Opinion: Canada has fallen into this trap, committed to spending billions more on offensive weapons wholly incapable of making us any safer. The U.S. and NATO make the world less safe to justify increasing public spending on weapons.
The war’s corrupting influence on our ability to judge soundly is manifesting in other ways, too, not merely limited to those cavalierly advocating suicidal military escalation.
We are not destined to succeed in defeating Russia in any kind of conflict — escalation will only bring bout mutually assured destruction. It’s an idea we struggle with, but we need to reimagine what victory could be. In this case, it’s avoiding a Third World War. Putin is not a nice fellow — he is a bully and a tyrant and his actions constitute war crimes — but as Noam Chomsky has amply demonstrated, all the postwar U.S. presidents would likely have been hanged if the Nuremberg laws were applied to them. The people who lead “our side” are never judged to the same degree by which they — and by extension we — judge others, further insulating our society from accountability, further convincing us we’re invulnerable.
We’ve turned a blind eye to the resurrection of fascist symbols and the re-commemoration of monuments and memorials to war criminals and Nazi collaborators from the Baltic to the Balkans and beyond. From Moscow, NATO doesn’t have the appearance of a peacekeeping force, and if we were honest with ourselves, it shouldn’t look that way in Ottawa either.
Canada has fallen into this trap, committed to spending billions more on offensive weapons wholly incapable of making us any safer. The U.S. and NATO make the world less safe to justify increasing public spending on weapons. Eventually, someone will demand all that military spending not be for naught.
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