Peace Through Strength – Military Keynesianism
Yanis Varoufakis spoke to Declassified UK about why Keir Starmer’s plan to spend more on the military is not a sustainable way to grow Britain’s economy.
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“Peace through strength” – our very own home grown wannabe autocrat speaks, you couldn’t invent such politically deceptive language — oh, of course, you can invent it, George Orwell did in his novel 1984, he called it doublespeak. Orwell would have probably used this slogan himself if he’d thought of it at the time. It’s a sort of rhetorical collateral damage of our language by political deviousness, to stand aside all those well worn almost clichéd linguistic excrescences such as enhanced interrogation, extra-judicial killing, tree hugger, nanny state……..
Weapons have also been dumped in the seas (a point made by Attenborough and Butfield in Ocean: Earth’s Last Wilderness) and contribute to pollution in other ways.
https://ceobs.org/uk-sea-dumped-munition-policy-falling-behind-that-of-the-eu/
And of course, the UK Ministry of Defence, possibly the most corrupt, incompetent, abusive, wasteful and downright evil of departments regularly tries to evade its responsibilities. Other countries like Kenya are degraded, abused and wrecked by British military operations and occupations.
Margaret Thatcher’s undermining of British manufacturing industry should always be qualified by her boosting of military manufacturing (she wasn’t going to repeat Winston Churchill’s post-WW1 Treasury failings as she beat the drum for limited war and unlimited arms and torture equipment sales).
The greatest World Evil is NATO, and its insane determination to destroy the living planet must be defeated, as it ramps up its wars against democracy, women, children, peasants, non-whites, the environment, ecosystems, and the Earth systems like our climate which sustain life here. Vast military budgets and withdrawal from landmines/clusterbombs treaties are just symptoms of the disease we will likely die of.