Where is day 5 and day 6? Nothing happened, day 5 was midterm review plus seminars and day 6 was the midterm. I will say, I did struggle with the midterm, during the essay portion I ended up running out of time so the last bit was incredibly messy and just bad in general. I did write a note on the end explaining why the quality took a steep dive so maybe it would make my professor be a bit more understanding when marking it. Who knows, he did say that he will take into account and reward us for effort so maybe I didn’t do half bad, I’ll never know because I refuse to look at my marks. I’d rather not cause more psychic damage to myself.

Anyway let’s get on with day 7. This day we talked about war and, my god, were comments made. These comments may be of interest to you so stick around for them. He began the lecture with a little speech about war and how he hopes that our generation will be different when it comes to violence. In my opinion I kind of doubt it since we have some warmongers in this very class so… yeah. He went in on the definition of war: organized violence. Is there more to it? Of course, but this is the simplest explanation. War is a human flaw, he says. There are interstate wars and intrastate wars. He then brought up Clausewitz’s Trinity: people, government, and army. We didn’t talk about Clausewitz in depth at all, all he told us was that he was a Prussian military guy who came up with this trinity. My professor also introduced us to the term “casus belli” which means something like “the cause of war.” He then asked us what was the cause of the Ukraine war: a student said territorial expansion (as in regaining soviet land) and denazification. This was a good enough explanation I guess and my professor just went with it, he also considered both to be terrible reasons for going to war, stating that denazify doesn’t mean anything in this context. “What does he mean to denazify?” He then asks us about Gaza, the Zionists pipes up immediately with “October 7th attacks.”

We then moved on to going a bit more into the trinity, starting with people. People have hatred: and with that my professor said he believes that Putin hates Ukrainians. That’s right, not the government but the actual people. He said so because during the Beijing olympics Putin was scowling something horrible when a Ukrainian athlete won. Moving on, governments use reason and policy to enact war and armies deal with chance, for example when hitler went to invade the soviet union he got screwed over by winter, aka chance. The Ukraine war was brought up as an example again. In this war governments are the most important aspect; Putin wants previous USSR territory while Zelenskyy wants to be in NATO; my professor thinks that Putin is the main problem and if he was gone today the war would end very quickly; when it comes to the army, Russian civilians hate their military and this is proven due to their support of Prigozhin’s coup attempt and the fact that they are forcefully conscripted; Ukrainians love their military and government which gives them a huge advantage. No, he did not talk about conscription in Ukraine and the fact that Zelenskyy made a call for refugees to come back and fight. Oh well.

So what are the justifications of war? This is explained by the Just War Theory, which we split between Jus in Bello and Jus ad Bellum. Lots of Latin. Jus in Bello is about the conduct of war and Jus ad Bellum is about the just cause for war. Jus in Bello deals with whether the war is proportional or not and whether there is discrimination between combatants and non-combatants. With this he brought up how Trudeau is in trouble due to being caught between pro-Palestine and pro-Israel members, he even b talked about how recently there were pro-Palestine protestors in the House of Commons, interrupting the session and then getting kicked out. The Zionist in my class speaks up and asks about discrimination when an “army” hides among civilians, what then? My professor straight up said that this is difficult to answer and its hard to out legal terms into practise. The Ukraine war is clear cut, Russia is bombing civilians knowingly while with Palestine Israel claims to be discriminating, but is that true? Who knows. Another student asked about the Houthis discriminating between ships, of course the US and UK retaliated horribly and with that my professor said that Canada came out in support of these attacks at first but then next turned around against it, he thinks this was a terrible mistake, we never should’ve been involved in the first place. Canada has no business involving itself with the US and UK, it’s a bad diplomatic move and makes us look really really bad. He said that Trudeau wants to look good on the international stage but lacks substance. He doesn’t think things through.

Jus ad Bellum deal with what conditions give reason for war. He then asked us a weird question: if the Mexican government kidnapped Canadians, is that war worthy? Some students wholeheartedly said yes, the Zionist was the loudest in this proclamation. For the most part it was agreed that outright invasion on Canadian soil would be just cause for going to war. Another reason given by my professor was to prevent genocide. With that he brought up the “genocide” in Xinjiang, and asked us should we invade in this situation? The Zionist laughed and stated it would be a waste because we’d get absolutely destroyed. We then moved on learning that war must be carried out by competent authorities (Hamas is not a competent authority, says my professor) and it must be a last resort after diplomacy has failed.

Next is typologies: preemptive war, preventative war, total war, limited war, civil war, international war, cyber warfare, hybrid warfare, war of inequality and war of rivalry. When we were talking about all this Turkey was brought up and I learned that Turkey is not in the EU because of the Armenian genocide, lack of democratic governance, treatment of Kurds, and them being a Muslim majority state. We then went over peacemaking, peacekeeping, and pacific settlement. These terms weren’t described in detail, most likely due to time running out. He then ended the lecture asking us if war would become obsolete, most said no and he replied that that was quite discouraging. He really wants us to be the generation that will not be warmongers I guess. He then asked what we would do to stop war, a student said he’d kill all world leaders. Professor then asked if we replaced all world leaders with women, would there be no more wars? I say absolutely not, other students seem to be of the opinion that while war would not go away there would probably be less so as women are more logical and not looking to posture, unlike men. It was argued that diversification in general would be better for lessening war. Other students said it depends on the woman. Another student said that environment plays a bigger role than gender and used Danielle Smith (Alberta Premier) as an example: she’s a woman but isn’t less combative; she is the leader of the UCP and that environment fosters animosity; her gender is meaningless. It was then stated that men have an ego that women do not seem to have (I guess?) and that is the biggest reason for war, my professor took to this and said that Putin has an ego and that fosters the war he is carrying out.

Then we moved on to the seminar portion and only one person went. This seminar was about Russia-China collusion, the US must be careful with its policies against China and Russia as they will work together and undermine the West. In her ending critique of the article she believes Russia and China need the US and its allies more and cannot rely on each other. She thinks they are independent from each other and don’t need that relationship. Professor pushed back against this, stating that now they are relying on each other a lot and their relationship is getting stronger and stronger. This was just a weird seminar, I felt bad for her to be honest, not in a mean patronizing way, but in the “I know you just want to get this over with, I get it” way.

Anyway that was day 7, we’re moving into the break so that means I can relax a little bit. By relax I mean work on my research paper (I have to compare Putin and Xi Jingping) and get caught up on readings/assignments. Maybe I’ll be able to play some video games and draw too.