Anti-War

Ever since Donald Trump became a former president, news outlets and commentators have cited polls showing that many Republicans believe violence might be needed to save the country. As Trump’s legal woes increase, so do mainstream media alarms about the specter of violent responses. But we’ve heard virtually nothing about connections between two decades of nonstop U.S. warfare overseas and attitudes favoring political violence at home.

I am surely not the only one who has noticed that the defensive propaganda lines that are flowing out the Democratic Administration have become more than ordinarily ridiculous of late. One is astonished at the melding of fact and fiction to create narratives that depict the White House and all that pertains to it as forging a new and more wonderful country. Wasn’t “Build Back Better” the battle cry, whatever that is supposed to mean? And the spin is endless, even when a clueless Joe Biden belatedly winds up in Maui to relate to the tragedy in which at least 1,000 died, only to be greeted by surviving local residents saluting the president with their middle fingers upraised. As the president looked out over the destruction of an entire city by fire he reminisced by recalling his long ago “almost” encounter with a fire in his kitchen. Locals who were screaming for help from government were, in fact, getting almost nothing while the nation’s Chief Executive was in the Oval Office gloating over sending another $23 billion to the arch crook Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, money to fight a war that Biden encouraged and has blithely entered into.

Hey World War II fans, Rahm Emanuel has got some great news for YOU! He’s turning Japan into a warmaking country, and bragging about it.

Fun fact: the U.S. tried that before and it kind of backfired.

Funner fact: this is at least Rahm Emanuel’s tenth opportunity to fail upward.

Rahm Emanuel is the formerly much despised mayor of Chicago who tried to cover up police murder.

Congressman Rahm Emanuel in January 2007, after antiwar voters handed his Democratic Party the U.S. Congress to end the war on Iraq, made clear to a friendly Washington Post/CIA reporter that he hoped to keep that war going for two more years in order to “oppose” it in another election.

Rahm Emanuel is on video telling a young Asian-American woman that he’d like to adopt her, that she’s probably quiet and does a lot of studying.

Rahm Emanuel twice volunteered for the Israeli military despite not even being Israeli.

HARVEY WASSERMAN - ET AL.

The global crisis at six Ukrainian atomic reactors and fuel pools has escalated to an apocalyptic threat that demands immediate action.

Protecting our lives on this planet now demands immediate deployment of a United Nations peacekeeping force to operate and protect this plant.

A petition is now circulating to help make that happen.

This week Russian occupiers threw the Zaporizhzhia site into deepening chaos by firing Unit 4 up to “hot shutdown.”  Until July 25, Unit 4 had been in cold shutdown, along with Units 1,2,3 and 6. Unit 5 had been on hot shutdown to help power the plant.

But the Ukrainian nuclear agency Energoatom warns that putting Unit 4 up to hot shutdown is “a gross violation of the requirements of the license to operate this nuclear facility.”

The Russian military has occupied Zaporizhzhia since March, 2022.

In recent years, and again this year, to my knowledge, only a single member of either house of the U.S. Congress has said publicly, prior to voting No on a military spending bill, that he or she planned to vote No because the spending was too high. The same individual has done this more than once, and nobody else has done it at all. That individual is Senator Bernie Sanders. He says he will vote no on his website and in The Guardian. He does not say “I encourage my colleagues to join me in committing to vote No unless military spending is reduced rather than increased,” and I wish he would say that. But, of 535 or so members of Congress, 534 have not done what Sanders has, not this year, and not at any point in recent memory. It’s possible that some Libertarian has done it, advocating for tax cuts for gazillionaires rather than — as Sanders advocates — moving the funding to human and environmental needs, but I’ve publicly asked innumerable times for everyone’s help finding such an example and have yet to find one.

A mere 55 years after his death, the U.S. government has restored J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, which the Atomic Energy Commission had taken away from him in 1954, declaring him to be not simply a communist but, in all likelihood, a Soviet spy.

Oppenheimer, of course, is the father of the atomic bomb. He led the Manhattan Project during World War II, which birthed Little Boy and Fat Man, the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, killing several hundred thousand people and ending the war. What happened next, however, was the Cold War, and suddenly commies – our former allies – were the personification of evil, and they were everywhere. The American government, in its infinite wisdom, knew it had no choice but to continue its nuclear weapons program and, for the sake of peace, put the world on the brink of Armageddon.

Hello, H-bomb!

War, the building block of the world’s governmental entities for uncounted millennia, had evolved to the brink of human extinction. Official government policy amounted to this: So what?

Was he kidding? Are these words for real?

“I have, therefore, chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived — yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.”

By David Swanson, Executive Director of World BEYOND War; Kathy Kelly, President of World BEYOND War; John Reuwer, Board Member of World BEYOND War; Brad Wolf, Director of Peace Action, Lancaster, PA

Forty-eight hours before a global peace conference in Vienna, Austria, was to begin, the venue host abruptly cancelled. Peace, it seems, cannot be discussed, especially peace in Ukraine.

This news is a disturbing step in a growing trend.

Owners of the venue which was to host the Summit for Peace in Ukraine, announced on Wednesday, 7 June, 2023, their decision to cancel the agreement holding the summit on their premises. Fortunately, a new location was secured in Vienna (and anyone on Earth can sign up to take part online), but not before a smear campaign against the summit had been launched.

The venue owners reportedly explained: “We have decided to comply with the wishes of Ukraine and its embassy operating in Austria and have cancelled the rental of all rooms in the ÖGB catamaran for the event ‘International Summit for Peace in Ukraine’ next weekend.”

There are a lot of anonymous bureaucrats that man the offices in the nation’s capital. If one were to mention the name Wendy Sherman at a Washington DC cocktail gathering it is likely that few in the room will have ever heard of her, but she has long been one of the most important players in Democratic Party administrations when it comes to foreign policy in key parts of the world. Sherman, the Deputy Secretary of State, will be retiring this summer after more than thirty years with the Foreign Service. She has been a fixture in often controversial top level policy making since Bill Clinton was in the White House, where she served as a top adviser to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, also taking on the role of lead negotiator in the ultimately unsuccessful talks to stop North Korea’s ballistic missile program in the late 1990s.

May 21, 2023
Yasui Masakazu, Secretary General
Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs (Gensuikyo)

1. The G7 Summit Meeting of major economies, held from May 19 to 21 in the A-bombed city Hiroshima, ended, issuing a joint statement. During the Summit, the G7 leaders had an opportunity to visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and meet with the Hibakusha. However, far from “send(ing) out a strong message to realize a world free of nuclear weapons” from the A-bombed city, as repeated by Prime Minister Kishida, no new initiatives or proposals were made, betraying the expectations of the Hibakusha and the people. On the contrary, the Summit declared its open affirmation of the “nuclear deterrence” theory, which is very deplorable.