> Why do you think every incremental ratchet step on the gear of Germany rearming in the last three years has been taken as serious headline news by so many?

Cause they started two world wars previously. The second one coupled with genocide, actually multiple separate genocides going on at the same time.

You can say this but the people who need to hear it won’t listen. They lack the perspective of actually reading history to understand the scale at which people were killed before the world police era.

But even reading history isn’t enough. I think we’re fundamentally not equipped to understand what a large number of deaths actually looks and feels like. 10 deaths happening in our vicinity is an unbearable tragedy. 1 million deaths is just a number. So folks are struck by a nostalgia for a time when humans killed each other by the millions.

In some ways they remind me of the people who long for the days before vaccines eliminated a bunch of diseases.

The EU is just about building up to the task of proper self-defence against Russia, and China is not at all interested in a world order except as it feels necessary to protect domestic order. So they do things like border-pushing against India, the nine-island line, wars of words with Japan, and surveillance of overseas Chinese nationals, but other than that they are a long way from anything like the European colonial or world war era.

(IMO there has actually been a retreat from China trying to do propaganda "please like us" adventures overseas in the past few years. Peaked round about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Wall_(film) / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Battle_at_Lake_Changjin - second highest grossing film worldwide of 2021! For a Korean War movie?!)