Ursula Franklin

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Ursula Franklin : biography

16 September 1921 –

Modern weapons technologies, including the required research and development, are particularly capital-intensive and costly. The time between initial research and the deployment of weapon systems can be as long as a decade, during which the government must provide financial security and political justification for the project. In other words, the state not only provides the funding but also identifies a credible external enemy who warrants such expenditure.Franklin (Reader), p.58.

Franklin points out that the technological nature of war requires states to conscript the resources needed to pay for hi-tech devices designed for destruction. Thus, people opposed to war are forced—through taxation—to pay for war preparations even if it violates their individual conscience.Franklin (Reader), pp.55–57.

Peace and social justice

In her 1987 paper, Reflections on Theology and Peace, Ursula Franklin contends that "peace is not the absence of war—peace is the absence of fear."Franklin (Reader), p.76. She asserts however, that fear of war and violence is not the only kind of fear that destroys peace. She includes fears arising for example, from economic insecurity, unemployment and the lack of adequate shelter. Franklin points to what she calls "the threat system" which manages people by instilling fear and uncertainty at all levels of society.Franklin (Reader), pp.69–70.

There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.

– A.J. Muste quoted in The Ursula Franklin Reader.Franklin (Reader), pp.69&96.

For her, social justice is the essential element needed to banish fear and bring peace. Justice means freedom from oppression, but it also implies equality for all. "In God’s eyes," she writes, "all creatures have value and are subjects of equal care and love; similarly, in a society of justice and peace, all people matter equally."Franklin (Reader), p.70. Franklin suggests that in consumer-oriented societies, war and violence are the inevitable result of an acquisitive lifestyle that rejects caring and social justice. She quotes historian Lewis Mumford’s observation that during the rise of capitalism, the sins of greed, gluttony, avarice, envy and luxury became cardinal virtues.Franklin (Reader), p.71. Mumford goes on to argue that the "moral change that took place under capitalism can be summed up in the fact that human purposes, human needs, and human limits no longer exercised a directing and restraining influence upon industry: people worked, not to maintain life, but to increase money and power and to minister to the ego that found satisfaction in vast accumulations of money and power."Mumford, Lewis. (1973) The Condition of Man. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, Inc., p.162. Franklin extends Mumford’s argument by pointing to new global realities such as militarized economies dependent on weapons production and national borders increasingly closed to refugees. "Any modern theology of peace," she writes, "must, I think, take into account the worldwide drift towards ‘techno-fascism,’ the anti-people, anti-justice form of global management and power sharing that is developing around the world."Franklin (Reader), pp.71–73.

Globalization as warfare

Franklin argues that the end of the Cold War brought two main changes. First, the threat of war between the United States and Soviet Union was replaced by regional wars among smaller states. Second, war was transposed to what Franklin calls "another key"—the struggle for global commercial and economic dominance.Franklin (Reader), p.115. She asserts that this new form of war is now called globalization and its battlefields are global stock and currency markets.Franklin (Reader), p.117. This economic warfare defines the enemy as all those who care about the values of community. "Whatever cannot be merely bought and sold," Franklin writes, "whatever cannot be expressed in terms of money and gain-loss transactions stands in the way of the ‘market’ as enemy territory to be occupied, transformed and conquered."Franklin (Reader), p.118. A main strategy in this kind of warfare is the privatization of formerly public domains such as culture, health care, prisons and education to generate private profit. Franklin contends that the new economic warlords or "marketeers" aim, for example, to transform "the ill health or misery of our neighbours into investment opportunities for the next round of capitalism."Franklin (Reader), p.124. She argues that marketeers have become occupying forces served by "puppet governments who run the country for the benefit of the occupiers." Franklin has also noted that in democratic politics, the economy is all that seems to matter. "Canada has almost no foreign policy," she says, "but rather is part of an elaborate network of trade agreements."