Anti-War
The assassination of Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, while she was covering an Israel Defense Force incursion in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank, has sent shock waves throughout the world. Shireen was a well-known and respected reporter for Al-Jazeera. She and three other reporters were pinned down by Israeli snipers. She was wearing a helmet and press jacket that clearly identified her as a PRESS when Israeli forces shot her in the face. Another Palestinian journalist, Ali al-Samoudi, was shot in the back, but is reportedly in stable condition.
If I object, in the United States, to the Israeli government’s brutal occupation of Palestine, most people will not only know what I’m talking about but also understand immediately what a hateful antisemite I must be.
If, on the other hand, I object, in the United States, to Morocco’s brutal occupation of Western Sahara, most people will have no idea what I’m talking about. Isn’t that actually worse?
Remarkably, the Moroccan government is armed, trained, and supported by the U.S. government, and escalated its brutality in response to a tweet by then-President Donald Trump, never corrected by Joe Biden.
Yet the presence of unarmed U.S. civilian protectors in Morocco prevent rapes and assaults and all sorts of violence simply by virtue of their being from the U.S. Even in the midst of atrocities committed with U.S. weapons, it is U.S. lives that matter.
Meanwhile, virtually nobody in the United States has any idea what’s going on.
When we doubt that swift and dramatic change is possible, what we really mean is that we haven’t seen much swift and dramatic change for the better lately. There’s actually no disputing that massive and almost instant change is perfectly possible. For example, in a matter of days, the unified voices of virtually every television network, newspaper, news website, and entertainment outlet in the United States took millions of people without a thought about foreign policy in their heads or any idea even where on the Earth Ukraine is located, and gave them all passionate opinions about Ukraine right at the very top of their awareness — the first thing they would mention, bumping the weather down to second place in the rankings as a topic for random conversations. You may think that was a very good thing — in fact, I can almost guarantee that you do. That’s sort of the point. But you can’t deny that it was fast or significant.
By Nobel Peace Prize Watch, April 28, 2022
Honorable Prime Ministers of the five Nordic countries, Magdalena Anderson, Mette Frederiksen, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, Sanna Marin, and Jonas Gahr Støre
The war in Ukraine once again shows that the world is like a city with brutal gangs constantly roaming the streets, looting and fighting with loads of heavy weapons. No one will ever feel safe in such a city. The same applies at the international level. No amount of weaponry can make us safe. No country will be safe until also neighboring countries can feel safe. The present international system is broken, to avoid future wars we need deep reforms.
"Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
I truly wish these words of Ike, uttered seven decades ago, were no longer quite so relevant. Perhaps what he should have called it was a “cross of irony.”
The war in Ukraine rages on, and the war mentality, promoted by propaganda on all sides, generates ever more devotion to keeping it going, even escalating it, even considering repeating it in Finland or elsewhere based on having “learned” precisely the wrong “lesson.” The bodies pile up. The threat of famine looms over many countries. The risk of nuclear apocalypse grows. The impediments to positive action for the climate are strengthened. Militarization expands.
Talk World Radio: Ruth McDonough on Unarmed Resistance in Western Sahara
https://davidswanson.org/talk-world-radio-ruth-mcdonough-on-unarmed-resistance-in-western-sahara/
AUDIO:
Russia’s war in Ukraine -- like the USA’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- should be understood as barbaric mass slaughter. For all their mutual hostility, the Kremlin and the White House are willing to rely on similar precepts: Might makes right. International law is what you extol when you aren’t violating it. And at home, rev up the nationalism to go with the militarism.
While the world desperately needs adherence to a single standard of nonaggression and human rights, some convoluted rationales are always available in a quest to justify the unjustifiable. Ideologies get more twisted than pretzels when some people can’t resist the temptation to choose up sides between rival forces of terrible violence.
In the United States, with elected officials and mass media intensely condemning Russia’s killing spree, the hypocrisy can stick in the craw of people mindful that the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions started massive protracted carnage. But U.S. hypocrisy in no way excuses the murderous rampage of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
I’ve just become aware of and read the 2020 book by Ned Dobos, Ethics, Security, and The War-Machine: The True Cost of the Military. It makes a pretty strong case for the abolition of militaries, even while concluding that it may or may not have done so, that the matter should be taken on a case-by-case basis.
Dobos sets aside the question of whether any war can be justified, arguing instead that “there may be cases where the costs and risks generated by a military establishment are too great for its existence to be justified, and this is even if we think that some wars are necessary and consistent with the demands of morality.”