If the United States, United Kingdom and Russia risk nuclear war over Ukraine and a gas pipeline, that is bad enough; for Australia to join this insanity is worse.
Military historians are well aware that Australian governments have not gone to war for sentimental reasons or because they were duped. The organising principle of Australian foreign policy is to remain on the winning side of a worldwide confrontation between the empire and the lands dominated by it.
…for the first time in my adult life, we Amero-Europeans ceased to gaze out at the world with our usual mixture of transient humanitarianism and inactive charitableness and instead became the subject of a sorrowful gaze from elsewhere.
G08 Theatre Melbourne Law School, Melbourne, VIC, 3010
Gerry Simpson delivers the third installment of the London School of Economics-Melbourne lecture series, engaging in a critical stocktaking of a century of international law (or war crimes law) characterised by retributive humanitarianism.