John Buridan’s Questions on Aristotle’s De anima—Iohannis Buridani Quaestiones in Aristotelis De Anima:
Reviewed by Jordan Lavender, Texas A&M University
John Buridan, John Buridan’s Questions on Aristotle’s De anima—IohannisBuridani Quaestiones in Aristotelis De anima, Gyula Klima, Peter G. Sobol, Peter Hartman, and Jack Zupko (eds.), Springer, 2023, 998pp., $139.99 (hbk), ISBN 9783030944322.
To read this excellent edition and translation of John Buridan’s Questions on Aristotle’s De Animais to encounter two things at once: an intellectual landscape remote from both ancient hylomorphism and post-medieval European philosophy and a bridge between the two.[1] Like Aristotle, Buridan thinks that all living things are animated by souls. But these souls are in many ways unlike the souls of Aristotle’s De anima. According to Buridan, the souls of non-human animals are themselves a kind of homogeneous substance, composed of extended parts spread throughout the matter of a living thing (QDA 91, 195–197). The arrangement of the integral parts of a living thing and the sensible properties of those parts depend on the soul as their efficient cause, but not as their formal cause (QDA 91–93, 113–115). The core of Aristotle’s account of sense perception—the reception of the form of an object in a sensory organ without the matter—in Buridan becomes a mere efficient causal antecedent to perception itself (more on this below). The operations of the intellect demand no more metaphysical apparatus for their explanation than the perceptual abilities of advanced non-human animals (QDA III, qq. 4–6). Nonetheless, faith requires holding a view of the human soul according to which the ability of such a soul to host sensations and inform a body is miraculous (QDA 257). The editorshave made this intellectual landscape available to a wide audience through an excellent edition of the Latin text from the medieval manuscripts; a lucid, philosophically and philologically well-informed translation; expert clarificatory footnotes; and a brief but substantive introduction.
John Buridan (c. 1300–c. 1361) spent his career at the University of Paris as a member of the Faculty of Arts. As the editors indicate, QDA is the product of Buridan’s lectures on the three books of Aristotle’s De anima. It was completed by Buridan sometime after 1347, and probably before 1361 (QDA xiv–xv). However, QDA is not a mere exposition of Aristotle’s De anima or even a textbook summarizing late-medieval psychology. Rather, it is a “question commentary” containing Buridan’s own, often very original, responses to some of the most difficult questions regarding biological life, perception, and thought faced by the philosophy and science of the time.The questions, 51 in all, are loosely arranged according to the order of topics in Aristotle’s De anima. Occasionally, the questions raise issues about how to interpret Aristotle’s works. More often, they focus on philosophical problems. Book 1 (6 questions) covers a wide range of topics and includes a question on the status of universals (q. 5) and an intriguing discussion of the relationship between cognizing properties and cognizing the substances of which they are properties (q. 6). Book 2 (25 questions) begins with a discussion of the soul’s relationship to its powers and to the body (qq. 1–7). After that, almost all of the remaining questions deal with sense perception and include detailed discussions of each of the external and internal senses. (The exception is q. 7, which is the only question in QDA solely devoted to “vegetative” powers and activities.) Book 3 (20 questions) begins with a discussion of the metaphysics of the human intellectual soul (qq. 1–7) and ends with questions devoted to further issues involving the same topic (qq. 17–20). The questions in between (qq. 8–16) contain an extensive discussion of the nature and causes of thought and various related problems.
Headline: Keir Starmer’s Bafflingly Bad Start as the U.K.’s Prime Minister
Sub-headline: The Labour government’s first hundred days in power have been characterized by mistakes, infighting, and drift.
By Sam Knight
October 12, 2024
Editor: Tony Blair’s and his Neo-Liberal Lite cadre are the arbiter’s of Responsible Govervance? Mrs. Thatcher called Tony Blair her greatest acomplisment. Yet Starmer is Blair’s dead-end?
This week, as the hundredth day of Starmer’s government approached, it was impossible not to compare the sense of drift with the dynamic early months of Tony Blair’s Labour premiership, in 1997, which followed a brisk “route map” of policy announcements. “Government is not just about the technocratic delivery of policy and change,” Alastair Campbell, Blair’s former press secretary, told the B.B.C., when he was asked about the performance of the new government. “It’s about the relentless, endless, never-ending conversation that you’re having with the country about what you are trying to do for the country. And I think it’s fair to say that that bit has been largely missing.” Another official from the Blair era told me, “It’s a little bit unforgivable to come in without a plan of some sort. I mean, that is the point of being in government. You have to actually want to do something.” The official despaired of the donations fiasco. “They say we have abided by the rules, so what’s wrong with it? They don’t think about how this actually looks, and that’s the politics of it,” he said. “If you’re missing that bit, it makes it a whole lot worse.”
