(I think number four may need a little work.) But there are some suggested contrasts for the 'doves' to paste into their scrapbook. What about, 'Afghanistan, where the world's most open society confronts the world's most closed one'? 'Where American women pilots kill the men who enslave women.' 'Where the world's most indiscriminate bombers are bombed by the world's most accurate ones.' 'Where the largest number of poor people applaud the bombing of their own regime.' I could go on. They should never have tried to beat me at this game. The mantra, especially in the letters to this newspaper, was: 'Afghanistan, where the world's richest country rains bombs on the world's poorest country.' ![]() I began to notice a few weeks ago that my enemies in the 'peace' movement had decided to borrow from this tattered style book. ('Jerusalem: an enthralling blend of old and new.' 'South Africa: a harmony in black and white.' 'Belfast, where ancient meets modern.') It was as you can see, no difficult task. 'Land of Contrasts' was our shorthand for it. Together, we evolved a harmless satire of the slightly driveling style employed by the journalists of tourism. “There was a time in my life when I did a fair bit of work for the tempestuous Lucretia Stewart, then editor of the American Express travel magazine, Departures. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that - like Chomsky - looked ridiculous. Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. These people were saying that we had to act. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans', to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilise the regime of General Franco? It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And I thought - destabilisation of fascist regimes is a good thing. ![]() It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as acts of policy. Germany's regular 2023 defence budget was around 50 billion euros ($53.5 billion), well short of 75 billion euros, or 2% of economic output.“That war in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. "Ten billion euros (more) is a lot of money," she was quoted as saying. The party of Chancellor Olaf Scholz did recently commit to the 2% NATO goal, but as with junior coalition partner the Greens, has members who remain unconvinced.Īccording to FAZ, Esken expressed scepticism about the efforts of Defence Minister Boris Pistorius, also of the SPD, to hike defence spending in next year's budget. The SPD has traditionally been more pacifist than most other mainstream parties in Germany, which long neglected its military in part due to guilt over its bloody 20th century past. Saskia Esken told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) she had always wondered whether this calculation was "the right way". BERLIN, Feb 19 (Reuters) - The co-chief of Germany's ruling Social Democrats (SPD) is sceptical about NATO's goal for each member to spend 2% of economic output on defence, according to a newspaper report, underscoring ambivalence in the country about bolstering the military.
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