate. Effective criticism of the arms lobby and its assistance in the rearmament of the now—predictably—enemy Soviet Union failed to materialize. As so often happens, this was due to a lack of public information. The American public was also psychologically unprepared for such criticism, because the media had failed during the war to distinguish between friendship and a purely strategic alliance against a common enemy. From mid-1941 till 1945, the brutal dictator Stalin was portrayed in the media as the benevolent "Uncle Joe."
NATO, founded in 1949, guaranteed the continuation of arms deals. Its first Secretary General, Lord Ismay, declared in a moment of candor the true purpose of the alliance: "to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." Containing communism was a useful platitude for the MIFC and NATO militarists, while arms deals and the ongoing polarization within Europe formed the actual basis for their lucrative positions and incomes.
After the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the historic opportunity for genuine European unification was squandered more willfully than negligently. The inclusion of Russia was and remains a vital task for Europe's survival, just as Victor Hugo proposed at the Paris Peace Congress in 1849. In the same integrative spirit, Vladimir Putin presented his vision of a free community stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok in his 2001 speech to the German Bundestag.
However, NATO's eastward expansion beginning in 1999, in violation of clear verbal commitments, cynically confirmed Lord Ismay's words. This was underlined by the systematic, commercially lucrative arming of Ukraine from 2014 onward, transforming it into Europe's strongest military power, specifying that keeping "the Americans in" obviously meant safeguarding the interests of the MIFC.
2. The System Instrumentalizes Conflicts
2.1 Protracted Wars
The fact that the operators of the system strive not to end wars, but to artificially prolong them, is a recurring theme throughout modernity. A war is profitable for finance capital and the arms industry when it offers planning certainty.
From this perspective, a swift diplomatic end is a "risk"—a fact vividly illustrated when George W. Bush rejected the Taliban's definitive offer of surrender in December 2001, two months after the start of the war in Afghanistan. His family wasn't the only one who benefited from the unsuccessful protracted conflict, which lasted until August 2021. The functioning of protracted wars can be demonstrated by other examples:
2.1 The Korean War (1950–1953)
Here, the peace intention of the UN Charter failed spectacularly for the first time. The US government ignored and tolerated massive border provocations perpetrated by the American-armed South Korean Syngman Rhee regime, which had already claimed 100,000 lives before the official outbreak of war. https://archive.org/details/KoreanWarTheBruceCumings/mode/1up
When the North launched its counterattack in June 1950, its logistics relied on American Studebaker trucks, which the Soviet Union had provided from Lend-Lease surpluses from World War II. At the same time, Chinese troops were fighting with US weapons (Thompson, Springfield) that they had seized from Chiang Kai-shek's troops, who had been defeated in the civil war. Thus, in Korea, the West was fighting against its own weapons, which it had previously exported profitably.
2.2 The Ukraine War (From 2022)
The Ukraine War also follows a profit-maximizing pattern. Western arms aid, in reality, flows directly back to the domestic defense industry as large commercial contracts to replace discarded older stocks with the most modern, more expensive systems. Transnational asset managers like BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street—historically the largest shareholders of leading arms manufacturers (Lockheed Martin, RTX, Rheinmetall)—are experiencing a historic stock market rally. These same financial institutions are already positioning themselves for the post-war period through exclusive "reconstruction funds": first, capital profits from destruction, then from the reconstruction and privatization of the heavily indebted country's infrastructure. As then-Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes openly explained to investors in January 2022, the tensions in Eastern Europe represent an excellent "opportunity for international sales." The MIFC has secured contracts and planning security here well into the 2030s.
2.3 The Psychological Delay Strategies from Vietnam to Gaza
Wars like those in Vietnam (20 years) or Iraq (9 years) dragged on for so long because the military systematically failed in the psychological arena. The pattern remained the same: The West arms and trains supposedly pro-Western rebels or government troops. Their ruthless, brutal treatment of the civilian population, however, drives the suffering people directly into the arms of the insurgents. In the West, this leads to an artificial, paralyzing division: Left-leaning citizens show solidarity with the victims out of empathy, while conservatives demand a tougher military approach. The resulting political "compromise" is a militarily pointless, incremental deployment of weapons that keeps the war undecided for decades—a disaster for the nations involved, but an insatiable goldmine for the MIFC.
