Blood Work

Gareth and Rocz join Gregk to account for the many crimes of modernity’s slow, silent killers – engineers, technicians, and urban planners.

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Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production

Image: An overhead photograph of the ‘Futurama’ diorama presented at the 1939 World’s Fair created by Norman Bel Geddes with sponsorship from General Motors [GM].

This is a preview. To hear the entire episode and help Blood Work to survive and thrive, become a supporter on Patreon.

As the Soviets entered the Cold War, they had a gun they could use as conduit, commodity, or currency. The US, meanwhile, hit the snooze alarm. In Vietnam, a rude awakening awaited them.

Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production

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Image: A Viet Cong soldier posing with a Type 2 AK-47 rifle during a POW exchange in 1973. (Source: SSgt. Herman Kokojan, Defence Visual Information Centre)

We trace the evolution of international arms transfers from mercantilism to the modern era, and the perverse incentives produced by the symbiosis of private enterprise and state imperatives in arms production.

Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production

THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE: Killstreak Inbound

Sources:

Amnesty International (June 1995), ‘RWANDA: Arming the Perpetrators of the Genocide’, available at Amnesty.org

Jonathan Beatty and S. C. Gwynne (1993), The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart Of BCCI

Steve Boggan (Nov. 23, 1996), ‘Bloody trade that fuels Rwanda's war (Operation Insecticide), available at The Independent

Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001

George Cryle (2003), Charlie Wilson's War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History

Owen Greene and Nicholas Marsh (eds.) (2012), Small Arms, Crime and Conflict: Global Governance and the Threat of Armed Violence

Nicholas Kotarski (2018), ‘Whose Monster? A Study in the Rise to Power of al Qaeda and the Taliban’, History Theses, 47

Keith Krause (1992), Arms and the State: Patterns of Military Production and Trade

Mamello Mosiana, Hennie van Vuuren and Daniel Ford (Nov. 13, 2024), ‘Unaccountable 00040 | Willem ‘Ters’ Ehlers – apartheid’s secretary turned genocide arms dealer’, available at Open Secrets

John U. Nef (1950), War and Human Progress: An Essay on the Rise of Industrial Civilization

Robert Pear (Apr. 18, 1988), ‘Arming Afghan Guerrillas: A Huge Effort Led by U.S.’, available at The New York Times(archived)

Frederic S. Pearson (1994), The Global Spread of Arms: Political Economy of Economic Security

Peter Dale Scott (2007), The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America

William Shawcross (1988), The Shah’s Last Ride

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute [SIPRI] (2010), ‘End-User Certificates: Improving Standards to Prevent Diversion’, available at SIPRI

Stockholm International Peace Research Institute [SIPRI] (2024), ‘The SIPRI Top 100 Arms-Producing and Military Services Companies, 2024’, available at SIPRI

Rachel Stohl and Suzette Grillot (2009), The International Arms Trade

Joe Stork (Nov. 1, 1995), ‘The Middle East Arms Bazaar After the Gulf War’, available at Middle East Research and Information Project

Andrew T. H. Tan (ed.) (2010), The Global Arms Trade: A Handbook

Adam Tooze (Mar. 23, 2023), ‘Chartbook 204: Iraq’s economic impasse twenty years after the invasion’, available at Chartbook | Adam Tooze

Mark Townsend (Oct. 28, 2025), ‘UK military equipment used by militia accused of genocide found in Sudan, UN told’, available at The Guardian

Matt Wells (Feb. 10, 2000), ‘Arms firm linked to Rwandan army chief’, available at The Guardian

Brian Wood and Johan Peleman (2000), The Arms Fixers. Controlling the Brokers and Shipping Agents

Image: Soldiers patrol outside of Goma International Airport in North Kivu province, Democratic Republic of Congo (2022)

This is a preview. To hear the entire episode and help Blood Work to survive and thrive, become a supporter on Patreon.

It’s time to tell the story of Mikhail Kalashnikov, his eponymous gun, the horrors of the Eastern Front, and one of the biggest fumbles in US military history.

Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production

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THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE: Pox Americana

Image: Mikhail Klashnikov posing with the AK-47 at an event commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the gun’s creation in 2007

We begin our history of the most famous firearm of all time with a prologue: Because in order to understand how we got here, you gotta understand where we came from.

Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production

THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE: Little Marco’s Big Speech

Sources:

C. J. Chivers (2010), The Gun: The Story of the AK-47

Larry Kahaner (2008), AK-47: The Weapon that Changed the Face of War

Chris McNab (2001), The AK-47

Image: The American-British entrepreneur Hiram Maxim posing with his eponymous Maxim Gun.

This is a preview. To hear the entire episode and help Blood Work to survive and thrive, become a supporter on Patreon.

Josh drops by the Blood Work studio to talk about one of the most mentally unhinged prestige TV shows of the early millennium and what it might tell us about America’s relationship with violence.

Image: Jack Bauer interrogating Marie Warner in Season 2 of 24.

Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production

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Prompted by a meditation on mercenaries, Gregk consults the henchest man in ancient history to discuss ancient forms of violence work and whether our current conjuncture is really a rupture, or more a return to form.

Image: A group of unidentified mercenaries operating in Gaza, 2025.

THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE: WEST MIAMI ANTISOCIAL CLUB

For this week’s newsletter, we situate the United States’ latest wave of aggression against Cuba within the longer histories of the the twentieth and nineteenth centuries, stripping back the various narratives the western hemisphere’s imperial master has layered, like wallpaper, over its designs on Cuba over decades.

This is a preview. To hear the entire episode and help Blood Work to survive and thrive, become a supporter on Patreon.

Gareth and Gregk reconvene to tell the second chapter in the C18 saga which, naturally, features some sunlit uplands, a Swedish man named ‘Pie’, and a wizard.

Read his recent article, “Has Ukip Gone Full Nazi?” in The New Statesman

Image: A title card from a C18 propaganda video tape, sourced from the third World in Action documentary about the group.

Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production

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Gareth and Gregk discuss what happens when a group of football hooligans decide to elevate their violent bloodlust into a fully-fledged political movement. (Spoiler: Bad, stupid things.)

Read his recent article, “Has Ukip Gone Full Nazi?” in The New Statesman

Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production

THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE: OLD WORLD BRB, NEW WORLD AFK

Sources:

Nick Lowles (2014 [2001]), White Riot: The Violent Story of Combat 18

This is a preview. To hear the entire episode and help Blood Work to survive and thrive, become a supporter on Patreon.

We situate the favourite tool in the U.S. arsenal in its historical context, and try to make sense of that silent, peaceful, deadly weapon.

Blood Work is a Scam Goldin Production

For more:

– Support Blood Work via Patreon

– Follow us on Bluesky / Instagram / Twitter

THIS WEEK IN VIOLENCE – Witness, No Witnesses

This week, we look at two news stories which demonstrate the differing approaches to advancing right-wing politics in the US and UK. The rise of Donald Trump and his dominance of political discourse over the past decade has placed spectacle front-and-centre in our understanding of right-wing thought and, indeed, placed right-wing thought front-and-centre in our perception of dominant political ideology.

But as our second news story hopefully demonstrates, the brazenness of Trump’s particular political style at times serves to aid the advancement of right-wing cruelty and sadism elsewhere, when a comparative lack of ripples across the water creates the illusion that less is occurring beneath the surface.

Image: An Iraqi mother nurses her sick child at a hospital in Baghdad in 1994. (Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)