You’re not acting in self-defence if you’re reacting to something that’s already happened, that’s revenge! It’s particularly egregious when it’s disproportionate. The Tallic Law gives permission for someone whose eye has been put out to put out the eye of the perpetrator, not both eyes. Someone astutely observed that the latter interpretation would, if universally observed, make the whole world blind. It appears to have already had that effect on most of our politicians! The sublime object that W.S.Gilbert’s Mikado hoped to achieve in time was to make the punishment fit the crime, not to make the crime fit the punishment!

It’s not self-defence when you respond with violence to a perceived future threat – that’s psychopathic paranoia and takes Herod’s dictat to a new level!

Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, became furious, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time that he had ascertained from the wise men.

Matthew 2:16-18

Killing a child because they might attack you doesn’t make you a hero, it’s the behaviour of a coward and a bully!

You don’t need a military force equal to that of the next 10 largest forces, many of which are your allies, unless you intend to dominate the globe. You’re under no threat, only someone pushed to the limits and armed only with a baseball bat could challenge someone with an SAR.

It’s not self-defence if you provoke someone weaker into attacking you by harassing them or bullying them in anyway – I include domestic and sexual harassment here.

It’s not self-defence to arm yourself with nuclear weapons, or to allow those of another nation to be based on your soil – it makes you a target for those you’re daring to use there’s first.

Our national defence doesn’t mean preventing refugees coming here, it means we should enable them to stay in their homeland and not become refugees. Donald Trumps idea is quite the opposite, he’s ordering Palestinians to go somewhere else – but not America, he’s defending his country by deporting anyone who doesn’t have approved documentation to prove their citizenship. This includes indigenous Americans, who have been driven into reservations where they have limited sovereignty. It’s sufficient for all nine Lakota reservations in South Dakota to bar Governor Kristi Noem from entering their territory. Trump wants to confirm that the reservations are what indigenous people have always said they were – concentration camps.

The reservations were established by treaties, that have been repeatedly broken, between the US government and indigenous nations – you can’t have a treaty with an entity that you don’t recognise as a nation. Any peace treaty that doesn’t include acknowledgment of Palestine as a sovereign state is meaningless!

Defence is responding to a clear and present danger, whether physical or psychological. When threatened, our adrenaline levels are raised to the level to where we have to options – fight or flight! Inability to do either raises our stress to a dangerous level. I’ve been there personally and gotten over it, I’m afraid we’re facing the same situation globally. We seem paralysed in the headlights of the juggernaut that’s coming towards us

A US senator is quoted as saying “ How about we try peace for awhile? It’s an idea so crazy it just might work”, but in an opinion piece for The Guardian Jeremy Corbyn commented that our leaders seem determined to give war a chance. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/23/leaders-war-gaza-jeremy-corbyn

Starmer wants to increase military spending at the expense of humanitarian aid, which is not only the most effective and least costly defence but would also solve the refugee crisis – nobody would want to seek asylum in another country if they had security in their own!

If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people

Tony Benn

Nuclear weapons are not a deterrent but a target! As long as nobody presses the button we’ll never know whether our enemies were deterred by the prospect of retaliation. Once the button is pressed the question is moot – and it doesn’t matter who pressed it first.

Both major parties in the UK are adamant about following the USA into increased spending on “defence”, while we “can’t afford” to support the poorest in either nation I’ld like to know what we’re supposed to be defending ourselves against! There’s no nation on earth that can challenge the USA militarily but China is beginning to do so economically and the USA responds, as it always has done, by encircling China with military bases. No amount of military spending can defend us from the two gravest dangers – a pandemic and climate change.

Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine I said that it was like a Western gunfight in which each was prodding the other to draw first. I don’t condone Putin’s invasion but it wasn’t unprovoked, any more than the Iranian attack on an Israeli military base was!

The only winners in any war are the arms dealers, win or lose it’s a profitable business. Fossil fuel industries have skin in the game too, they’re the cheerleaders hoping to make more profit. Link economic and military warfare leads to Armageddon – there are no winners in a nuclear war!