Starmer’s own behavior has been erratic. He has veered between attempting to stay aloof from petty criticism and giving long, overwrought explanations. (The Prime Minister said that he needed to borrow Alli’s eighteen-million-pound apartment during the election campaign so his son could have somewhere quiet to study for his high-school exams. “Any parent would have made the same decision,” he told Sky News.) In September, at the Labour Party conference—a noticeably sombre affair, given the Party’s landslide election victory—Starmer gave a creditable and, by his standards, warm speech, in which he reflected on his love of playing the flute as a teen-ager. “Even now, I turn to Beethoven or Brahms in those moments when, how to put it, the reviews aren’t so good,” Starmer said, before waiting a beat. “I’ve got some Shostakovich lined up for tomorrow.”
I asked Baldwin, Starmer’s biographer, for his impressions of the Prime Minister’s early struggles. Baldwin served as a communications director under Ed Miliband, the Labour leader prior to Jeremy Corbyn, and he is sympathetic to Starmer. But he acknowledged that the Prime Minister has an ungainly style as a politician. “I have used this metaphor of a minefield,” Baldwin said. “He takes one step forward, two steps to the side, one step back, two more steps to the side. It is inelegant and uninspiring—confusing even. But it’s the best way to get to the other side. In opposition, the other side was victory. In government so far, he’s looked more like a man wandering around a minefield without a clear sense that he’s getting somewhere.” Baldwin observed that Starmer has been in comparable situations before—both early in his time as the head of the Crown Prosecution Service and as Party leader—and that he was able to get it together. “It kind of almost needs to get quite bad with him before he does recognize a change of course is necessary,” Baldwin said. “But, when he recognizes there is a problem, he’s quite ruthless.”
On October 2nd, Starmer announced that he had paid back some six thousand pounds’ worth of gifts that he had received since becoming Prime Minister and that the rules on hospitality for ministers would be modified. Four days later, Gray quit as Starmer’s chief of staff and was replaced by McSweeney. There were signs that Starmer was finding his direction. Westminster bubbled with talk of a relaunch and “Starmer 2.0.” “It’s good to have a serious Prime Minister. I don’t think that’s changed since before or after the election,” the Blair-era official told me. “This is come-able back-able from. People writing off a government after two months, when they got a huge majority and five years, is just ludicrous.” Baldwin suggested that Starmer return to the language of “Five Missions” which had framed Labour’s election campaign— economic growth, green energy, public safety, education, and the N.H.S.—but which has since got lost in the noise. “I don’t think he can turn around now and say, I’ve discovered a new fundamental purpose for this government,” Baldwin said. “There’s a very real danger he’ll be ridiculed if he does that. And the missions are personal to him. They’re important.”
Editor: The Reader might wonder at this Blackburn introductory paragraph:
Keir Starmer is posing as the Labour Party’s unity candidate, appearing prime ministerial while sticking by the party’s left-wing policies. But if elected, he would be forced to choose between these priorities — and it’s clear the left policies would lose out.
Editor: Starmer is the creation of The Neo-Liberal Lite Tony Blair!
December’s general election was undeniably a hammer blow to Labour activists. It’s fair to say that most probably weren’t expecting to be beaten as badly as we were. Since the election of 2017 all the talk had been about what a socialist-led Labour government would do in office, and although a Commons majority always looked unlikely, many Labour members will have at least fancied their party’s chances of forcing a hung Parliament.
These heightened expectations make the scale of the defeat that materialized, and another five years of Tory government, all the more bruising. Now the Labour Party is facing up to the question of how to respond. Some aspiring leadership candidates have toured the TV studios volunteering to abandon high-profile policies from the 2019 manifesto — not because they’re unpopular, which they aren’t, but implicitly bargaining with the media and offering them the chance to set the boundaries of Labour policy in return for more favorable (or just less vituperative) coverage.
