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These days, the military tattoo is just too sad for words, the soldier-children twirling, dancing, fluting, prancing, singing, some with rightful Maori marks, or cheekbones high as Indian hills, thin teenage girls in kilts and fancy Argyle socks ... What have they to do with war or death? Yet men strap bombs on ten-year-olds.
The corporations have had it their own way for most of this century but two recent events have startled them. One is the election of a US president who says he is an economic nationalist. The other was Brexit. The battle lines have been drawn between a unipolar, American dominated world and a multipolar world.
It is important that Bachelet's appointment is discussed away from the framework promoted by the UN. Primarily, it should raise questions as to how a torture victim can become complicit in impunity as president. That such complicity is ignored at an international level should contribute to the growing mistrust in the UN as human rights 'guardian'.
Hopefully Australia will take stronger measures against what is effectively a one party state that ruthlessly crushes opposition at home and seeks to intimidate and threaten critics abroad. It is not surprising that after 25 years, I am again seeing Cambodian asylum seekers.
Last week, Javier Rebolledo, an investigative journalist specialising in uncovering dictatorship era crimes, was taken to court by a convicted torturer and former member of Pinochet's secret police. It is an act of political violence against a committed journalist. Chile needs people like Rebolledo if memory is to survive.
A few years ago, I travelled back to the war zones where I had worked providing humanitarian assistance to see what happened to the people and projects. I realised then that some things need to change. One of them is that we need to give communities who have borne the brunt of wars more time to recover.
There is no basis for this claim that, if the summit and its outcomes had occurred under Barack Obama, some have argued, those on the centre left would be cheering. The reality is, the summit would never have occurred, because no other president would have made the concession of a meeting at all for no apparent gain.
The first two shipments we sent to Nauru were sent with some assistance from individuals in Immigration who saw what we were doing as a good thing. Well, that's what we thought. By the second shipment, the letters from Australian school children mysteriously disappeared no one was willing to own up on the who and why.
One of the challenges that faces any society is how boys will become men. In many societies the passage is mapped and enacted through ritual initiations or through military training. It also periodically causes great anxiety. Two recent books encourage reflection on different aspects of the passage from boys to men.
The tension between remembering those who died and celebrating those who fought makes the celebration of Anzac Day inherently controversial. It is seen by many to canonise military values. But the risk is less to glorify war than to sanitise it by allowing time and space to take away its physical reality, and with it the sadness of war.
As the West flirts with starting World War III in Syria, it is worth examining some of the financial and business dynamics behind the US 'military industrial complex'. War may not be good business, but it is big business. And in contrast to Russia and China, the industry in the US is heavily privatised, including the use of mercenaries.
In recent months comment on international politics has been about taking sides and falling into line. Against such strident calls, two apparently unrelated pieces of speculation passed with little response: the prediction of a further cut to aid, and the assertion that China wanted to establish a military base in Vanuatu.
181-192 out of 200 results.