From 16 to 22 June, the 55th International Paris Air Show will be held at the Le Bourget exhibition center, north of Paris.
This is one of the world’s biggest arms fairs. France, now the world’s 2nd biggest arms dealer, is using it as a showcase to position itself in this global market for war and control, surveillance and repression, borders, prisons and camps.
Over the course of these few days, 2,500 exhibitors from 48 countries, led by the Western powers, are expected to sell their drones, bombers, missiles, etc., all weapons that always end up hitting civilian populations and repressing peoples in struggle.
The exhibition will feature Israeli stands as well as those of many firms complicit in genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity around the world.
Some of the French companies present are directly involved in the genocide in Gaza or supply military components to Russia: this is the case of Safran and Thales, whose components are incorporated into drones that target Palestinian and Ukrainian civilians. In partnership with Israel’s Elbit, Airbus contributes to surveillance programs in the Mediterranean on behalf of Frontex.
Other French firms, such as Dassault and KNDS, have contributed to mass crimes in Yemen and are arming dictatorships such as Egypt and Morocco. For its part, civil aviation, which takes center stage at the show, is complicit in the system of deporting illegal exiles. Le Bourget airport itself plays a dreadful role as the departure point for many deportations.
This 55th edition of the show also comes at a time when war is being used as an argument for reconfiguring public budgets at the expense of public services or the social protection system, while also serving as an explanation for inflation.
Militarization is always the option chosen by imperialist states to divide up the world and recover in times of crisis. Within the major powers, it accentuates the fascisation of media and political institutions. In the rest of the world, it encourages the extension or aggravation of armed conflicts that are already unfolding in indifference (Congo, Sudan, Kurdistan, Haiti). And by quadrilling the world with borders and camps, it is increasingly crushing the lives of those who have already been driven into exile by wars and extractivism.
While genocidal colonialism rages on in Gaza and the rest of Palestine with the military and financial support of the Western powers, while France continues to maintain its colonial domination in Kanaky, French Guiana and Mayotte, in the Caribbean, in Africa and even in working-class neighborhoods, while Russian weapons loaded with Western electronic components continue to wreak havoc in Ukraine, the great market of the oppression of peoples is opening its doors at Le Bourget, close to where we live.
To face up to this, we need to revive our anti-militarist and anti-imperialist traditions and the need for internationalist solidarity.
There is an urgent need for a united front against war and militarism, which encompasses all our struggles:
- Against authoritarianism, with the subjugation of the population in the name of the Union Sacrée and the subjugation of young people,
- Against the destruction of nature; the arms industry is based on ecocide and extractivism,
- Against patriarchy and its mass crimes against women in wartime, and against Macron’s so-called ‘demographic rearmament’,
- Against racism: repression in working-class neighborhoods and colonies from the Caribbean to Kanaky and Mayotte,
- For the rights of exiles: War causes refugees to be forcibly displaced and accentuates North-South relations of domination as borders are militarized,
- For social benefits and against job insecurity: war is an argument for reconfiguring budgets at the expense of public services and the social protection system.
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