Regardless of this, support for existing Labour policy remains strong among the party’s rank and file, shortly to be voting for a new leader, and the prospect of any drastic retrenchment from the current manifesto is unlikely to be favorably received. Hence the different tack taken by Keir Starmer in his leadership campaign, positioning himself as the unity candidate working to bring Labour’s draining four-year civil war to an end and take the party back into government on a left-wing program at the next time of asking, presumably in 2024.
This, to be sure, is an appeal which might hold some allure to Labour members — among them many erstwhile supporters of Jeremy Corbyn — especially those still disorientated and demoralized after last month’s election. But there are major problems with it, not the least of these being that a sizable minority of Labour MPs have no intention of making the kind of compromises Starmer appears to be asking of them.
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Editor: this reads like Robert Colvile in The Times:
Editor: File this under the rubric of Political Chatter!
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One longer-serving MP said McSweeney did not have Whitehall experience, “which could come back to bite us,” while “Starmer lacks people skills, and has surrounded himself with people with the same problem.”
McSweeney had a previous spell as Starmer’s chief of staff in opposition, but was removed amid accusations that the Labour leader was foundering on his watch without a clear vision.
The same MP complained there was now a “boys’ club” at the heart of No. 10, with those now in full charge of Downing Street blaming Gray for what had gone before. “Everything was always conveniently Sue’s fault, and not the lads’, despite all the major issues in Keir’s office predating her arrival,” she said.
One of the McSweeney allies quoted above rejected those claims, pointing out that Hollie Ridley, recently installed as Labour’s general secretary, had been one of his most senior lieutenants.
He also has two new and well-regarded female deputies in Vidhya Alakeson and Jill Cuthbertson.
For now, Starmer still has a host of considerable advantages on his side, notably a hefty parliamentary majority and a chief of staff with a proven winning record. But his early forced reset hints at the need for something more.
Editor: The reader can see very clearly, from this collection of political commentaries, that Tony Blair’s political catamite ,Kier Starmer, is not just a failure but an incompetent. The Reader can only conjecture what steps Blair can take, if any, to redress his utter failure of judgment?
Editor: TheFreePress provides political space for Douglas Murray on ‘Grooming Gangs’
The world has finally woken up this week to one of the biggest crimes in twenty-first century Britain: the organized gang rape of thousands of white working-class girls, mainly at the hands of Muslim men of Pakistani origin.
Even writing the sentence above would have got me into far more trouble 20 years ago than it will now. Sure, there are still plenty of people trying to police this story, to claim that race and religion have nothing to do with these crimes, or that it is wrong to bring them up. But the stories of the atrocities in towns like Rochdale, Rotherham, Telford, and Oxford are now out, and there is little likelihood that they will be reined back. Public anger is too great in the UK, and international attention is too focused, to allow that to happen.
Having written about these cases for many years now, I spent part of the last week being asked, “How did it happen? How could such a crime have gone on?” And the answer is: Because there are some terrible things that society wants to deal with, and there are some it refuses to deal with, and the things it refuses to deal with tend to be those crimes that go against some deep narrative of the age.
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Editor: Murray’s latest idée fixe in the pages of The Free Press is ‘The Rampant Dangers of Multiculturalism’
COMMENT
By George Kerevan
Headline: True danger from the right comes from likes of Douglas Murray
More importantly, the alt-right needs to forge a new political and social narrative if it is to successfully destroy the old social democratic consensus or even kill off One-Nation Tory liberalism. And for this it needs a new breed of right-wing intellectuals with a sophisticated suite of ideas. These are the folk to worry about.
They include the suave, slightly manic Douglas Murray, who is London-born but whose mother hails from the Isle of Lewis and speaks Gaelic. Murray has emerged as perhaps the leading alt-right ideologue of the younger generation.
A prolific writer and commentator, he is now associate editor of The Spectator, the holy bible of the right. Last week Murray entered the Scottish political firmament with a virulent public attack on Humza Yousaf. Murray suggested the FM was an “infiltrator” (hint, hint) and “the first minister for Gaza”. Murray also reheated a doctored social media post (possibly not realising it was bogus) that implied Yousaf had made anti-white remarks.
Such public bile should not lead us to dismiss Murray as a typical populist ranter. He has a forensic mind and significant influence in Britain, Europe and particularly the United States. But it is a mind that sees “the West” being subverted and destroyed by a grand conspiracy of godless high-tech billionaires, the entire Islamic world and universities captured by cultural Marxists.
