“Stop the Rearmament”, a manifesto
How can we defend our right to health, save our health system, tackle climate emergencies and environmental disasters, invest in young people, schools and the right to decent work, fight poverty and the exploding social inequalities, develop solidarity and international cooperation if we do not reduce military spending?
The answer is obvious. Yet some political-media, military and industrial lobbies would like to continue to increase spending on weapons and armies, taking away other precious resources from the care of our vital needs. Utter madness! While the bloody wars underway and the total absence of peace policies are impoverishing us as far as the eye can see, while the Italian and European productive fabric is being destroyed by increasing unemployment, poor, precarious and exploited labour, the warlords and arms merchants want to fuel the most dangerous rearmament race in history.
The urgency of stopping rearmament
Global military spending has been on the rise for over two decades, as all reliable international data show: a trend that has been further reinforced in the last two and a half years following the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the resurgence of rhetoric and policies increasingly aligned with the demands of the military-industrial-financial sector.
What used to be decided in less wasteful terms, but with opacity and reticence, is now being asserted: hence the enormous growth in the resources that States make available to the military sector, especially in the production and trade of new weapon systems.
At the same time, the opposition to military spending remains one of the qualifying points of action of the diverse pacifist, non-violent and social justice movement, always finding a good response from activists and the general public (as several opinion polls also show). This is why we think the time has come to relaunch a strong collective mobilisation against military spending, with new tools and a new capacity for activation. Without starting from scratch, but rather by strengthening existing trends and collaborations in order to be more and more incisive thanks to a new ‘campaign/mobilisation’ that wants to line up what has already been done, taking up and relaunching the ‘key’ points and arguments already developed to show that the increase in military spending (both in quantitative and qualitative terms) is a threat to everyone’s future, as well as constituting a ‘democratic gap’ with respect to the will of the majority of public opinion.
It is time to intervene, all of us, in politics, in the media, in our own society, to stimulate reflection on these proposals of ours for an alternative to military spending, and on what is really needed to reduce global armed insecurity and restore confidence in the future, particularly for the younger generations.
Our requests…
On this page all the informations (in Italian) on the details of the proposals and how to make them practically feasible
Promoting Organizzations
This Campaign launched by the PerugiAssisi Foundation for the Culture of Peace, Greenpeace Italy, the Italian Peace and Disarmament Network and Sbilanciamoci! aims to put the disproportionate expenditure on military structures and armaments in our country back to the foucs of Italian public opinion. We want to reveal to Italian citizens – with analyses and informative tools – the enormous figures of this ‘theft of the future’, with its negative impacts and highlighting what could be achieved with this money in terms of social spending, peace and development of the country.
Fondazione PerugiAssisi
Greenpeace Italia
Rete Italiana Pace Disarmo
