Anti-War
While the world watched and waited with bated breath for the outcome of the substantial global effort – involving over 100 cave divers from various countries, 1,000 members of the Thai Army and 10,000 others in various roles – to rescue a team of 12 young football players and their coach, who were trapped inside a flooded cave in Thailand for 17 days, 850,000 children were killed by human adults in other parts of the world, many of them simply starved to death in Yemen or other parts of Africa, Asia and Central/South America.
The German Luftwaffe’s Panavia Tornado fighter jet.
WBW’s Pat Elder is encamped with antinuclear resisters just outside the gate of Büchel Airbase in Germany and he sends us this report.
Early in the morning, when I approached this sprawling airbase that employs 2,000 civilians and soldiers, the bucolic setting was reminiscent of the rolling foothills of the Blueridge Mountains in western Maryland and Virginia. Scattered large, well-kept farmhouses amid the beautiful rolling land planted in wheat and corn reflected this prosperous and peaceful country.
Peace, love and Donald Trump?
I get the skepticism regarding the tentative nuclear disarmament agreement the president and Kim Jong-un reached last week, but not the cynicism — not the outright dismissal.
It’s too easy to hate Trump, but he isn’t the point. In his reckless unpredictability — in his lust for applause and desperation to steal headlines from the Robert Mueller investigation — he snatched an opportunity to meet with the leader of North Korea . . . “Little Rocket Man” . . . and talk about reducing the danger of nuclear war. Say what?
It hardly seems possible — but maybe Trump has a mission far beyond anything he himself envisions: visiting creative destruction, you might say, on the planet’s geopolitical infrastructure, loosening the certainties of nationalism and armed self-defense. Perhaps the salvation of Planet Earth begins with cluelessness and ego: a superpower leader who has no idea what he’s doing.
By Tony Jenkins, World BEYOND War
Photo caption: Peaceful protestors in Cameroon calling for an end to violence, Anglophone marginalization, and arbitrary arrest. (Photo: Screen capture from the cover of the Amnesty International Report “A Turn for the worse…”)
Deadly violence in Cameroon is at the precipice of civil war and the world is not paying attention. World BEYOND War calls for immediate action by state and non-state actors, the media, and international civil society to bring an immediate end to this deadly conflict.
Iran’s radical Marxist cult Mohajedeen e Khalq, better known by its acronym MEK, is somewhat reminiscent of the Israel Lobby’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in that it operates somewhat in the shadows and is nevertheless able to punch well beyond its weight by manipulating politicians and understanding how American government functions on its dark side. MEK promotes itself by openly supporting a very popular hardline policy of “democratic opposition” advocating “regime change” for Iran while also successfully selling its reform credentials, i.e. that it is no longer a terrorist group. This latter effort apparently convinced then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on 2013 as she and President Barack responded to the group’s affability campaign by delisting MEK from the government list of terrorist organizations.
This shift in attitude towards MEK was a result of several factors. First, everyone in Washington and the Establishment hates Iran. And second, the Executive Order 13224, which designates Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization, ipso facto defines any group fighting against it as one of the good guys, justifying the change
World BEYOND War has just released an updated 2018 mapping of militarism in the world. The map system can be explored and adjusted to display what you’re looking for, as well as display precise data and its sources at http://bit.ly/mappingmilitarism
Here are some examples of what it can show:
Where wars are present that directly and violently killed over 1,000 people in 2017:
Where wars are present and where wars come from are two different questions. If we look at where money is spent on wars and where weapons for wars are produced and exported, there is little overlap with the map above.
Here’s a map showing countries color-coded based on the dollar amount of their weapons exports to other governments from 2008-2015:
For those of us who fully expected most U.S. peace activists to vanish once Barack Obama became president but expected them to come back once Donald Trump ascended the throne, the failure of our second expectation has been hard, crushingly hard. But there are a few silver linings.
VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-zhmIexXJw
TRANSCRIPT:
BEN NORTON: It’s The Real News. I’m Ben Norton.
Back when “tin soldiers and Nixon” were “cutting us down” in 1970, a group of Ohio State University students and campus activists started an underground newspaper in Columbus. Driven mostly by the murder of four students at Kent State – Allison Krause, Jeff Miller, Sandy Scheuer and Bill Schroeder – shot during a demonstration that was opposing President Nixon’s illegal attack on Cambodia and the Vietnam War, the Columbus Free Press was born.
Not surprisingly, the Free Press was the first western newspaper to expose Cambodia’s killing fields thanks to international law professor John Quigley’s reporting from Southeast Asia. In the first issue of the Free Press, the October 11, 1970 issue, a Free Press opinion attacked a special grand jury’s decision not to indict Ohio National Guardsmen for the Kent State killings.
Imagine some foreign nation sent 100 missiles into Washington D.C.
You can imagine this because Hollywood has trained you to imagine it.
Imagine that for weeks or months prior to this attack, the foreign nation’s government and public debated whether to do it.
You can imagine this because you live in the one nation on earth where such debates happen, or because you have heard about the sorts of things that go on in the United States.
Now imagine that the primary excuse for the attack settled on in the debate in the distant foreign capital was this: it would be punishment for the U.S. government’s use of and possession of banned weapons: depleted uranium, white phosphorous, napalm, cluster bombs, etc.
You may be able to imagine that, depending on what you know about events in the world and how good you are at playing role reversal.