Traditional nation states and Christian civilisation and values have been replaced by a rapacious global (“cosmopolitan”) managerial elite which uses identity politics as a battering ram to exert control.
This puts Murray squarely in the conspiracy theory mould. But he is more intellectually effective than most in justifying his ideas. Populist, Trumpist racism may appeal to the lumpen elements but Murray supplies a more intellectually satisfying conspiracy menu for the middle classes.
Ostensibly, he deconstructs “fascist Islam” and the alleged infiltration of the elite universities – inevitably Murray is an Oxford graduate himself – by Marxist academics. Murray is also a bag of personal contradictions. He is gay and an atheist and even supports (in a convoluted way) same-sex marriage. Not that you might know it from some of his public renderings.
Part of me feels sorry for Murray. He is a bright young man marooned in a generation where rampant consumerism and unhinged individualism has destroyed social community, while the death of the socialist project has removed hope. Folk such as Murray end up as intellectual nihilists desperately trying to forge some impossible conservative Valhalla to find an anchor in life.
At least it begins that way, but it quickly slides towards an intellectual justification for outright fascism. The mass demonstrations in the UK and Europe protesting Israeli bombing of Gaza seem to have unhinged Murray.
I’ve seen a video of him circulating on social media in which he says the police in Britain “have lost control of the streets” (shades of Braverman) and that “we might need to send in the army”. What are the army supposed to do – shoot demonstrators?
Then, even more chillingly, Murray suggests sending in the army might not work – he actually wrote a book about the 1972 Bloody Sunday shootings in Derry and their aftermath. Instead, he muses that the “British public” might have to take matters into their own hands.
We can always dismiss Braverman as a maverick, over-ambitious politician who should be sacked. But Murray is busy constructing the intellectual architecture for a new, mass fascist movement. That is much more dangerous, especially for a UK where the alt-right has traditionally been kept in its cage by a fuzzy alliance between the establishment (which want a quiet life), the provincial middle classes (who also want a quiet life) and the Tory Party.
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Editor: Some selective quotation from George Kerevan’s essay:
Last month, 12,000 people turned up at the O2 arena in London and paid big bucks to hear Murray and Jordan Peterson, the other intellectual superstar of the global alt-right. This was billed as the launch of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, or ARC (get it!). They were joined by luminaries such as American social media guru Ben Shapiro.
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Quite the reverse unless you count ARC’s association with maverick US presidential hopeful, Vivek Ramaswamy.
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Murray and Peterson are trying to build a mass movement outside of the traditional right-wing parties. There is also a cultish, semi-religious tone to the project which promotes self-help rather than who to hate.
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Again, I need to stress that Murray and Peterson are a new, seductive breed of right-wing anti-politician.
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And Murray calling for the deportation of those he disagrees with. “Send them back” remains a ridiculous slogan for what was once the world’s biggest colonial empire.
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Both Murray’s Spectator magazine and its stablemate The Daily Telegraph, are up for sale. One likely bidder is Sir Paul Marshall, the hedge-fund billionaire who is bankrolling Murray’s ARC and who was an early investor in GB News. Behind the alt-right ideologues are always the billionaires with vested interests. Be warned.
Editor: The Reader confronting another manifestation of ‘The Rebellion Against The Elites’ needs to look at the many, and various iterations of the political actors, in this melodrama: Murray, Peterson, its organizational structure Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, Vivek Ramaswamy, The Spectator ,The Daily Telegraph as the watershed of Thatchers toxic Neo-Liberalism. Her inheritor in Britain was Tony Blairs ‘New Labour, and in America Bill Clinton, and his familier Hillary Clinton, who birthed the New Democrats: these toxic political actors traded on the Hayek/Mises/ Friedman Mythology, that collapsed in 2007-2008!
Murray trades in a Toxic Nostalgia , for an Empire run by ‘virtious White Males’ ; Peterson is a willful political Hysteric, Vivek Ramaswamy is a self-agrandising Capitalist: in sum he is Elon Musk lite!
Besides the Nixon example, look to former Neo-Conservatine , now Liberal, Francis Fukuyama: who once he ensorceled a cadre of American philosphocal naifs, with an Hegalian pastisch! Or Liz Chaney as the now ally of The New Democrats in the Impeachment of Trump. Recall that Clinton welcomed the likes of the utterly vacious Neo-Con Bill Kristol.
