The news of the conflict in Ukraine or the genocide of the Palestinian
population do not seem to affect much of the public opinion. Perhaps we
are somehow accustomed or resigned to war and its horrors. Perhaps
because we have been involved, for decades now, in numerous armed
conflicts and we have almost never considered "our" conflicts, the ones
we have fought so far, "wars", but have called them "international
missions", "police operations", "actions to fight terrorism", "peace
keeping actions", etc.
This is the process that Samuel Moyn, professor of history at Yale,
calls the humanization of war. That is, the efforts to make war "more
ethical", to "avoid torture", "limit civilian casualties" (through
"smart bombs", "surgical military operations", etc.). However, according
to Moyn, these efforts at representation have not only not achieved the
desired result, but have even supported the military enterprise, making
it stronger. As wars have become more "humane" (assuming that this has
actually happened) they have also become infinite. And, we can add, wars
are "endless" not only in the strictly temporal sense. War becomes
"endless" also because the cultural, economic and political apparatus
that supports it is gradually expanding well beyond the confines of the
strictly military sphere.
Our society, our daily life, in fact, are steeped in militarism and the
"ease" with which we accept and experience wars around us is probably
also linked to the deep militarism that has now pervaded our entire
culture (understood as values, norms, etc.). Militarism, in other words,
is a cultural system, often latent, that pervades in a subtle and
concealed way daily practices in the most disparate worlds: from sport
to business, from the entertainment industry to school and university,
from social policies to justice.
The spread of this social model centered on war, therefore, affects both
the civil and military spheres. The two spheres are mutually
intertwined, making it difficult to distinguish their respective
borders. This dual role takes shape, more or less explicitly, in the
three dimensions: economic, cultural, political. The economic dimension
of this model of action is clearly manifested in the increase in
military spending in the state budget; the political one focuses on the
idea of resolving conflicts (internal or external to the country's
borders) with the priority use of force; the cultural one is supported
by a system of values, norms, symbols linked to militaristic culture.
A fairly striking example of the intertwining of economic, political and
cultural aspects, when we talk about war, is given by the defense
industry. The Italian Leonardo s.p.a. is a clear example. In Leonardo
s.p.a., the largest arms industry in Europe, one of the largest in the
world, with approximately 30% state participation and approximately 70%
of turnover in arms, the intertwining of the economic, political and
cultural dimensions is clearly represented in three well-known public
figures: Guido Crosetto, former senior advisor to Leonardo and former
president of AIAD (the association of industrialists of Confindustria in
the defense sector), is now Minister of Defense; Luciano Violante,
former president of the Anti-Mafia Commission and then president of the
Chamber, today presides over one of Leonardo's two cultural foundations,
which have the task - by statute - of spreading its cultural vision in
civil society; finally Marco Minniti, former Minister of the Interior,
is now president of the Med-Or foundation, another cultural foundation
of Leonardo s.p.a, with a mission similar to that of the Leonardo
foundation and, among other things, dedicated in particular to spreading
its message in Italian universities. Within the scientific committee of
Med-Or, it is surprising - but perhaps not so much - the presence of
numerous Italian academics, including about ten current rectors and some
former rectors.
The world of war is linked to that of business and management not only
because some of the largest and most powerful companies are involved,
directly or indirectly, in the production of weapons and because, as in
the case of Leonardo s.p.a., they invest so much, in terms of economic
and human resources, in the diffusion of their cultural model and their
social vision. The world of business is historically linked - we could
say "almost ontologically" - to war. Managerial science (and, in
particular, operational research that constitutes its heart), as a
discipline, was born during the Second World War and has its roots in
the history of armies themselves.
Historically, the military is one of the first examples of rational
organization. As such, it paved the way for other organizations to work
out how to achieve their goals and optimize ways of doing things. The
standardized division of labor in the military, based on strict
instructions and discipline, as in the armies of the Persian and Roman
empires or in the troops of Maurice of Orange in the 16th and 17th
centuries, formed the basis for the principles of scientific management
formulated centuries later. Chinese general Sun Tzu's Little Book of War
Strategy and Tactics has become very popular among business and
economics professionals. Accounting techniques have their origins in the
classification practices developed at the early days of the West Point
military academy. Engineering as an academic discipline also originated
in the military: military academies around the world were the first
engineering schools. The Normandy landings and subsequent supply chains
had a major influence on the development of business logistics and the
spread of this knowledge from the United States to the rest of the
Western world.
