The Merchant of Death

Alfred Nobel (1833–1896) was a Swedish chemist, engineer, inventor, and philanthropist who made several contributions to science during his life. Nobel’s most famous invention was dynamite.

In 1888, the brother of Alfred Nobel, Ludvig Nobel, died from a heart attack. Some journalists in Europe made a journalistic error and printed Alfred’s obituary instead. One French newspaper wrote, “Le marchand de la mort est mort,” or “the merchant of death is dead.” The obituary went on to describe Nobel as a man “who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before.”

The book “The Merchant of Death” explores how people use the truth or good that is included in biblical scriptures and constitutions (i.e., liberal democracy, personal freedom, human rights, social justice, etc.) to become rich or to find ways to kill more people faster, just as they do with dynamite.

Killing, assassinating, spying, eavesdropping, deceiving, cheating, and betraying help the fittest rejuvenate their power only when these methods compel the weak to abandon their old ways and embrace the new. In other words, for killing, betraying, etc. to become worthwhile, the fittest need to make the weak shed from his mind attachments to distinction or tribal values, just as humans or animals are constantly shedding skin, either in the form of cells or in one continuous piece. When killing, deceiving, etc. stops to help the fittest to make the weak want to stay in groups with him and to let him have more power than others, history showed that recourse to such approaches became a detriment.

The book “The Merchant of Death” tries to support how the decision of the western European monarchs and republics (the victors of WW2) to deviate away from the work program that the founding fathers of the UN (the old powers) counselled them to be faithful to its principles to keep their dominant role and to grant rights to their critical thinkers and servants (governments, non-state actors, and international institutions) to regard themselves exempt from observing the work program suggested in the UN Charter and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights turbocharged dynamism around the world exactly as happened after Alfred Nobel managed to stabilize nitroglycerin (i.e., dynamite) in 1867. This is because, as of 1945, it is no longer governments who are killing, assassinating, spying, eavesdropping, deceiving, cheating, betraying, rivaling, etc. in the name of the larger cause of humanity (i.e., liberal democracy, personal freedom, and scientific progress), but non-state actors and international institutions joined in this formal quest as well.

The objective of the work is to support that if the Western European monarchs and republics (the victors of WW2) and their principal global policemen (the United States) continue to rely on assumptions that appear to be similar to what rulers and kings in antiquity relied on to get their ways despite the resistance of others (i.e., producing outcomes that do not make people trust them or love them, as the constant wars since 1945 could support), it would not be possible for them to avoid their power, wealth, and status continuing to erode and degrade until, in the course of time and things, it would be stripped from them and new families/dynasties start to depend on the universal ideas that they (the Western European monarchs) depend on to dominate, exploit, and subjugate others.

Most importantly, the work tries to support that if the Western European monarchs and republics (the victors of WW2) continue to allow the formal international intergovernmental organization named the United Nations to be a great temple of uselessness (and a den of thieves since 2013), the international order will be functioning in the same way Galileo (1564-1642), an Italian astronomer, plotted change in the Galileo wheel experiment he performed on how two wheels (or two people) can travel together (i.e., with skips or piecewise function) instead of the way Aristotle obtained in the famous wheel paradox experiment (i.e., continuous function). This signifies that for as long as the victors of WW2 allow the coming together of people to collaborate in the economic field as an idea that people support because it helps them to do things crookedly, it would not be possible to count on obtaining functions (relations) that would be without skips (i.e., what Galileo obtained) or at most what Gilles de Roberval (1602-1675), a French mathematician, obtained when “he focused on the path traced out by the point on the circumference of a rolling circle,” i.e., cycloid functions, which are functions that are similar to a bell-shaped curve. This also means that the longer the victors of WW2 take to stop the United Nations (the organization) from being an economic operator and a place that denies people rights just as people use the idea of governments to do on the outside of the UN fence (or to get rid of one of those two legal entities so only one stays, killing, deceiving, etc., in each UN member state), the faster the collapse of the victors of WW2 will be nearing.

The work also tries to support that the longer the families/dynasties that control the nations that won WW2 keep the international order dynamic, the more the international order will continue to be converted into a den of thieves instead of a pen that helps people learn to respond only to the voice of “their” shepherd, as Jesus suggested in the Good Shepherd and His Sheep parable to keep balance. When people stop speaking the same language, mankind would be throwing away the most important idea that humanity has toiled (i.e., killed, assassinated, spied, eavesdropped, deceived, cheated, betrayed, etc.) in the last two thousand years to secure. The primary focus is the idea of freedom, which mankind has begun to preserve without any skips since 1776. When it becomes impossible to know if people are killing, cheating, etc. to really secure the idea of freedom, or if the killing, cheating, etc. that people are propelling is motivated to use the idea of freedom to dominate, exploit, and subjugate, mankind will shed the American culture that humanity toiled during the last two thousand years to form and will go back to cooperating as per pre-1776 political and development cycles.