But it also signals and symbolises a much more existential threat to the world order.
Russian premier Vladimir Putin, likewise, abandoned politics for an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, contemptuous of that proud nation’s integrity and sovereignty.
These are just two examples, but almost overnight, it seems, the entire international order is on the cusp of collapse.
Few of us will waste much sympathy on Hizbollah or Hamas, but the massive destabilisation of human dignity now comes not from them but from state-sponsored terrorism.
A confidence that superior military force will deliver the goods is backed by religious ideology, a deranged Zionism in Israel’s case, a sick parody of Orthodox Christianity for ex-KGB man Putin.
We sense instability wherever the eye looks. China swaggers across the Pacific, with threats of invasion in one pocket, and bribes in the other. Biden, roi faineant of what is still the most powerful country in the world, pours armaments into the conflagrations in Palestine and Ukraine, while chanting his own exceptionalist mantras.
Meanwhile, down in the badlands, the crudest populism and conspiracy theories hold sway, whether in Thuringia and Pomerania or among bible-clasping Southern fundamentalists.
The rhetoric of peace is still strummed in the corridors of the United Nations, yet the Security Council has become an embarrassing joke, a grotesque symbol of the paralysis of peace-making.
United States Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, for his part, has reduced diplomacy to a French farce.
Common to all these crucial players in international politics is their almost exclusive reliance on military hardware.
The world is militarised as never before. Amoral actions, including deploying hunger and disease as a weapon, fit seamlessly into these massive investments in the most sophisticated weaponry. Of late, nuclear weapons are being brandished as just one more tool in the workbox.
Even our most influential and in so many respects simpatico neighbour, Australia, is drifting into a nuclear alliance without any apparent hesitation.
The price to be paid for this idolisation of weaponry is primarily being paid by the innocent civilians caught in the middle.
Apparently anything goes. Hunger is used as a weapon. Hospitals, schools and sacred sites are targeted. The long-term cost to human dignity is also unthinkable, not only in terms of the direct destruction of dams and agriculture but in the diversion of resources from meeting our primary challenges at present: the ongoing degradation of the environment, and the floods of desperate refugees across the globe.
How did we get to this parlous state? Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska writes:
A gale
Stripped all the leaves from the trees last night
Except for one leaf
Left
To sway solo on a naked branch.
With this example
Violence demonstrates
That yes of course —
It takes its little joke from time to time.
The truth is that when we cross a certain line, we cease to be human.
As responsible citizens we need to stand back from the dreadful accounts and images which assail us every day.
Yes, we may bleed inwardly, but it is more urgent to put on the hard hat of reason.
Politics are the work of humans, and they can be turned around. Behind so many of these policies are sick ideologies. We have the moral and spiritual resources to critique, denounce and replace them.
Future generations depend on us acting now.
— The Rev Dr Peter Matheson is an emeritus professor at Knox Theological College in Dunedin.
