What's the price of war

• La palette : Transportation. Logistics. Commerce. The industrial and productivist dimension.
• AK-47 : The symbol of all conflicts.
• Or : The economic dimension of war: from arms sales to looting to conditional peace/surrender agreements (which cause many subsequent wars due to unbalanced terms).
• Noir : Embodiment of oil that fuels all conflicts as both reason and resource.

War is not an accident but the product of manufacturing consent specific to democratic regimes: it responds to a systematically economic stake—land, resources, access—and enables the appropriation of what can no longer be obtained through law or negotiation, while ensuring the continuous operation of the military industry; unlike authoritarian regimes that can impose war through coercion, democracies must make it acceptable by constructing a narrative, asserting that 'we cannot not act,' where emotion produced by propaganda replaces reasoning, transforms a strategic choice into a moral obligation, and obtains the necessary support to justify massacres, including those of their own population, in the name of fallacious principles designed to enrich a few at the expense of the people.

Profits and losses are never distributed equitably: war enriches the system—the military-industrial complex responsible for the production and distribution of weapons, the military-intellectual complex responsible for producing the media and ideological narratives that make war acceptable or even necessary—while the population bears the human, social, and material losses; those who give orders and those who manufacture ready-made thinking will never go to combat and will reap the dividends.