There’s a whole set of political and ethical issues wrapped up in whether protesters like the ones gathered against Melbourne’s large Land Forces defence industry conference are right to confront police with anger, volleys of horse poo and tomatoes and even fires to make their point. 

My simple view is that violent protest achieves little, while peaceful, impassioned protest is a valuable part of our society that can cause change.  And the work to promote peaceful protests needs to be done by protest organisers and participants, with the police response and posture needing to also not push people along the path to violence on our streets.

But there’s another side to the protesters’ logic and motivations that just doesn’t add up.  The protesters are deeply anti-war.  Good, I suspect most of us are.  They see the arms industry as fuelling war and think that if these companies stop making weapons peace will be the result.  That’s where I start to disagree. They carry signs with slogans including “Capitalism Kills. No $ for War” and “War: it’s costing the Earth”.

Many of the protesters support Palestine and want an end to the war between Hamas and Israel.  They link the arms companies to that war and again seem to think that stopping the companies will stop that war.

There’s a giant blind spot here that involves self deception and wishful thinking.  The Israel-Hamas war is not the only brutal conflict on our planet right now.  Putin’s war against 38 million Ukrainians is brutal, with Russian missiles, drones and glide bombs deliberately targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure like hospitals and power stations.  There are many smaller active conflicts and several ‘frozen’ ones like the Korean Peninsula and the Taiwan Straits.

Ukraine has not been conquered by Russia despite two years of Russian war because of the Ukrainian people and military’s courage and resourcefulness – but also because the Ukrainian military has been provided with a flow of weapons and defensive systems by many of the arms companies gathered down at that exhibition facility in Melbourne.

Javelin anti tank missiles that destroyed Russian forces advancing on Kyiv at the start of the war are made by Raytheon. The Patriot anti-missile system that has been intercepting Russian Kinzhal ballistic and hypersonic missiles flying towards Kyiv and other Ukrainian population centres is made by Lockheed Martin.  The NASAMs air defence system that has been shooting down other Russian missiles and drones is a made by the partnership of Raytheon and Kongsberg.  General Dynamics makes the F-16 fighters that are starting to equip the Ukrainian air force, as a well as making the M1A1 tanks given to Ukraine’s ground forces.  And Thales here in Australia makes the Bushmaster protected vehicle that has saved the lives of Ukrainian soldiers using it to get to the battlefield and back again.

Ask Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainian people if they want the companies in Melbourne to be shut down and you’ll hear that they want the opposite – the companies need to produce more and western governments need to get this military equipment into the hands of Ukrainian soldiers faster so that they can defend themselves and end the war.

So, imagine if the protesters were subject to that Chinese curse ‘May you get everything you wish for’ with western arms companies shutting down and countries like Australia, the US, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Poland, Finland, France, the Philippines, Ukraine – and Israel – dismantling our militaries and giving peace a chance. 

The war in Ukraine would end and so would the war in Gaza, just differently to how the protesters seem to imagine.

In Ukraine, it would be through Russian conquest and pillage, with Putin perhaps thinking things went so well he should re-establish the glories of the Soviet Union a bit more by eating chunks of de-militarised Lithuania, Poland or Finland. 

Hamas would climb out of their remaining tunnels and roll back into Israel to do what they were founded to do: exterminate the Israeli state and every Israeli standing in their way, with their behaviour modelled on the barbaric murders, assaults and torture they began in 7 October 2023 and have continued since.  Hezbollah, the Houthis and numerous other Iranian proxies in places like Syria and Iraq would join in in the violence and killing. When the initial slaughter ended, Hamas would govern the conquered and their own people brutally and violently – as they have done since seizing power in Gaza in 2007. ‘Free Palestine’ would be more like Afghanistan than Sweden.

Closer to home, Kim Jong Un would see a demilitarised South Korea as the perfect opportunity to unify the Peninsula on his terms under his rule, executing traitors who foolishly believed in democracy, personal freedom – and free markets regulated by governments. Xi Jinping would gratefully acknowledge American and Japanese pacifism by subjugating 23 million Taiwanese, send thousands to re-education camps and prisons as he’s done to the Uyghurs and turn Taiwan into a security state like present day Hong Kong.

What this picture shows is the obvious nasty truth that the protesters in Melbourne need to deny: violent regimes led by brutal people exist in our world and they are restrained by others who have the military power to do so. They will not turn from goals of conquest to gathering flowers and frolicking with men and women of peace if we and other democratic nations close down our arms industry and chant ‘peace not war’ while wrapped in keffiyehs and carrying signs about how we don’t like baby killers.

So, the starry-eyed protesters need to ignore what is keeping Ukraine free of Russian conquest. They need to engage in self-deception about what a Palestinian state ‘from the river to the sea’ would look like under Hamas – and how it would be created. 

And they need to engage in one final magical act of self delusion by denying that one fundamental reason they are able to protest against the Australian government and the arms companies gathered at the exhibition is because they live in a country that is kept safe and free by the work of people in the companies in that exhibition hall, who equip Australia’s and our allies’ and partners’ militaries. 

Democracy has to be defended to survive and to deter those who would otherwise use force against us.

This article was first published in The Australian.