In the case of David Brooks look to his ‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces’ as his ascedency to the New York Times, via his wan literary invention of Joey Tabla Rasa! In his latest essay steeped in self-condratulation and vexving moral quandires, whose knot he is going to untie. I will skip the first paragraph!
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A few years ago, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, Angela Duckworth, got a bit more specific. She wrote that character formation means building up three types of strengths: strengths of the heart (being kind, considerate, generous), strengths of the mind (being curious, open-minded, having good judgment) and strengths of the will (self-control, determination, courage).
I’m one of those people who think character is destiny and that moral formation is at the center of any healthy society. But if you’re a teacher in front of a classroom, with 25 or more distracted students in front of you, how exactly can you pull this off? Moral formation isn’t just downloading content into a bunch of brains; it involves an inner transformation of the heart. It involves helping students change their motivations so that they want to lead the kind of honorable and purposeful lives that are truly worth wanting. It’s more about inspiration than information.
And yet every day, there are schools that are doing it. On just about every campus I visit there are professors who teach with the idea that they can help their students become better people. It may be a literature professor teaching empathy or a physics professor who doesn’t teach only physics but also the scientific way of life — how to lead a life devoted to wonder, curiosity, intellectual rigor and exploration.
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Editor: Mr. Brooks supplies a list of imperatives!
A countercultural institutional ethos.
The moral skills.
Exemplars.
Moral traditions.
Deep reading.
Self-confrontation.
Paid public service.
Editor: What might the reader think of Immanuel Kant’s 1784 essay? Compared to Mr. Brooks morally inflected chatter, in what place does Immanuel Kant’s essay of 1784 fit?
An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?
IMMANUEL KANT (1784)
Translated by Ted Humphrey Hackett Publishing, 1992
1. Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.[2] Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude![3] “Have courage to use your own understanding!”–that is the motto of enlightenment.
2. Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance (natura-liter maiorennes),[4] nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians. It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me. The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men have carefully seen to it that the far greatest part of them (including the entire fair sex) regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous, not to mention difficult. Having first made their domestic livestock dumb, and having carefully made sure that these docile creatures will not take a single step without the gocart to which they are harnessed, these guardians then show them the danger that threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone. Now this danger is not actually so great, for after falling a few times they would in the end certainly learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes men timid and usually frightens them out of all further attempts.
3. Thus, it is difficult for any individual man to work himself out of the immaturity that has all but become his nature. He has even become fond of this state and for the time being is actually incapable of using his own understanding, for no one has ever allowed him to attempt it. Rules and formulas, those mechanical aids to the rational use, or rather misuse, of his natural gifts, are the shackles of a permanent immaturity. Whoever threw them off would still make only an uncertain leap over the smallest ditch, since he is unaccustomed to this kind of free movement. Consequently, only a few have succeeded, by cultivating their own minds, in freeing themselves from immaturity and pursuing a secure course.
Editor: Mr. Brooks is an utterly conventional journalist , an employee of The New York Times, and a cultivator of his readerships vanity: as a function of his readerships adulation of a poltical technocrat, who refracts their values back at them, in a the most highfalutin terms !
NEW YORK — Federal prosecutors alleged in a recent court filing that New York City Mayor Eric Adams engaged in illegal activity beyond the bribery case laid out in a September indictment.
On Monday night, officials from the Department of Justice submitted a motion to the court that mentioned the additional evidence in the “ongoing investigation,” but did not go into detail about what it showed.
“Although the indictment and discovery provide Adams with more than sufficient information as to his alleged co-conspirators and aiders and abettors, law enforcement has continued to identify additional individuals involved in Adams’s conduct, and to uncover additional criminal conduct by Adams,” Edward Kim, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District in New York, wrote.
The filing was designed to push back on a request from Adams’ attorney, Alex Spiro, that the government provide a detailed list of evidence, called a bill of particulars, which it will be using at trial. In opposing that ask, Kim said prosecutors did not want to be hemmed in by the list at trial, and that disclosing the names of additional co-conspirators in advance would allow Adams to engage in witness tampering.
“The Indictment provides ample cause to believe that as potential witnesses became known to Adams and his allies, measures were taken to influence their testimony,” Kim wrote, citing a portion of the initial indictment alleging an Adams staffer instructed a business owner to destroy evidence relevant to the case. “And even without a likelihood of physical violence, the threat of witness tampering further supports denial of a bill of particulars in a white-collar case.”
