Anti-War
When New York City recently released a grotesque “public service announcement” video explaining that you should stay indoors during a nuclear war, the corporate media reaction was principally not outrage at the acceptance of such a fate or the stupidity of telling people “You’ve got this!” as if they could survive the apocalypse by cocooning with Netflix, but rather mockery of the very idea that a nuclear war might happen. U.S. polling on people’s top concerns find 1% of people most concerned about the climate and 0% most concerned about nuclear war.
“No War 2022, July 8 – 10,” hosted by World BEYOND War, will consider major and growing threats faced in today’s world. Emphasizing “Resistance and Regeneration,” the conference will feature practitioners of permaculture who work to heal scarred lands as well as abolish all war.
Listening to various friends speak of the environmental impact of war, we recalled testimony from survivors of a Nazi concentration camp on the outskirts of Berlin, Sachsenhausen, where over 200,000 prisoners were interned from 1936 – 1945.
As a result of hunger, disease, forced labor, medical experiments, and systematic extermination operations by the SS, tens of thousands of internees died in Sachsenhausen.
Ignorance might be bliss, arguably in some situations, but not in this case. Here, ignorance can be catastrophic as western audiences are denied access to information about a critical situation that is affecting them in profound ways and will most certainly impact the world’s geopolitics for generations to come.
“Just imagine for once if we led the world in funding peace and not wars.”
Just imagine! The words are those of Robert Weissman, president of the organization Public Citizen, in response to the legislative efforts of Reps. Barbara Lee and Mark Pocan, who are the co-chairs of — glory hallelujah! — the Defense Spending Reduction Caucus. They recently introduced legislation that would cut Pentagon spending by $100 billion and divert the money to programs that actually helped the country . . . e.g., universal health care, ending child poverty, saving the environment.
Pretty much anything that complicates the story of a person is a good corrective to the tendency to simplify and caricature. So, one has to welcome Craig McNamara’s book, Because Our Fathers Lied: A Memoir of Truth and Family, from Vietnam to Today. Craig’s father, Robert McNamara was Secretary of War (“Defense”) for much of the war on Vietnam. He’d been offered the choice of that or Secretary of the Treasury, with no requirement that he know anything about either job, and of course no requirement to have the slightest notion that the study of making and maintaining peace even existed.
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.”