after attending the dawn service at the shrine of remembrance this anzac day, cw, rr and jk warmed ourselves with hot beverages at swanston’s burnetti’s while waiting for the anzac march to start.

aptly, we started discussing about the significance of anzac day, and in particular the notion that commemorating the war dead might be misconstrued as a glorification and advocating of war itself. this lead to the musing if the maintenance of defence was necessary if the assumption is that we all want world peace.

i proposed that to have peace, we have to be prepared for war as a defensive strategy i.e. deterrence. however it also dawned on me that such ideology follows a similar vain as the guns right group who advocates that people would be safer if they could defend themselves in the event of an attack and if the adversary knows that their potential victim might not be defenceless.

however, such an assumption is based on the premise that people are always rational and will never abuse such power. this is obviously not the case.

on a larger scale, i suppose the possession of nuclear power or weapons of mass destruction and the anxiety of the have-not-nations stem from the same trajectory.

the apprehension that a student might have in a classroom of armed classmates wouldn’t differ very much from a country in the world of armed neighbours.

come to think of it, its quite a ghetto world isn’t it?