I'd be tempted to add that if you just dismantled military institutions across the planet, you'd have plenty more funds available to do important stuff with. AFAIK the US alone has military / three-letter-agency spending of at least a trillion dollars per year, and all this for what?!
To be fair the US is pretty much the entire military for all of the West, Japan, Korea, and Australia. We just consolidated militaries after WW2 to prevent Europeans from fighting one another.
But I definitely agree we could get rid of war. We've been in long peace. It seems very possible.
> To be fair the US is pretty much the entire military for all of the West, Japan, Korea, and Australia.
That's not true. France for example still has strong military. So does UK, Israel... Not saying it's a good thing that these military institutions exist, but except maybe in Ukraine nobody in Europe would feel (more) unsafe if the USA military would disappear overnight.
> But I definitely agree we could get rid of war. We've been in long peace. It seems very possible.
I agree it's very possible given the right mindset/circumstances. But we're far off from it. War feeds from countries with mafia-like governments who take all the people's money under securitarian pretexts, and these governments have never stopped waging war. In some countries like France, the government has even pushed for military patrols in the streets (since the 80s), training for kids in schools to anticipate attacks (since 2015) and the return of mandatory military service (or so-called universal national service, since 2019 i believe).
The US is still at war in several countries, and so is France. We don't feel it on the mainland because the propaganda is really strong here (whenever we're talking about it it's along the lines of "don't ask questions, we're just killing terrorists") and the consequences are very remote. But war is still really real for many people on this planet, and is still (mostly, though not only) caused by western imperialist powers imposing their will on the rest of the planet (see for example what France is doing in Mali to exploit all the riches in the north) or by the governments they arm (see what Saudi Arabia is doing in Yemen).
To be fair, i'm not saying Russian or Chinese military are any better. I just don't understand how we could stop wars when the military establishment is stronger than ever in our own countries, and still causing wars and suffering abroad. Such criticism can still be interpreted to be illegal, as France has banned insulting national symbols (since Sarkozy), and anti-imperialists militants such as Jean-Marc Rouillan can still be condemned (after spending decades in prison) for denouncing the lies of the propaganda of the french empire.
While I do agree to an extent that our military spending is quite high, it is probably the one thing keeping what little manufacturing capabilities we have alive inside the country, and I feel that is important.
Don't you think we could be manufacturing more useful (and maybe less polluting) items? If commercial goods had the durability of military equipment and the same kind of public financing, i believe locally-produced durable products could be competitive with cheap imported quasi-slave-produced products.