Jean Chapoutot, a historian from the Sorbonne, studying the deep
connection between management and war, even identifies a substantial
link between Nazism and management. We know, after all, that militarism
is an essential component of any type of fascism. Chapoutot states that
current managerial thought is partly a legacy of Nazism and highlights
surprising parallels and points of contact between Nazi culture linked
to resource management and modern managerial techniques. He does so by
reconstructing the story of Reinhard Höhn, an SS officer and director of
the state research institute at the University of Berlin who, after the
war, transferred Nazi ideas into the scientific discipline of
management, founding the most important management school in Europe in
Bad Harzburg. It trained the managers of over 2,500 companies, including
Audi, BMW, Hoechst, Bayer, Telefunken, Esso, Krupp, Thyssen, Opel, Ford,
Colgate, Hewlett-Packard.
But let's get back to current events. The link between militarism and
management is now also explicitly manifested, for example, with a
military language now internalized by the world of business and
management and with personnel recruitment programs by some companies
that no longer hide the fact that they are looking for specific military
skills, especially with reference to job positions of figures who will
manage personnel. As for the first point, metaphors now rooted in
management culture such as "strategic positioning", "blue ocean
strategy", "the manager as a general" and "perimeter defense" clearly
derive from military history. On the topic of recruitment, one of the
most striking cases is provided by Amazon, with a massive program for
hiring ex-military personnel (to date already over 100,000). Bezos
himself states that with these programs his company seeks workers whose
military experience, characterized by "a propensity for action and
obtaining results", becomes particularly "valuable in guiding people in
our frenetic work environment".
From various points of view, therefore, the armed forces have developed
knowledge and practices that have been taken up by organizations born
later in other civilian environments. However, in more recent times, the
roles seem to have reversed. Several scholars of the military world
observe a new trend in this deep bond: today the military seem to follow
and learn from business management more than businesses follow and learn
from the military.
But whatever the direction (military-civilian or civil-military) war and
its culture are cynical and destructive violence, suffering. War is
torture, rape, brutal crimes, no matter where it is fought or supported
and - as Samuel Moyn reminds us - it is a dangerous illusion to think
that there is one war more humane than another.
http://sicilialibertaria.it
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
population do not seem to affect much of the public opinion. Perhaps we
are somehow accustomed or resigned to war and its horrors. Perhaps
because we have been involved, for decades now, in numerous armed
conflicts and we have almost never considered "our" conflicts, the ones
we have fought so far, "wars", but have called them "international
missions", "police operations", "actions to fight terrorism", "peace
keeping actions", etc.
This is the process that Samuel Moyn, professor of history at Yale,
calls the humanization of war. That is, the efforts to make war "more
ethical", to "avoid torture", "limit civilian casualties" (through
"smart bombs", "surgical military operations", etc.). However, according
to Moyn, these efforts at representation have not only not achieved the
desired result, but have even supported the military enterprise, making
it stronger. As wars have become more "humane" (assuming that this has
actually happened) they have also become infinite. And, we can add, wars
are "endless" not only in the strictly temporal sense. War becomes
"endless" also because the cultural, economic and political apparatus
that supports it is gradually expanding well beyond the confines of the
strictly military sphere.
Our society, our daily life, in fact, are steeped in militarism and the
"ease" with which we accept and experience wars around us is probably
also linked to the deep militarism that has now pervaded our entire
culture (understood as values, norms, etc.). Militarism, in other words,
is a cultural system, often latent, that pervades in a subtle and
concealed way daily practices in the most disparate worlds: from sport
to business, from the entertainment industry to school and university,
from social policies to justice.
The spread of this social model centered on war, therefore, affects both
the civil and military spheres. The two spheres are mutually
intertwined, making it difficult to distinguish their respective
borders. This dual role takes shape, more or less explicitly, in the
three dimensions: economic, cultural, political. The economic dimension
of this model of action is clearly manifested in the increase in
military spending in the state budget; the political one focuses on the
idea of resolving conflicts (internal or external to the country's
borders) with the priority use of force; the cultural one is supported
by a system of values, norms, symbols linked to militaristic culture.
