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By Dave Wolland
ENDS
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The urge to throw more money at defence budgets across a number of countries has become infectious. Spend, spend, spend is the theme, and the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has shown himself willing to join this wasteful indulgence.
The trouble with deterrence chatter is that it remains hostage to delusion. Strategists talk in extravagant terms about the genuine prospect that nuclear weapons can make any one state safer, leading to some calculus of tolerable use. The French offer of replacing the US nuclear umbrella in Europe perpetrates similar deadly sins about deterrence.
The action of spontaneous, undirected attention quiets and cleanses the brain of its useless, accumulated content, allowing the mind to fall silent and participate in the consciousness of the cosmos.
Unfortunately, international law, which was in theory supposed to reflect global consensus, was hardly dedicated to peace or genuinely invested in the decolonisation of the South. As disturbing as all of this is, there is a silver lining, specifically an opportunity for the international legal and political system to be fixed based on new standards, justice that applies to all, and accountability
Five public sector heavyweights resigning and walking out the door within the space of a month must be unprecedented. The resignations may all be unrelated and therefore simply coincidental, but the number of sudden resignations in such a short time suggests not and raises suspicions of some sort of behind the scenes agitation and orchestration by Ministers.
For democracies to save themselves, they should bring non-establishment voices to the table. In 2025. Germany will be another important test case, already sowing the seeds of political failure. We should be wary of demonising the far non-establishment-right while lionising the far establishment-right.
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