‘War is a racket’: How Malta’s military boom echoes a 1935 warning

War is a racket, said U.S. Marine Major-General Smedley Butler in 1935, and ninety years later the phrase still reverberates through Valletta’s limestone alleys every time another arms fair sets up in the Mediterranean. Malta, officially neutral since 1980, likes to style itself as a “peace lab” that once brokered talks between Gaddafi and the West, yet the island is also Europe’s southernmost radar dome, a refuelling node for NATO ships, and—according to the latest trade statistics—an exporter of €4.3 million worth of “electronic targeting equipment” in just twelve months. Somewhere between the souvenir cannons outside Fort St Elmo and the slick drone-component factory in Ħal Far, the racket Butler warned about is quietly humming along.

Walk down Republic Street on any Saturday and you will see war re-packaged as heritage: red-coated re-enactors fire blank muskets while cruise-ship visitors film on phones manufactured with Congolese cobalt. The same kids who learn about the 1565 Great Siege in school can buy toy AR-15s at the Christmas market for €15. “We glorify the past to ignore the present,” says Dr. Maria Camilleri, who lectures in anthropology at the University of Malta. Her students recently mapped 47 public monuments celebrating military victories but could not find a single statue commemorating civilian victims of twentieth-century conflicts. “Collective memory here is curated by siege mentality,” she adds. “That makes it easy for governments to justify new defence spending as ‘security’ rather than profit.”

The numbers tell their own story. Since 2014 Malta’s military budget has doubled, while the state-backed Malta Development Bank has channelled soft loans to three foreign-owned companies producing components for guided missiles. Meanwhile, 3,800 Maltese households still rely on food banks. “It’s the same old con,” argues former Labour MP Evarist Bartolo, who now writes a newsletter on geopolitics. “You scare people with migration or terrorism, then channel taxpayers’ money to private contractors. In the 1930s it was battleships; today it’s cyber-warfare and drones, but the song remains the same.”

Yet the racket is not just fiscal; it is cultural. Every village festa fires petards that mimic artillery, normalising the sound of war for toddlers. The island’s most popular carnival float this February was a giant tank spraying confetti, driven by teens who had spent months raising funds to build it. “We literally party to the rhythm of simulated gunfire,” says Steve Pace, a DJ from Żejtun who has started refusing gigs that use pyrotechnics. “When I pointed it out on Facebook, my own cousins called me ‘unpatriotic’.”

Resistance, however, is germinating. In May, peace activists parked a fishing boat outside the Malta Maritime Museum and projected Butler’s 1935 speech onto its sail, drawing a crowd of 200. The same month, Gozitan farmers blocked trucks they claimed were ferrying radar parts under agricultural tarpaulins. “We recognise the smell of fertiliser, and that wasn’t it,” jokes 68-year-old Ċensu Vella, still wearing his straw hat during our interview. Their spontaneous protest lasted only three hours, but it forced parliamentary questions about end-user certificates—an issue the independent media has since dubbed “Malta’s arms-smuggling loophole”.

The Diocese of Malta has also weighed in, with Archbishop Charles Scicluna dedicating his 2023 Armistice Day homily to “the idolatry of arms”. “When war becomes a business, every refugee boat is treated as a threat, not a neighbour,” he told congregants inside St John’s Co-Cathedral, whose baroque walls once hosted the Knights’ armoury. His words prompted a rare joint editorial in the Times of Malta and Malta Today calling for a national commission on disarmament, though no political party has yet taken up the proposal.

What would a post-racket Malta look like? Activists point to the island’s thriving gaming sector as proof that high-tech jobs can pivot away from weaponry. “We already code better avionics than most of Europe,” says software engineer Leanne Ellul. “Redirect 10 % of that talent to green shipping or Med-climate modelling and you transform the economy without firing anyone.” The government’s new AI strategy, unveiled in April, mentions “dual-use” technologies seven times but never defines the second use, leaving campaigners wary.

For now, the Mediterranean remains a theatre where superpowers rehearse tomorrow’s conflicts, and Malta’s limestone forts—once built to repel Ottomans—now host cocktail receptions for defence contractors. Butler’s warning, scrawled on a banner outside Castille last week, puts it bluntly: “To hell with war.” Whether Maltese politicians will muster the courage to cut the island’s slice of the racket is the question hovering over this year’s budget debate. Until then, the cannons will keep firing—some with blanks for tourists, others with very real consequences for children on distant shores.