Germany: Politics, Military Economy, and Genocide
Munich War Conference
The official Lebanese presence at the Munich “Security” Conference was notable this year, raising questions about the participation of a small country like Lebanon in such an event. The conference is held annually in Munich and brings together heads of state, ministers of defense and foreign affairs, military officials, security experts, and representatives of arms companies to discuss issues of “security and international policies”. Every year, a protest is organized by “Action Alliance Against the NATO Security Conference”, a coalition of groups and organizations against militarization and in solidarity with Palestine, coinciding with the conference.
The coalition describes the conference as a “NATO Security Conference”, representing a platform for promoting NATO policies, a venue for arms deals, and a tool for maintaining Western global hegemony.
They oppose NATO and Western military policies and reject the arms race, asserting that fear of war with Russia is deliberately exaggerated to justify increased military spending. Furthermore, the coalition considers NATO an instrument of American imperialism after the collapse of the Soviet Union, which waged illegal wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, controlling a large portion of global military expenditure and arms production.
The coalition criticizes German policies, particularly Germany’s unconditional support for “Israel” in the Gaza genocide, its continued exploitation of Global South countries, and racist European migration policies.
Munich Conference: Security as a Tool for Capitalist Hegemony
The conference forms part of the power structure of the global capitalist system. The social composition of participants are drawn primarily from ruling classes and large-scale capital rather than from popular sectors. It functions as a space in which political and economic elites manage the global order. In this context, “security” signifies the preservation of their dominant position within the international economy, enforced through political and military hegemony over the Global South.
In official discourse, “security” implies stability, deterrence, and protection of international order, whereas from a class-analysis perspective, it also means safeguarding trade routes, investments, supply chains, and financial hegemony. The concept of “security” is defined to serve the continuity of capital accumulation; war generates enormous demand for arms, with contracts and profits flowing to military manufacturers, financed by public money through taxes or debt, while destruction itself opens new markets for reconstruction. In this sense, war is not understood as a systemic failure but as a tool for increasing profit, even at the cost of brutal mass genocide.
The Munich conference exposes this alliance between the state and arms companies, as increasing “international tensions and wars” in the capitalist sense means larger military budgets and wider contracts for arms manufacturers. Within this context, the conference functions as a platform that provides political and moral legitimacy to militarization and armament.
A striking example of this dynamic emerged at the conference, during a roundtable discussion on Gaza. A speaker, introduced as “High Representative for Gaza, National Committee for the Administration of Gaza, Board of Peace”, Nickolay E. Mladenov, ironically the former Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Bulgaria, bluntly stated that Gazans’ lives depend on the disarmament of the Palestinian resistance. He explicitly declared that allowing humanitarian aid to enter Gaza is conditional on Gaza’s political submission.
The zionist entity was granted the first comment by former Israeli foreign minister, the zionist Tzipi Livni, for whom a British court issued an arrest warrant in 2009 following a lawsuit by Gaza victims for committing war crimes during the Israeli 2008–2009 war on Gaza.
Despite a few oppositional interventions, particularly by a Dutch journalist and Dr. Mostafa Al-Barghouti, regarding Israel’s accountability for the genocide in Gaza and the silent ethnic cleansing of the West Bank, the broader discussion largely reflected Western supremacy and the Zionist settler-colonial project in Gaza, with Germany complicit by providing it a platform.
Domestically in Germany, for example, increased military spending coincides with pressure on health, education, and social welfare budgets. As a result, already-limited public resources are redirected away from social priorities. The costs are borne by working and middle classes through higher taxes or reduced services, while arms companies benefit from increased armament profit.
The War Fair in “Nürnberger Messe”: Public Business of Death
A few kilometers from Munich, the city of Nuremberg, self-styled as the “City of Peace and Human Rights”, hosts one of Germany’s largest arms fairs, Enforce Tac, annually at the end of February.
With over 1,400 companies from around 50 countries participating, this fair serves as a platform for selling instruments of killing and surveillance, showcasing the latest weapons and military technologies currently being used in wars worldwide, from Sudan, Kashmir, and Brazil to Gaza and Lebanon.
What is particularly appalling is the way death is promoted as a commercial product. Participating companies boast of so-called “enhanced lethality” and “hit-kill ratio”, displaying examples of how the weapons function within military operation simulations in a civilian village. In 2024, an “Arab supermarket” was recreated within the fair as a weapons testing ground.
All of this occurs under an official veneer of legitimacy, with the city providing the venue and the mayor and city council members involved in its management. Notably, the Enforce Tac fair has unprecedented participation of Israeli companies, such as Elbit Systems, which markets its weapons as having been field-tested on Palestinians.
The disturbing similarity in marketing between Elbit Systems and Enforce Tac reveals the underlying logic of contemporary arms production. In both cases, weapons are presented as highly efficient, precise, and effective at neutralizing targets. Human language is replaced with cold technical jargon: value is measured by weapons’ increased killing power; destroying neighborhoods is equated with achieving operational objectives. This similarity shows the fair organizers’ alignment with zionist thinking, where violence, killing, and occupation are measures of efficiency and success.
The fair reflects how war is a profitable commodity, and death a source of income flaunted by its organizers. It functions as a propaganda machine for death and war, a stark example of how war serves as capital for profit, and how politics, authority, and money are used to legitimize platforms for trading in blood.
For the third consecutive year, the “Cancel Enforce Tac” campaign organized a counter-movement, bringing together activists and groups in solidarity with Palestine and against militarization, aiming to shut the fair down. Coinciding with the fair, demonstrations and protest activities raise public awareness, press for cancellation, and expose local politicians’ complicity in the trade of blood and genocide.
Political and Military Hegemony
Germany plays a central role in the global arms industry and is the second-largest arms exporter to “Israel” after the United States. This position makes it a material partner in supplying genocidal wars in Gaza and Lebanon and a key component of the global economy of death. Here, the Western discourse of “peace and human rights” collapses, revealing itself as an ideological cover for violent colonial practices.
Lebanon’s participation in such a conference, despite its peripheral position in the global system, falls within the mechanism of integrating it into Western networks of interest as a subordinate actor. It reproduces political and economic dependency, ensuring the continued dominance of NATO and the United States in the region.
Ultimately, between the Munich Conference and the Nuremberg Fair, a clear class-based picture emerges: “security” is defined in ways that serve military capital, war is a driver of its accumulation, and politics is an ideological apparatus legitimizing militarization and institutionalizing the trade of blood.
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