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Kim’s office declined to comment, though Adams addressed the revelations at an unrelated press conference.
“Even Ray Charles can see what is going on,” he said. “I have an attorney, Alex Spiro, who is handling that. I’ve said over and over again: I’ve done nothing wrong.”
In a subsequent statement Spiro brushed off the new filing as a media strategy.
“This is amateur hour,” he said in a statement. “They are just looking for a headline instead of doing the right thing. I assume we are at the point where New Yorkers are not falling for it.”
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The government has previously hinted they may have more allegations against the New York City mayor. During an October hearing, an assistant U.S. attorney told Judge Dale Ho it was possible that the justice department would file a superseding indictment against Adams.
Yet since then, prosecutors have made no such effort. And Adams’ legal team — which has now reviewed reams of evidence held by the U.S. attorney via the discovery process — has expressed confidence federal gumshoes don’t have the goods.
“The incriminating evidence the government hoped to obtain does not exist,” Spiro wrote in a December filing. “The government’s ‘evidence’ thus reveals what defense counsel knew all along: this case is an egregious overreach by prosecutors with no interest in a search for the truth.”
The rapacious Russian Bear is the nightmare of ‘Europe’ : the hallowed remaines of the ghost of Jean Monnet’s Coal and Steel Cartel, of The Cold War years. As that is by now the ricketry remains of a dream of ‘Europe’, incapable of its own realization, but hanging on a notion of its viability, via Technocratic chatter at high volume. From Newspapers like The Financial Times, and its cadre of Experts like Gideon Rachman. NATO is the linchpin that now holds together this unrealised fraturing Super State! Not to speak of a Cold War relic rehabilitated as need be!
Editor: Some telling quotataions from this NATO propaganda refracted through Gideon Rachman as its enuciator
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Mark Rutte, Nato’s recently appointed secretary-general, warned last month that: “Russia’s economy is on a war footing . . . Danger is moving towards us at full speed.” He urged Nato to rapidly increase defence production and “shift to a wartime mindset”.
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Last April, General Christopher Cavoli, Nato’s supreme commander in Europe, cautioned that: “Russia shows no sign of stopping. Nor does Russia intend to stop with Ukraine.” Western analysts argue that Russia is already engaged in a hybrid war with Europe — involving regular acts of sabotage that risk mass casualties.
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Editor: ‘European defence analysts worry’. Rachman as Diagnostician:
Elbridge Colby, who has just been nominated as under secretary of defence for policy, wrote in the FT last year that China is a much higher priority for the US than Russia and argued that the “US must withhold forces from Europe that are needed for Asia, even in the event of Russia attacking first”.
European defence analysts worry that a US military pullback from Europe would encourage Russian aggression. In a recent book, Keir Giles of Chatham House argues: “The withdrawal of America’s military backing for Nato is the surest possible way of turning the possibility of Russia attacking beyond Ukraine into a probability.
Editor: Vladimir Putin acts as goad to a hapless Europe? Rachman sounds the alarm!
But the extent of the casualties Vladimir Putin is willing to absorb should also be a warning. The Russian army is now larger than it was at the beginning of the war in 2022. And, as Rutte recently pointed out, the country is producing “huge numbers of tanks, armoured vehicles and ammunition”.
European countries lack the manpower and equipment to engage in a war of attrition of the kind Russia is fighting in Ukraine. At the beginning of last year, the British army had 73,520 — the fewest since 1792. The German army has 64,000.
Editor: Mr. Rachman on Poland, Germany, France, Britains as to who is best able to confront the menace of Putin in Economic terms.
The closer you get to the Russian border, the more seriously the Russian threat is taken. Poland is on course to increase its defence spending to 4.7 per cent of GDP in 2025. But in the bigger western European economies, it’s a different story. Germany and France barely hit 2 per cent last year; Britain was at 2.3 per cent.
France has a budget deficit of 6 per cent of GDP and public debt of well over 100 per cent. The British government is also highly indebted and struggling to raise revenue.
But Germany — with a debt-to-GDP ratio of just over 60 per cent — has the fiscal space to spend a lot more on defence. It also still has a considerable industrial and engineering base.
Editor Mr. Rachman demonstrate a kind of surity , in sum he places his wager on Germany.
Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democrats, who will probably emerge as German chancellor after elections this year, takes the threat from Russia seriously. He could preside over a historic shift. If Germany relaxed its constitutional provisions against deficit financing — and accepted the need for common EU debt to finance European defence — it could transform the continent’s security landscape.
