Tag: World Affairs

It may be time to think the unthinkable: all the signs are pointing to the West preparing to launch a proper war in Europe. Once started it could bring, for the first time in living memory, millions of Western civilians into uniform and see the cities of the West attacked. Preposterous? Jumping the Shark? Listen to what the leaders in the West are saying. The time to stop the madness is now, not once the elites drive us into the abyss and civilians are stripped of all rights to oppose. (more…)

It’s been argued that Indonesia’s next President may be good for Australian interests; for domestic progressives that’s doubtful. (more…)

Like Gaza, Ukraine is one of the great tragedies of the post-Cold War period. Like Gaza, it is the result of a deadly game pursued by great powers intent on inflicting maximum damage on each other, seemingly oblivious of the costs. (more…)

If the Tories’ plan for young people to serve in national service is not bizarre enough, we now find that the Labour Party will use nuclear weapons should they deem it necessary. The ideas raised by possession of nuclear arms are just as contradictory now as they have been throughout the nuclear age. They demonstrate the stupidity of the nuclear arms race very succinctly. (more…)

Euripides drama Medea about unpunished crimes infecting the Greek city-state contains some sobering lessons for Australia’s future in AUKUS. (more…)

Well it finally happened: Biden is now letting Ukraine strike Russian territory with US-supplied weapons. Escalations in nuclear brinkmanship which would have been unthinkable a few short years ago are becoming increasingly common as Ukraine loses more and more territory and runs out of soldiers to fight. (more…)

What happens when a powerful nation cannot afford to lose a war it has already lost? (more…)

Suppose the United States State Department was tasked during World War II to assess whether Adolf Hitler’s extermination camps violated international humanitarian law (IHL). (more…)

Richard Flanagan has done us a favour. His recent book, Question 7, takes us back to the creation of atomic bombs, and to their use against people, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Those bombs played an indirect but pivotal role in Flanagan’s family. They are directly pivotal in humanity’s story. After many decades of habituation to abstract talk of nuclear warfare, Flanagan reminds us of what a nuclear bomb does to people and why no more should ever be used. (more…)

The stars do not exactly seem to be aligning for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he bids for a third term in office with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police charging three Indians living in Edmonton with the assassination of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar in June last year.

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In this quiet hour, I summon words, a humble man amidst shadows long,
To speak of wounds not my own, to voice a plea so loud and strong.
For streets that haunt with harried silence, for whispers in the dark,
For the women who carry nightmares in the hollows of their hearts,
I say, not in my name, shall this darkness be just fate. (more…)

Rwanda is now a peaceful country which remembers each year, the awful genocide of 1994. People can blindly become killers if their leaders are successful in instilling enough fear into them. Learning from history is an antidote. (more…)