3. The Failure of the Media
3.1 Censorship and Whitewashing
This kind of war procrastination would be immediately halted amid public protest if the mainstream media fulfilled their constitutional role as guardians of liberal civilization. However, since the Spanish-American War (1898-1899) and the subsequent Philippine-American War, they have only done so with significant limitations. https://apjjf.org/2013/11/40/Susan-A-Brewer/4002/article
Instead, they act as an integral part of the system. Through a double filtering of information—first by the military and intelligence services, then by the oligopolies of news agencies—reporting is subjected to constant whitewashing and censorship.
As soon as scandals threatening the system come to light, a reliable media brake kicks in, as two historical studies in contemporary US history demonstrate:
3.2 The Church Committee (1975–1976)
When investigative journalist Seymour Hersh revealed in late 1974 that the CIA was illegally spying on US citizens and the anti-war movement domestically (Operation CHAOS), the Senate established the Church Committee. However, the deeper the committee dug and uncovered illegal assassination plots and the FBI's COINTELPRO program, the more the mainstream media resorted to suppressing the more than justified criticism of government institutions. They adopted the national security framing and accused Senator Frank Church of "castrating" the CIA and rendering the country defenseless in the Cold War.
When CIA station chief Richard Welch was assassinated by terrorists in Athens in December 1975, the media and government, despite the lack of causality, used this event for a massive campaign: the press's "revelation hysteria" was blamed for Welch's death. This media shift deprived the commission of public support; the final report was watered down, and the newly established parliamentary oversight bodies remained toothless.
3.3 The Iran-Contra Affair (1986–1987)
When it came to light in November 1986 that the American government, with CIA assistance, had sold weapons to both sides in the Iran-Iraq War in order to finance the right-wing Contra rebels in Nicaragua with the proceeds, the media protected the system through targeted personalization. They played along with the court's portrayal of CIA officer Oliver North as the central figure, presenting him in a soap-opera style as a patriotic outsider. In doing so, they successfully diverted attention from the core issue—the government and intelligence agencies' violation of the Constitution. To protect CIA leadership, President Ronald Reagan, and Vice President George H.W. Bush, the media adopted the narrative that it was merely a few "out-of-control employees."
Even worse: When journalists like Robert Parry and later Gary Webb (Dark Alliance, 1966) provided detailed evidence that the CIA-backed Contras were smuggling tons of cocaine into the US to finance their war, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post didn't launch their own investigations, but instead began a massive campaign to destroy Webb's credibility. The systemic crime was successfully buried. The legal proceedings dragged on until George H.W. Bush pardoned the main defendants on Christmas Eve 1992, shortly before their sentencing.
4. Disregard for Basic Psychological Principles
4.1 Israel's Counterproductive Military Strategy
While Israel achieved resounding victories against several Arab states simultaneously in 1967 and 1973 within 6 and 19 days, respectively, it has not been able to achieve a decisive victory against the terrorist groups Hamas and Hezbollah. As with the American military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, this failure is based on serious errors at the psychological level. It constitutes a further escalation that the current Israeli leadership has framed the core error as a military strategy. This Dahiya Doctrine calls for the large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure and residential buildings in areas from which Israel is being shelled—supposedly as a deterrent.
The mainstream media, however, shielded this counter-strategy from conceptual awareness and criticism. In the two years between the massacre on October 7, 2023, and the ceasefire on October 10, 2025, none of the major North American or European news agencies reported on the Dahiya Doctrine, while its destructive consequences dominated the headlines during the same period. https://www.frieden-freiheit-fairness.com/blog/eine-militaerdoktrin-gefaehrdet-die-befreiung-der-iranischen-nation
Even though the operations were announced in advance, tens of thousands of civilians lost their lives. The reputational damage to Israel and the West is enormous, as demonstrated, among other things, by the rise in anti-Semitic attacks. The Islamists were easily able to fill the information gap with their own propaganda. Even though the operations were announced, tens of thousands of civilians lost their lives.