Even 80 years after the end of the second world war, some of Germany’s neighbours — particularly Poland and France — will feel queasy about German rearmament. But, in the interests of their own security, they need to get over it.
Editor: Mr. Rachman’s well oiled political machinery failes to factor in the rise of Alternative for Germany!
Membership of NATO corresponds to Germany‘s interests with regard to foreign and security policy, as long as NATO’s role remains that of a defensive alliance. We are in favour of a substantial strengthening of the European component of the North Atlantic Alliance. To achieve this objective, it is necessary to restore the military capabilities of the German Armed Forces, and to align these with strategic and operative requirements. The AfD thus calls for a restoration of Germany’s defensive capabilities, not only for the purpose of ensuring national defence as the main task of the German Armed Forces, but also to meet Alliance requirements, and perform crisis prevention measures. Membership of NATO corresponds to Germany‘s interests with regard to foreign and security policy, as long as NATO’s role remains that of a defensive alliance. The AfD believes that predictability in meeting commitments towards NATO allies is an important goal of German foreign and security policy, so that Germany can develop more political weight to shape policies, and gain influence. We advocate that any engagement of NATO must be aligned to German interests, and has to correspond to a clearly defined strategy. NATO has to be reformed, and the armed forces of the European partner states have to be restructured in such a way that they can ensure security in Europe and at its periphery. Wherever German Armed Forces, as part of NATO operations, are involved beyond the borders of its Alliance partners’ territory, shall, in principle, only be carried out under a UN mandate, and only if German security interests are taken into account. The Allies and Germany work together on equal terms and with mutual respect. They co-operate in questions of major international importance. Against this background, and 70 years after the end of World War II, and 25 years after the end of a divided Europe, the renegotiation of the status of Allied troops in Germany should be put up for discussion. The status of Allied troops needs to be adapted to Germany’s regained sovereignty. The AfD is committed to the withdrawal of all Allied troops stationed on German soil, and in particular of their nuclear weapons.
4.4.1 No European Army
The AfD rejects the idea of a combined European military force, and subscribes to well-equipped and trained German Armed Forces as the pillar of German sovereignty. This does not preclude the continuous co-operation of the German Armed Forces with its Allies. Germany needs military forces whose leadership, strength and equipment are adapted to the requirements of future conflicts, and which comply with the highest international standards. It needs troops which are trained according to the requirements of modern combat, as well as an administration which is oriented towards the welfare of the troops, combined with considerably reduced bureaucracy
Another indispensable factor is the existence of national defence capabilities, which are necessary to remain independent in key technologies, to keep pace with the latest developments in armaments technology, and to preserve jobs in the domestic defence industry. The military budget has to be increased to a level which is adequate for preserving the security and freedom of Germany and its Allies. The size and equipment of the armed forces need to be adapted to both the tasks at hand, and to foreign and security policy requirements. Furthermore, the intelligence services should be restructured and reformed. They are an important instrument in detecting threats at home and abroad. The AfD rejects the current practice of funding intelligence services according to budgetary constraints
During the week-long commemoration of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, free speech organisations around the world, spearheaded by the writers’ group Pen International, pointed out that the biggest threats to free speech came from governments “ostensibly motivated by security concerns”.
Pen’s statement on the issue drew critical attention to France’s new surveillance laws – which have elsewhere been condemned by human rights groups as being too intrusive and carrying no judiciary control.
And, while free speech is the foundation stone of a progressive, functioning democracy we can’t champion it in isolation, while losing sight of other key principles. The democracies whose politicians insist that we are all Charlie are the same ones chipping away at other freedoms. What of the suggestions of passport-stripping coming from both French and British governments – for dual-nationality terrorism convicts and those returning from fighting with ISIL, respectively? This might be one of the most anti-democratic things a state can do, flying in the face of the fundamental right to citizenship by birth.
It’s only when we get rid of what one writer has described as “discursive segregation” in the context of free speech and Charlie Hebdo, that we can start to fight for and uphold these invaluable collective rights, together. It’s the capacity to fight for two seemingly opposing things at the same time that we need to find – because, until we do, how will we ever find the operational common ground between them?
Rachel Shabi is a journalist and author of Not the Enemy: Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
Editor: A quick reminder of what Charlie Hebdo’s Satire expressed! All now carefully scrubbed from the record!
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