380 Chapter Ten
to the very foundation of Islam, made it easy to attack foreign in
fluence and corruption and rally mass followings for the defense of the
true faith. But a regime seeking to be true to the Koran had difficulty
in coping with twentieth-century technology since those who mas
tered the technology of the West were unlikely to remain fanatically
faithful to Mohammed’s revelation.
An enemy at the gates has always been the best substitute for spon
taneous consensus at home. Fear of what a foe would do if allowed to
cross the frontier will often breed obedience, if only on the ancient
principle “better the scoundrels one knows that the scourge one
fears.” Wars and rumors of war against near neighbors can therefore
be expected to flourish luxuriantly in those parts of Africa, Asia, and
Latin America where public consensus is weak and precarious. Peasant
ways of life face enormous strain wherever population has become too
great to allow the rising generation to find enough land to live on and
raise a family in traditional fashion. The restless and impassioned
search for new faiths, new land, new ways of life provoked by such
circumstances is sure to disturb any and every form of constituted
governmental authority until such time as the demographic crisis
somehow diminishes. To judge from Europe’s history between 1750
and 1950, this will take a long time and may cost many lives.
Wars and preparations for wars are therefore likely to remain very
prominent in most of the Third World. The enormous arms buildup
occurring in those lands since the 1960s testifies to this fact. As in
earlier ages, such expenditures are not always purely wasteful from an
economic point of view. New skills, needed to maintain such compli
cated pieces of machinery as modern combat airplanes, have wider
application. Given suitable conditions, they can, as in nineteenth-
century Japan, promote industrial growth. On the other hand, heavy
investment in armaments may choke off other kinds of development.
Overall, there seems to be no coherent relationship between Third
World rates of economic growth since 1945 and rates of military
expenditure.^18
Inability to maintain domestic peace, however, is a sure path to
economic regression. Insofar as maintenance of public order becomes
problematic so that governments fear their own people as much or
more than any external foe, police equipment takes precedence. Re
cent statistics show that since the mid 1960s new nations have invested
more heavily in police forces than in armament aimed at foreign
- Cf. Gavin Kennedy, The Military in the Third World (London, 1974), pp.
174–89.
