Note on “War”
🥜 It is nuts to say collective security agreement at the UN (def. not NATO = collective insecurity) level would be tantamount to getting “sucked into a war”. Collective security is not war, it is diplomacy. War is not the “extension of diplomacy by other means,” it is just war.
In case of aggressors, defense of innocents is not war, it becomes war when the defending nation goes on the counter-offensive, and that is never justified (in the ancient past there was a case for it, maybe, but even then I’d argue no).
People who claim “we must kill or be killed” are just plain out-right neocons, and evil, there’s no other way to put it. The defender of innocents is one who is prepared to be killed to avoid the innocents being killed, it is the harder more courage-required role. A completely different mindset to a Clausewitzian neocon war monger.
Once you get deep political “apparati” which generate pretenses and artificial boogeyman as excuses for war, you clearly know who the real enemy is, they are “from within.” Why were you ever buying those excuses for war? It is because you thought war was justified “in some instances.” Well, no, it is never justified. That was your mistake, it was not the mistake of getting fooled by the artificially generated boogeymen (sometimes the boogeyman has basis in fact).
The mistake was thinking the military was the solution, whether the boogeyman was real or faked. Same in the psychological “war on poverty” (orwellian) via unemployment and the Inflaton Boogeyman. That particular war is more horrific than any military war, if only you could wake up and see why! (You should wake up.)
A different philosophy of state craft I’m alluding to would be more like Sun Tzu, but brought up to modern context where so much “war” is hidden, and “electronic and “psychological”. There’s been not much concerted Sun Tzu effort in this realm, to prevent the causes of such “electronic/psyche” war in the first pace. Like for starters, not consuming mainstream news? Peeling back the spokespeople of the nominal State who are really voicing the will and propaganda of the mafiosi deep State (is this also “a thing” in New Zealand??? Gotta ask.)?
The “war is diplomacy” meme and all this machine generated pre-emptive policing/security via the likes of Palantir et al is stuff that we all have to make go way somehow. When you elevate “defense of innocents” up to militarism, you are revealing your Neocon neural pathways, so… try to retrain them?
A good discussion towards the end of BJG’s chat with Whitney Webb (here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jyx4yEVl61w) has perhaps the best method for this, but I would add “local politics” does not mean only “local”. It means cooperating internationally with support, best practices, and both tactics and strategy, since what works in say Barcelona or Edinburgh locally could work in Auckland or Dunedin. So when we act locally it does not mean we only act locally, that too would be 🥜🥜🥜.