A fairly striking example of the intertwining of economic, political and
cultural aspects, when we talk about war, is given by the defense
industry. The Italian Leonardo s.p.a. is a clear example. In Leonardo
s.p.a., the largest arms industry in Europe, one of the largest in the
world, with approximately 30% state participation and approximately 70%
of turnover in arms, the intertwining of the economic, political and
cultural dimensions is clearly represented in three well-known public
figures: Guido Crosetto, former senior advisor to Leonardo and former
president of AIAD (the association of industrialists of Confindustria in
the defense sector), is now Minister of Defense; Luciano Violante,
former president of the Anti-Mafia Commission and then president of the
Chamber, today presides over one of Leonardo's two cultural foundations,
which have the task - by statute - of spreading its cultural vision in
civil society; finally Marco Minniti, former Minister of the Interior,
is now president of the Med-Or foundation, another cultural foundation
of Leonardo s.p.a, with a mission similar to that of the Leonardo
foundation and, among other things, dedicated in particular to spreading
its message in Italian universities. Within the scientific committee of
Med-Or, it is surprising - but perhaps not so much - the presence of
numerous Italian academics, including about ten current rectors and some
former rectors.
The world of war is linked to that of business and management not only
because some of the largest and most powerful companies are involved,
directly or indirectly, in the production of weapons and because, as in
the case of Leonardo s.p.a., they invest so much, in terms of economic
and human resources, in the diffusion of their cultural model and their
social vision. The world of business is historically linked - we could
say "almost ontologically" - to war. Managerial science (and, in
particular, operational research that constitutes its heart), as a
discipline, was born during the Second World War and has its roots in
the history of armies themselves.
Historically, the military is one of the first examples of rational
organization. As such, it paved the way for other organizations to work
out how to achieve their goals and optimize ways of doing things. The
standardized division of labor in the military, based on strict
instructions and discipline, as in the armies of the Persian and Roman
empires or in the troops of Maurice of Orange in the 16th and 17th
centuries, formed the basis for the principles of scientific management
formulated centuries later. Chinese general Sun Tzu's Little Book of War
Strategy and Tactics has become very popular among business and
economics professionals. Accounting techniques have their origins in the
classification practices developed at the early days of the West Point
military academy. Engineering as an academic discipline also originated
in the military: military academies around the world were the first
engineering schools. The Normandy landings and subsequent supply chains
had a major influence on the development of business logistics and the
spread of this knowledge from the United States to the rest of the
Western world.
Jean Chapoutot, a historian from the Sorbonne, studying the deep
connection between management and war, even identifies a substantial
link between Nazism and management. We know, after all, that militarism
is an essential component of any type of fascism. Chapoutot states that
current managerial thought is partly a legacy of Nazism and highlights
surprising parallels and points of contact between Nazi culture linked
to resource management and modern managerial techniques. He does so by
reconstructing the story of Reinhard Höhn, an SS officer and director of
the state research institute at the University of Berlin who, after the
war, transferred Nazi ideas into the scientific discipline of
management, founding the most important management school in Europe in
Bad Harzburg. It trained the managers of over 2,500 companies, including
Audi, BMW, Hoechst, Bayer, Telefunken, Esso, Krupp, Thyssen, Opel, Ford,
Colgate, Hewlett-Packard.
But let's get back to current events. The link between militarism and
management is now also explicitly manifested, for example, with a
military language now internalized by the world of business and
management and with personnel recruitment programs by some companies
that no longer hide the fact that they are looking for specific military
skills, especially with reference to job positions of figures who will
manage personnel. As for the first point, metaphors now rooted in
management culture such as "strategic positioning", "blue ocean
strategy", "the manager as a general" and "perimeter defense" clearly
derive from military history. On the topic of recruitment, one of the
most striking cases is provided by Amazon, with a massive program for
hiring ex-military personnel (to date already over 100,000). Bezos
himself states that with these programs his company seeks workers whose
military experience, characterized by "a propensity for action and
obtaining results", becomes particularly "valuable in guiding people in
our frenetic work environment".
From various points of view, therefore, the armed forces have developed
knowledge and practices that have been taken up by organizations born
later in other civilian environments. However, in more recent times, the
roles seem to have reversed. Several scholars of the military world
observe a new trend in this deep bond: today the military seem to follow
and learn from business management more than businesses follow and learn
from the military.
But whatever the direction (military-civilian or civil-military) war and
its culture are cynical and destructive violence, suffering. War is
torture, rape, brutal crimes, no matter where it is fought or supported
and - as Samuel Moyn reminds us - it is a dangerous illusion to think
that there is one war more humane than another.
http://sicilialibertaria.it
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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