Militarization | Breaking out of the war regime: You won't get us!

When Israel attacked Iran on June 13, 2025, Israeli bombs hit Evin Prison in Tehran , presumably killing over 70 Iranian regime prisoners. Immediately following the Israeli attacks, the Iranian regime launched a wave of repression against critics. So, whatever those who profit from war and seek to expand their spheres of influence tell us, wars are never fought for human rights or liberation. On the contrary, war is always also a war against social struggles, against grassroots movements.

Whether in the escalation of wars and violence in Iran, Gaza , Ukraine, or Syria, the post-World War II international order is collapsing, and no one seems to have any idea how to stabilize it, not even those in power. They are pursuing their interests with violence—increasingly without the rhetorical camouflage that was common around the turn of the millennium.

Countries like Iran, Palestine, and Ukraine are becoming battlefields where the struggle for economic interests and international order is being waged. But even in countries not acutely affected by the war, its logic continues: in processes of militarization throughout society. In Germany, since the "turning point," limits on defense spending have been lifted, the debate about conscription has been fueled, election posters promise security and rearmament, companies like VW are once again increasingly investing in military equipment, and shares in Rheinmetall & Co. are booming. And the discourse is becoming more authoritarian: individuals are being demanded of "war-readiness," any dissent is defamed as "naive," events are being canceled, demonstrations and chants are being branded as anti-Semitic and banned. The corridor of debate is narrowing, and nuances are barely audible. In this way, or in a similar way, order and discipline are being maintained on the home front elsewhere.

We therefore propose a hypothesis about the development of a war regime. By this, we do not mean a specific form of government in the form of a military junta in individual nation-states. Rather, we mean a new mode of rule and national and global crisis management through the joint action of state and non-state actors. This mode is centered around the right of the strongest. On the one hand, wars serve to secure increasingly scarce resources and to reorganize global trade routes, supply chains, and neo-colonial power relations. On the other hand, war always means homogenization and discipline within, the suppression of social contradictions, and struggles under the banner of national unity.

Here, too, an economy and a society are to be made fit for war—materially and discursively. The socio-psychological driver is the stoked fear of the evil lurking behind the walls that separate our civilization from a barbaric world. Russian authoritarianism and the Islamist fundamentalism of Hamas serve as symbols of evil, in contrast to which our own social order is supposed to appear as the epitome of humanity, freedom, and progress.

In view of their necessary defense, we are supposed to fall into line and believe that the countless crises, the inequalities, and the climate catastrophe, which have their origins in the capitalist mode of production, have become secondary. Tightening our belts, accepting the abolition of the eight-hour day , swallowing inflation, and tolerating billions being invested in armaments instead of the education and healthcare systems – all of this is supposedly necessary if "the Russians" are soon at our door again and we must stand together against them. By constantly invoking the external threat, any objection to rising defense budgets, falling wages, or diminished social benefits is branded as naive, disloyal, or dangerous. Realpolitik alternatives – disarmament and the search for diplomatic solutions – are thus gradually disappearing from public discourse.

The rhetoric of no alternative not only cements the war regime itself, but also the neoliberal core of its policies. Austerity and militarization are being elevated to the only conceivable strategy for security and progress. Negative arms conversion is intended to secure German jobs and profits when, in the future, tanks instead of train carriages leave the factory floors. Thus, to escape the recession, the military sector is being targeted. Once again, the German economy is profiting from death and killing.

The rhetoric of war knows only a binary and racially coded friend-enemy logic, which sees in the other and the outside only the threat and the absolute other to one's own position, with whom negotiation or compromise is no longer possible. The racist dehumanization of the enemy has always been a fundamental prerequisite for carrying out and legitimizing wars or even genocide like the one in Gaza. The enemy is not only external but has long since arrived within one's own society. Considering, for example, the demand by Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) for more effective weapons for the federal police, the heavily fortified external borders, and paramilitary actors like Frontex, it becomes clear once again that the "others" are to be kept at bay by military means, made precarious, and their rights further eroded.

