State violence is the final refuge of the incompetent, considering the staggering incompetence of the present governments, it’s no surprise they’re hedging their failures with increased military spending. When leaders are intellectually and morally bankrupt, when they run out of ideas, when their authority falters under the weight of economic inequality, climate breakdown, and crumbling public services, they reach for the oldest tools of control: fear, force, and distraction.
Across the world, we’re watching this trend unfold. Governments are pouring resources into militarisation while systematically underfunding healthcare, education, and welfare. In the UK, billions are being funnelled into new military hardware, expanded surveillance infrastructure, and policing, all while people struggle to heat their homes, access a GP, or keep a roof over their heads. This isn’t mismanagement. It’s a political choice, and it makes clear where the priorities lie, in protecting the power of the #nastyfew, not people.
They tell us it’s about “security” and “defence.” But when a government starts to feel more threatened by its own people than by any foreign force, we must ask: what kind of future are they preparing for? It’s starting to look like one where dissent is criminalised, protest is heavily surveilled, and public frustration is met not with care or accountability, but with batons and border walls.
We should be deeply worried, because violence is not only about tanks and drones, it’s the everyday grinding violence of austerity, the hostile environment, the punitive benefit sanctions, the calculated dismantling of social safety nets. It’s a state driven project that protects the profits of the #nastyfew while punishing those who dare to imagine something different.
But here’s the hard truth, we did this, and we keep doing it. It’s us. We have the power not to do this. We vote, we organise, we protest, and sometimes we stay silent, and all of that shapes the world we live in. Every time we shrug our shoulders, every time we tell ourselves change is impossible, we make the next wave of repression that much stronger. But the other side of this is also true, when we act, when we organise, when we care, we push the tide in the other direction, this is a basic story of #activism.
Incompetence, paired with unchecked power and militarisation, becomes very sinister fast. It’s a very basic first step, that we must resist this story of more control, more surveillance, and more force as the solutions. What we need now is courage, creativity, compassion and solidarity. The qualities that have been deliberately stripped from the institutions that govern us, but that still live in us, and in the communities in this #openweb commons we build.
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