hi this is part of a rant i wrote before we did the action


We have been organising for DSEI 2003 for some time now. Some of us were at DSEI in 2001, or were at arms fairs like COPEX in the years before that. Seeing the same crappy companies flogging arms and torture equipment to dodgy regimes and anyone who can stump up the cash is a nasty feeling of déjà vu, as was the second Iraq war (are by any chance the two issues related?!!) Why are we going? As part of our strategy to stop the cycle of arms sales, the killing and torturing, the years of suffering in forgotten prisons, the complicity, the money chain, the lies, the bullshit, the global instability and world wars, the ‘global terrorism’ triggered by people getting sick of having their kids’ body parts blown off in the name of freedom, the oil deals, goddam it, the out of town supermarkets and Greenfield housing developments that make us drive our cars so we need the oil which keeps us over a barrel to the oil- fuelled economy which “justifies” the wars they fight on “our” behalf which keeps global capitalism rolling along…we want to highlight, and stop, the sickeningly, dangerously, loony , hypocritical, power- crazed system which is, for example, happy to flog arms to the Taliban for years (they didn’t give a stuff what was happening to women in Afghanistan then, did they?) and then go, ‘oh, er, they are nasty terrorists after all, lets bomb the fuck out of Afghanistan cos that will really sort it all out’ (or alternatively completely destabilise the Middle East). And then we are told that we are ‘fighting a moral war’, and ‘winning the war on terror’.
The bitter irony of DSEI 2001 happening on ‘9-11’ is so strong it can hardly be articulated. A lot of shit has hit the fan since then –notably Afghanistan and Iraq. The anti-war movement has grown massive in this time, picking up from a head of steam already created by the anti-globalisation movement (same people, same networks…). DSEI 2003 is the time for all these issues to be consolidated in one big push to stop the arms trade. We will be taking effective action to shut down DSEI. We can do it- stop the deals being done in the short term, and in the longer term create a climate where the deals are never done. There is no justice- just us, so empower yourselves and get active!