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Very impressive presentation!
By the Netherlands' chief of defense. As he puts it, he didn't choose the pen or the brush as his instrument, but a gun. A very impressive presentation.
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It is a very good presentation.
Luckily, in the USA, (at least so far), the State doesn't have a 100% complete monopoly on the use force. The 300-400 million guns in private hands, as well as our citizen soldiers and veterans, ensure that this remains so. It is only those "choose to take up the gun" which give that flimsy old national document its teeth.
As the French proverb says "Constitutions are only paper, bayonets are made of steel."
Like others I think I give this the side-eye. Great presentation to hoplophobes, but the whole pillar of the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence is valid only insofar as you trust the state. I think the American secular critique (and dare I say the Christian religious critique) is that the state is fundamentally corrupt and tends towards further corruption. The secular critique would go on to say that the only way the state can long endure is if it’s power is tightly constrained. How is it constrained in those moments when, as the General says, “human ideals and human failings must meet in the middle”?
It’s interesting listening to the idealism from ten years ago in the context of failure in Afghanistan, Ukraine, along with that of German energy policy and Russian trade engagement. With Chinese aggression in the Pacific looming over discussions. Trade, it turns out (and I think has ever been show as such) can be used as a cudgel or a bargaining chip, and like war is a continuation of policy by other means.
He starts off great but then praises the state monopoly on force.