9th May is the shareholders’ meeting of Rheinmetall, where the war corporation distributes the blood money it has earned from the sale of weapons, deadly ammunition and other war equipment in the world’s wars. As every year, the amount of profits from war and suffering will be announced on this day. And 2022 was a good year for the managers of death. While the champagne corks are still popping, we will be in the streets protesting.
The alliance “Rheinmetall Entwaffnen” opposes militarisation, rearmament and arms exports. It is committed to an intersectional and internationalist anti-militarism. We are working to build a diverse, broad movement against rearmament, arms production and war. In recent years, we have made our presence felt with mass actions of civil disobedience and blockades against the arms industry in Kassel, Oberndorf and Unterlüß, among other places.
War is the worst outbreak of violence of patriarchal capitalism. People are exploited, injured, and killed by the industrialised war machine. Survivors are often left speechless and actionless. As the binarisation of gender and gender roles takes place, so too does increasing violence, against LGBTQI+, against women, against children, against all who cannot or will not live conformist lives.
The so-called feminist foreign policy plans military interventions in the Global South to secure resources for a few. It means that the actions of a few elite women are also responsible for the hunger of large parts of the world’s population, and no longer exclusively those of elite men. In feminist foreign policy, the law of the strongest applies. Feminist foreign policy shakes hands with fascists and laughs at extra-legal executions. It is nationalist and bellicose. In short, “feminist foreign policy” is anti-feminist.
Our feminism is anti-militarist. We are loud and creative and intervene where we are. For us, this means concretely attacking the warmongering of the German state and those who make profits from the production of weapons, tanks and other war equipment.
The Greens, who many decades ago saw themselves as a “peace party”, are now pushing militarisation ever further and fuelling the escalation of war in Ukraine. Instead of seriously seeking alternatives to a protracted war of attrition with thousands of deaths on both sides, the Greens want to “ruin Russia” (Baerbock) and proclaim “Ukraine must win. That’s it.” (Göring-Eckardt). At the same time, rearmament projects and arms deliveries cannot go fast enough for them. But even more weapons will not put an end to the dying. Quite the contrary.
Left anti-militarists, anti-imperialists, feminists, Kurdistan solidarists, people fighting against the border regime, trade unionists and climate activists – let’s betray the war together!
There are corporations, production sites, offices and other war and crisis profiteers everywhere. Join planned demonstrations and actions or visit war profiteers in your neighbourhood.
Düsseldorf, 9 May, from 11.55 a.m., Rheinmetall-Platz 1
Berlin, 9 May, 5 p.m., Platz vor dem neuen Tor 1
In Rostock, from 5 to 11 May, UDT Entwaffnen is organising a protest camp against the UDT undersea weapons fair, in which Rheinmetall is also involved.
