Former President of the U.S. Jimmy Carter called the U.S. “the most warlike nation in the history of the world”.  In his Sunday School lesson at his home church in rural Georgia last spring Carter observed that his country had experienced only 16 years in its 242 year history when it was not at war. The country that spends more on its “defense” than the next ten nations in the world combined is also the world’s number one exporter of arms and military equipment.  It comes as no great surprise then that the protests against police brutality sweeping this country in recent days have been met with police forces armed for intimidation and repression of dissent as we have never seen before.

More than thirty years ago the U.S. Congress approved the 1033 program which enables the Pentagon to transfer military hardware and equipment to local police forces in the country.  Since it began, this program has seen 533 planes and helicopters and over 423 “Ambush-resistant” vehicles transferred to civilian forces assigned to protect and defend us.  Two years after President Obama suspended the 1033 program following the Michael Brown killing by police in Ferguson, MO President Trump reinstated it.

There has been an escalation of violence in the urban streets of our world today beyond what we experienced in the turbulent 60’s.  Protestors of the U.S. War on Vietnam sat down or kneeled in front of police on horseback wielding wooden batons; today, police with guns that can fire 10 bullets per second meet demonstrators in the streets of U.S. cities.  The 1033 program favored by Trump has provided local police with 93,000 machine guns.

Militarization of the police in other nations is a feature of U.S. “security aid” to some of our closest allies. Over half of our foreign aid to El Salvador in 2017 supported improving security and law and order which followed many millions in direct military and police aid during that country’s Civil War in the 70’s and 80’s.  The country with the highest murder rate in the Western Hemisphere, Honduras, in 2017 received 44 percent of its aid for security compared to 30 percent for antipoverty programs. U.S. security aid for Brazil reached a height during the period of military rule in the 60’s and 70’s.  Now the authoritarian rule of Jair Bolsonaro counts on violent repression to quell protests and dissent of Brazil’s citizens.

The popular view of the U.S. image around the world in my lifetime has descended from champion of those struggling for independence from colonialism post WW II to the leading ally and supplier of dictatorships stifling dissent and democracy.  In the view of the current U.S. administration, our best friends among the world’s nations today are the most authoritarian, anti-democratic rulers in the world today. 

The economic inequality and exploitation of people alongside the degradation of the natural environment by the global economic order has led to unprecedented human migration and public protests in many nations.  It seems evident that the leader of this economic order has chosen to respond to the protests and demands for change with violence and the force of advanced weaponry.  As Rev. William Barber of the Poor Peoples Campaign observes, the War on Poverty of the 1960’s in the U.S. has become a war on the poor. But not just war on the poor in the U.S. We train and equip the police and military for brutal repression of the poor, Frantz Fanon’s “wretched of the earth”, around the world.