The stunnng tone deafness of US foreign policy pronouncements across the past few decades shows no sign of slowing its descent into further depths of denial and sheer unmeaning.
In the American context, abortion has only increasingly become a ‘master category’, pointing to an ultimate value around ‘life’ but also condensing the meanings and anxieties that are fuelling the radical Right’s larger political struggle—offering ordinary folks a visceral connection to overcoming something ‘rotten’ in the established liberal system.
If biopolitics is power that is realised through the organisation of how people live, then necropolitical power is realised through dictating the limits of who gets to live and who dies.
Simplistic, black and white judgements are dominant right now, but there is good reason to think that this war may turn out to be much more than a struggle over a lily-white democratic versus autocratic principle.
This apparently old-fashioned land war seems to be exposing the extreme fragility of global capitalism, a system we have been told is the only possible future. This is a further rip to the fabric of these illusions, which have recently been cast asunder by an apparently old-fashioned plague, and some very cutting-edge climate catastrophes.
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.
…if Australia can’t renew itself within terms appropriate to its own region—that is, renew our relations with Indigenous Australians, as well as the peoples of the Pacific and of Indonesia and Asia generally—it will remain an outpost supported only by imperialist powers…
The decision to acquire nuclear-powered boats reflects what has been the Australian Way of War for more than a century: to operate inside the strategy of a superpower by contributing a well-chosen, niche capability to augment the larger force.
…if the next war is against China, over Taiwan, the South or East China Sea, or some contrived event, Australia will become involved, will be a principal target, and will lose the war. China is not the Taliban.
Australian strategic planners are well aware that it would be absurd to protect trade with China from China… In the real world, the military build-up is about whether foreign military and intelligence activities can be conducted in another country’s exclusive economic zone.