At the same time, migrants are always the "testing ground" for authoritarian practices that are then intended to be generalized. This became particularly evident in the fall of 2023, when the repression and interventions of the traffic light coalition government were directed against the Palestine solidarity movement, combined with debates about imported antisemitism and racist propaganda for "large-scale" deportations. This resulted in massive restrictions on freedom of expression and assembly, as well as on access to citizenship.

The military logic of thinking in camps, which allows no nuance and presents the enemy as absolute evil, thus narrowing the corridor of what can be said, the ban on demonstrations, the arming of police forces, and the withdrawal of funding for critical, social, and/or left-wing projects – these are all emblems of an increasingly authoritarian state. In Germany, this is particularly evident in the expansion of the Bundeswehr and the police, which are being massively upgraded not only symbolically but also materially in the wake of the debates about the "defensibility" of democracy. And this despite the numerous right-wing to far-right networks in these very institutions brought to light by anti-fascist research. With an eye on the next election, a secure right-wing extremist party has the opportunity to seize power in a state that will likely have been massively armed by then.

Those who fail to abolish the basic conditions of imperial competition in capitalism will not be able to avoid waging war in the future. Neither Trump's extortionate "peace" policies nor the expansion of the European border regime, which combats migration movements militarily and through security policy, indicate that the fascist international is truly a project of peace, no matter how unpopular foreign missions may be among its supporters.

Whatever those who profit from wars and seek to expand their spheres of influence tell us, wars are never fought in the spirit of human rights or liberation.

In the face of escalating planetary chaos, political hegemony, access to increasingly scarce resources, and the imperial way of life are increasingly being secured through military means. There is reason to fear that this trend will escalate into a kind of "super-sized prepping" (Naomi Klein). This also applies to securing raw materials for "green" technologies: The other projects of "green capitalism" are linked to a militarized neoliberalism, because even a capitalism converted to "green" technology requires access to resources and is dependent on neocolonial exploitation.

We are already seeing how authoritarian, fascist, and warmongering rulers of various stripes are undermining fundamental democratic rights, attacking critical civil societies, and celebrating violence as a means of political enforcement—whether as a means of counterinsurgency or as a deportation fantasy. Our antifascism must therefore become antimilitarist, and our antimilitarism antifascist.

The war regime is a massive attack on fundamental liberal rights such as freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, and academic freedom, on critical civil society, on the rights of wage earners, and on the welfare state. It is therefore also a top-down war, an attack on what has already been won, an attack on all forms of resistance.

We therefore propose desertion. Not just in the narrow sense of refusing military service. We understand desertion as a practice of evasion, the collective refusal to be integrated into the war regime. In practice, this would mean engaging in all those struggles in which the spread of the authoritarian war regime is negotiated: in struggles against German support for the genocide in Gaza; in struggles against repression; in struggles against violence against queers, migrants, and FLINTA*; in struggles against social cuts and austerity policies; against rearmament, arms deliveries, conscription, and militaristic training; in struggles against continued resource exploitation, against militarized external borders and deportations; against the heavily armed police apparatus.

Our task as the radical left is to transform these struggles into anti-militarist struggles against the war regime, to bring them out of their isolation and connect them. It is our task to broaden and collectivize moments of refusal and desertion from the war regime. Because the logic of war creates a new logic of power, which finds its legitimacy and goal in the militarization of all society.

And – last but not least – all these struggles against the war regime must be waged as transnational struggles. We need a transnational movement that does not fit into the rigid ranks of discipline and the demarcated fronts of camp formation. For the boundary does not run between nations and fronts, but between us, who die in the wars, and those who profit from them. Between the top and the bottom. Between the prisoners of Evin Prison in Iran and everywhere in the world and the powerful who lock them up and bomb them. Between those who fight for life and those who build death machines. We cannot and will not choose sides in these wars, for they are wars against us.