Nukes for freedom, and other lies

A short post tonight because I can't go to sleep for thinking about this. I need to write some thoughts to help my mind slow down. And you get to read it. If you choose. Feel free.

French President, Emmanuel Macron, standing in front of a nuclear submarine to announce his government's dramatic escalation of its nuclear weapons posture, declared:

To be free, one must be feared. To be feared, one must be powerful.

To be free, one must be feared?

I can't...

I cannot wrap my head around how fucked up this statement is.

I can only understand it as a confession. A confession of deep fear. A trauma playing out, as it so often does, commonly expressed with the phrase "hurt people hurt people".

People are dying tonight - in Iran, in Palestine, in Israel and Lebanon and the USA - because of this fucked up idea of freedom as based on the capacity to visit violence upon the other. The insistence that my freedom can be expressed only through your unfreedom.

Surely, it is this pathological mythology, above all, that we have to work out how to let go of. It's the rotting corpse that poisons the whole biosphere - the source of the toxins that drive war, ecological crisis, inequality, extractivism, patriarchy, colonialism...

It's not as though this is new. But that statement. The clarity of it. The bluntness. The unashamed, stark confession.

It's the polar opposite of the lesson of the Bund that I learned from my Opa - none of us will ever be free until all are free.

I've already written a bit of what I want to say here (and I'm riffing on the same theme with the title), and a lot more will come soon exploring Arendt's extraordinary and nuanced ideas of freedom.

But for tonight, playing with her magnificent observation that "violence can destroy power, but it can never create it", let us observe that fear can destroy freedom but it can never create it.

Fear - and power based on fear - will always stimulate a response that will undo freedom. Any freedom based on fear, on violence, on coercion, is illusory.

This is why Arendt sees freedom and sovereignty as completely contradictory - for the individual as for the nation state. Freedom is "neither to rule nor to be ruled", and it can only exist "without domination or subjugation", as she wrote in Freedom and Politics, and as I will return to soon.

But, for tonight, enough.

Those of us who can sleep sound in our beds, let us do so, so we can use our freedom to work for the freedom of all. Tomorrow.