We Bomb Therefore We Are
- November 23, 2015
- by
- Matt
Many people who have never read a word of military history or strategy will have come across the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s famous dictum that ‘war is politics (policy) by other means.’ If wars are fought in pursuit of political goals, then it follows that governments will know what these goals are, and develop appropriate military strategies to achieve them.
The U.S. Department of Defense currently defines strategy of ‘ a prudent idea or set of ideas for employing the instruments of national power in a synchronised and integrated fashion to...
Pitiless War
- November 18, 2015
- by
- Matt
The Narodnik revolutionary Vera Figner once described terrorism as a ‘very sombre form struggle.’ Figner spent twenty years in prison for her part in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II – the most high-profile assassination of the nineteenth century and an act that contained many of the essential features of revolutionary terrorism, so she...
Murder in the City of Light
- November 14, 2015
- by
- Matt
Let’s get one thing straight: the responsibility for last night’s disgusting massacre in Paris belongs to the shrunken specimens of humanity that carried them out and the organization that sent them to do it. The attacks are yet more evidence – if any were needed – that Daesh/ISIS is one of the most vicious...
Erdogan’s Massacre
- October 12, 2015
- by
- Matt
Terrorist atrocities tend to provoke a predictable stock response from politicians and governments. Invariably there is a great deal of sonorous rhetoric, accompanied by exhortations to the population to stand firm and show unity in the face of the universal evil of ‘terrorism’. Nearly always there is a lot of use of...
International Terror Day
- June 27, 2015
- by
- Matt
In his memoir The Devil in France, the German-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger looked back on the historical circumstances that had resulted in his internment in a French prison in Tunisia during World War I, and driven him into exile in southern France following Hitler’s ascent to power, and his internment in French concentration camps...
Yemen: stirring the cauldron
- April 11, 2015
- by
- Matt
What exactly has to happen in order to demonstrate once and for all to those who regard war and militarisation as the solution to the many problems that the Middle East faces that they were catastrophically wrong? The casualty estimates and death tolls from the countries our armies and special forces have fought or intervened...
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