Allright, I allowed myself to go fully hippie. Luckily I do have readers, and now and then, some of you actually, take issue with what I write, and corrects me. I am refering to a previous page on the AUKUS deal, where Australia switched at least some of her allegiances from France to North America. In my writing, I end up disgusted at the fact that the whole switching takes the form of a sale. I ended saying that there was no need to study geopolitics, other than to understand that it is all about boys making, selling and buying bigger guns.
Which is true.
What is also truth, as G. pointed to me, is that money means something. It is not really something in itself, but it is a representation of something else. To hate money, or to hate the use of money to signal something is indeed an old hippie hangup from me, that I had hoped to have shed long time ago. To get to complain about money, as if we would be happier, or fairer, if we could scrap money. When, actually, money is just a very efficient medium of exchange. That, as G. points to me, also measures and enable lots of things. Some horrible ones indeed, like control. “Control over people, groups, or even countries” as G. says.
The horror is not so much that a realignation of world powers has been expressed in the buying of submarines. That is what money is for, to get stuff. The horror is the stuff. The horror is the investment of such immense human capital in creating and building a war submarine, a device that will not only pollute our future, being nuclear powered, but that has been designed to kill so many people.
Actually, if you push me, is not even the stuff what is horrific. It’s us.
Thinking in the AUKUS pact, which among other consequences seems to been pushing, right now, closer collaboration between France and India, I remember the skirmishes at the border between China and India. After the Sino-Indian war of 1964, that border has been contested, with militar presence from both sides. Which, not surprisingly, ends up in skirmishes. Yet, to prevent undesired bloodshed and unwanted escalations, both governments have agreed that patrolls should be unarmed. No fire weapons allowed for the soldiers. Which in the end, doesn’t really matter. During the last skirmishes registered, between 2020 and 2021, there might have died 60 soldiers. Which kill each other with clubs, and stones and pushing each other’s into precipices.
It is not the money indeed. It’s the beast that lives inside us.