Anti-War

The glory of Pearl Harbor Day still lingered yesterday on Human Rights Day with a Democracy Summit wrapping up and Nobel So-Called Peace Prize laureates talking about U.S. government-approved and -funded journalism. U.S. media is dominated by Donald Trump and how he’s out of power at the moment. All is just going swimmingly in the steady march of freedom and goodness. If you pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain. Or maybe it’s a small army of little men behind a thousand curtains. We can discuss the many causes and motivations of deception and self-deception. Suffice it to say that once you look, listen, or smell for an instant at the actual state of the world, you can’t turn away, and you can’t stomach the pretty picture.

The exclusion of certain countries from the U.S. “democracy summit” is not a side issue. It is the very purpose of the summit. And excluded countries have not been excluded for failing to meet the standards of behavior of those that were invited or the one doing the inviting. Invitees didn’t even have to be countries, as even a U.S. backed failed coup leader from Venezuela has been invited. So have representatives of Israel, Iraq, Pakistan, DRC, Zambia, Angola, Malaysia, Kenya, and — critically — pawns in the game: Taiwan and Ukraine.

What game? The weapons sales game. Which is the whole point. Look at the U.S. State Department website on the Democracy Summit. Right at the top: “‘Democracy doesn’t happen by accident. We have to defend it, fight for it, strengthen it, renew it.’ –President Joseph R. Biden, Jr.”

Five members of the World BEYOND War Youth Network (WBWYN) from five continents have contributed, together with WBW’s Education Director, to a chapter in a new book (available free in full as PDF) called Problems, Threats and Challenges for Peace and Conflict Resolution, edited by Joanna Marszałek-Kawa Maria Ochwat.

The book provides a highly informative survey of how people in numerous parts of the world view working for peace, primarily meaning the ending of violent conflict within, rather than between, nations.

The first chapter was put together by Phill Gittins, World BEYOND War’s Education Director, together with young peace activists Sayako Aizeki-Nevins, Christine Odera, Alejandra Rodriguez, Daria Pakhomova, and Laiba Khan.

Sayako Aizeki-Nevins is a high school student from New York who has found her way from climate and racial-justice activism to activism for peace. “Today,” she writes, “my main interests revolve around the intersections between climate change, militarism, and war. I pursue these interests through my work with the WBWYN.”

On November 15, 2021, the Russian Ministry of Defense carried out the successful destruction of the discontinued and decommissioned national spacecraft named “Tselina-D”, which was put into orbit back in 1982. The head of the Russian Defense Ministry, Sergei Shoigu, confirmed that the Russian Aerospace Forces had indeed successfully destroyed this satellite with pinpoint accuracy.

The fragments formed after knocking down this spacecraft do not pose any threat to either orbital stations or other satellites, or generally speaking to the space activities of any state. This is well known to all space powers that have fairly effective national technical means of verification and control of outer space, including the USA.

After the destruction of the named satellite, its fragments moved along trajectories outside the orbits of other operating space vehicles, have been under constant observation and monitoring from the Russian side and are included in the main catalogue of the space activities.

A new defense budget looms. Maybe we’re running out of wars to fight, but no matter. The proposed figure before Congress is bigger than ever: $778 billion.

I want to recommend a new film and a new book. The film is called The Boys Who Said NO! There’s more courage and moral integrity in this documentary than in any fictional blockbuster. With the wars now underway and threatened being as unjust as those 50 years ago (and with women now being added to U.S. draft registration) we need more saying No! We also need to recognize, as depicted in this film, the scale of the horror of the war on Southeast Asia 50 years ago, not yet repeated anywhere, and avoid the foolishness of desiring a draft in order to say no to it. Our planet is imperiled by military spending, and the time to learn from and act on the lessons of this film is not in the future. It is right now.

U.S. presidential election campaigns have been known to focus on the slogan “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Efforts to explain the behavior of the U.S. government ought to put a little more focus on a different slogan, found in the headline above.

A Rotarian has just made me aware that Rotary quietly adopted a policy in June of not investing in weapons companies. This is worth celebrating and encouraging all other organizations to do likewise. Here is the policy, excerpted from a document pasted below:

“The Rotary Foundation . . . will typically avoid investment in . . . companies that derive significant revenue from producing, distributing, or marketing . . . military weapons systems, cluster munitions, anti-personnel mines, and nuclear explosives.”

Now, I’ll admit that declaring what you will “typically” not do is weak compared to declaring what you will never do, but it does create leverage to make sure that in fact the “typical” behavior is at least mostly what is done.

And it is certainly odd that after “military weapons systems” three particular types of military weapons systems are added, but there doesn’t seem to be any obvious way to read that as excluding other types of military weapons systems. They seem to all be covered.

Below is appendix B from the minutes of a Rotary International board meeting in June 2021. I’ve bolded a bit of it:

*****

The Pentagon’s offer of “condolence money” to the relatives of the ten people (seven of them children) who were killed in the final U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan — originally declared righteous and necessary — bears a troubling connection to the government’s ongoing efforts to get its hands on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and punish him for exposing the inconvenient truth of war.

You know, the “classified” stuff — like Apache helicopter crewmen laughing after they killed a bunch of men on a street in Baghdad in 2007 (“Oh yeah, look at those dead bastards”) and then smirked some more after killing the ones who started picking up the bodies, in the process also injuring several children who were in the van they just blasted. This is not stuff the American public needs to know about!

In the wake of WMD-liar Curveball’s videotaped confession, Colin Powell is demanding to know why nobody warned him about Curveball’s unreliability. The trouble is, they did.

Can you imagine having an opportunity to address the United Nations Security Council about a matter of great global importance, with all the world’s media watching, and using it to… well, to make shit up – to lie with a straight face, and with a CIA director propped up behind you, I mean to spew one world-class, for-the-record-books stream of bull, to utter nary a breath without a couple of whoppers in it, and to look like you really mean it all? What gall. What an insult to the entire world that would be.

Colin Powell doesn’t have to imagine such a thing. He has to live with it. He did it on February 5, 2003. It’s on videotape.