4.2 The Islamists' Strategy
The media's failure is doubly serious because it also failed to explain the counter-strategy employed by fanatical Islamist leaders, exploiting the Dahiya doctrine. In the summer of 2024, Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar (the planner of the October 7 massacre) wrote to his accomplices in Qatar: "We have Israel right where we want them." Sinwar thus confirmed that Israel's destructive Dahiya strategy corresponds exactly to the Islamists' calculations: The Muslim population suffers, and the Islamist leaders profit from the waves of sympathy and support they receive following corresponding media reports.
Militant leaders like the mullahs in Tehran fanatically pursue the goal of spreading radical Islam worldwide; they view their own population as tools to be coldly sacrificed in the guise of noble martyrdom. When Donald Trump or Benjamin Netanyahu threatened the regime in Tehran with the destruction of power plants and civilian infrastructure, it demonstrated that they had not learned sufficiently from the catastrophes from Somalia to Afghanistan. One can do Islamists no greater favor than with a protracted war that claims many civilian lives.
4.3 Clash of Civilizations Instead of Cultural Rapprochement
This strategy has been working since the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1995), when European states began accepting Muslims in addition to persecuted Christians. This accelerated the spread of a radical, reform-resistant Islam in the anti-spirit of the Muslim Brotherhood (founded in 1928) which combines armed jihad with propaganda. Tehran is considered the coordination center.
Following the Lebanese Civil War, the perpetually inconclusive wars in the Middle East, from Iraq to Afghanistan, protracted by the MIFC, have caused the suffering of civilians that fuels the flow of refugees. The emotional atmosphere created by the media in the West promotes widespread sympathy for the victims and also benefits the terrorists.
In contrast, reform movements in the Middle East, which could reduce tensions between cultures, are being abandoned or actively destroyed by Western politics. Atatürk's groundbreaking reforms of 1924/1926, which abolished Sharia law in Turkey, could be undermined again under Erdoğan today due to a lack of effective defense. The mainstream media also bear considerable responsibility for this damage to compatibility between the West and the Middle East by making any honest debate about Islamism taboo, using buzzwords like "Islamophobia." This same disingenuous wall of silence also shields the endless protracted wars, the self-destructive division of Western societies into left and right, and the chaos of migration from urgently needed criticism.
As there is hardly any ideological defense of Western values in the media, Islamists feel emboldened to pursue expansionist visions of the future. Turkish President Erdoğan declared at an Islamic conference in November 2024:
“The progress of the West—built on blood, tears, massacres, genocide, and exploitation—has temporarily gained the upper hand [...]. A day will come, sooner or later, when the era of progress that excludes the sacred and the human will come to an end, and while Western civilization collapses with a great crash, our civilization [...] will rise even stronger.” https://www.memri.org/tv/turkish-president-erdogan-western-civilization-will-collapse-we-will-flourish
The problem of unsolidary, biased media was already recognized by the founding fathers of the USA, such as Thomas Jefferson, but a structural solution has been postponed to this day.
5. Solutions
5.1 Consistent Separation of Powers
This solution does not require the invention of new democratic principles, but merely the consistent application of a proven instrument of democracy: the balance of power.
Over the past 250 years, the information sector has effectively established itself as the fourth power, but it is under the influence of an oligopoly of large news agencies that manipulate public opinion through selective information filtering.
If we are to prevent liberal civilization from being replaced by authoritarian societal models, the fair marketplace of opinions based on unfiltered information flows must be restored. This requires democratic control and structuring of the news system. Only reporting consistently committed to the citizens and the truth will deprive militarists of their psychological cover and thus remove the main obstacle on the path to liberating humanity from the scourge of war.
5.2 AI as Savior
This reform is long overdue. While an unmanipulated AI in the information sector can precisely monitor truthful, fair, and life-respecting reporting, a manipulated one can be misused for any form of insidious fraud and inhumane violence. Destructive pioneering models are already spreading, including bot farms that distort political debates.
The upcoming system reform must anticipate the already announced gigantic investments in the expansion of AI and ensure democratic control over this ultimate power apparatus. It is precisely at this level that the fate of civilization, since its beginnings, is now being decided in the struggle between destruction and development, and between deception and integrity.