What would you do with $5m?

Have you ever wondered what you could do with $5m ??

Think about what you'd do with that much money if you wanted to help other people - at home or in the developing world? It's a lot, it could make a huge difference to a lot of people.

Now, have you ever heard our governments claim that they'd love to support this type of work, but they just don't have the money??

You might have accepted this as the realities of manging a finite budget. But then, if you did, you'd probably be surprised to find ministries spending $5m on stuff they don't even plan to keep around, like there was no tomorrow.

Did you know that the cost of the missiles that are being fired in Ukraine and in Gaza, killing civilians and causing massive damage, it typically about that much, more precisely, in the range $1-30m, depending on the type of missile.

Yes, this is the cost for ONE missile!! Up to THIRTY MILLION DOLLARS !! Really, just let that number sink in. Suddenly it's not so strange that politicians want to spend 5% of our GDP on weapons, if they are so expensive.

It's the same way that I regularly buy caviar and $4000 bottles of champagne for my dinner each evening. But wait a minute! I don't! Because I realise that that would be absurd. I don't know anything about the price of creating caviar or great champagne, but I know that it is not worth that much money to me personally.

Why does this logic not apply to the defence industry? Even if you enjoy the massive death and destruction that missiles cause, think for a minute whether even that justifies these absurd costs - which are being paid with our taxes. It's crazy to think, when we look at dead, mutilated bodies and destroyed housing estates in Ukraine or Gaza that maybe the damage done by not spending the money on good projects is even greater than the cost to the victims. That with the €5m euro that we spent on that missile that killed all those people, we could have saved even more lives if we’d spent the money like people who cared about humanity.

Someone needs to put a stop to this nonsense, which is wrong on so many levels.

Maybe money is a language that politicians understand better than empathy or humanity. Let's put the same kind of budget limitations on defence as we put on other spending. Force them to negotiate. Force arms makers to reduce their profits if they want to make a sale. I'm not denying that the arms industry has made big technical advances, but who wouldn't if you had an unlimited budget and a captive audience of ministers with infinite budgets who can always be convinced that they need to upgrade to the latest technology?

Everyone will object "but we need to defend Ukraine" - and Russians will object "but we must win in Ukraine" - and it will go on and on, the some arms corporations will get richer and richer, and lots of innocent people will die.

Remember that Russian soldiers, whom we kill with “our” missiles, are also mostly innocent people, just that they had the misfortune to come of age under a tyrant who sent them off to a war they have no desire to fight against people with whom they have no quarrel.

We need people with the courage to step out of this - not as appeasers, not as pacifists, but as powerful defenders of basic human decency.

If I could invent one thing before I die to bequeath to the world, it would be a Harry Potter-esque spell which would just kill anyone, anywhere, who starts a war. No exceptions, no excuses. Doesn't matter who's right or who's wrong. Doesn't matter if you're a president or a general or a terrorist.

Because this is what we need. Russia is not at war with Ukraine. Putin is at war. Not because the Russian people need Russia to defeat Ukraine for any tangible reason. But because he has this pathetic need to pretend his a “strong leader” when in fact he’s just too pathetic and weak to do what’s best for Russia rather than for his own ego.

Israel is not destrying Gaza - Netanyahu and his cronies are destroying Gaza, not because the war is even helping Israel’s security (because it’s definitely not), but because it helps keep him out of prison where he belongs.

Instead of fighting back against armies and populations, the way to stop wars is to fight back against the individuals who start them. I'm not saying it's easy, I haven't even mastered the disappearing charm yet. But it's a vision.

The world needs to treat bullies in charge of govenments the way we treat bullies in primary school. Don’t let them win. Don’t humour them. Just stop them.

And ethically, it is 100% moral to kill one evil person if it prevents the deaths of a million innocent people. We need the UN or someone to make a statement to this effect. Literally, stop making resolutions against countries and start making resolutions against individuals, even if (especially if) they are world leaders.

Of course, the idea wouldn’t be to assassinate them, but to bring them to justice for crimes against humanity. But if this wasn’t working out (as is the current case), then it feels to me that just letting them continue to murder millions more people is the greater of the two remaining evils.

And it's not some bizarre untested theory. It's the way the world works for 99.999% of us who are not political leaders. If we decide on a whim that we want to bully someone in school, or kill a co-worker, or whatever, the system in place doesn't punish the school or the work-place, it punishes the individual.

And yet, there are people who attend meetings in Brussels in the EU institutions who have had friendly meetings with Putin since he started the war. Who see him as just another leader, murdering millions of people because, well, that's what we leaders do, I suppose, because we’re important and ordinary soldiers and civilians are just pawns.

The election of Trump is a great example to help us understand what’s going on. Many of us do not know many individual Russians or Chinese. But we know lots of Americans. We know them personally. We know that America is not evil, Americans are not evil. Trump is evil. We don’t have a problem with America, or Russia or Israel. We have a problem with Trump and Putin and Netanyahu. How long will it take us to realise this, and to act appropriately? https://www.defenseone.com/.../mideast-missile.../395791/....