Peace

September 28, 2018, marks 100 years since the stupidest parade I’ve ever heard of. And this is a world awash in stupid. Donald Trump wanted to hold an insane weapons parade in Washington this November. That was dumb. But so was, on a far lesser scale, the move by various peace groups to de-prioritize going ahead with a massive celebration of having helped get the parade cancelled. I suppose the thinking is that we have got just too many victories for peace to be bothered with inspiring people to join us.

Anyway, the French parade of death that inspired Trump was certainly moronic. So is the French plan to let Trump back into the country. Three cheers for the Irish, whom he won’t be visiting! But nothing matches for sheer idiocy the parade held in Philadelphia on September 28, 1918.

Last weekend I was on Iranian TV being asked about the meeting in Tehran at which the presidents of Iran and Russia had refused to agree with the President of Turkey to stop bombing people in Syria. I said Iran and Russia were wrong.

I also said that nobody involved, least of all the United States, was right.

Not only would the United States and the world be infinitely better off if in response to 9/11 the U.S. government had done nothing at all, as Jon Schwartz tweets each year, but Syria would be dramatically better off if just about any outside force had never gotten in or now got out.

Here’s my 5-step plan for Syria:

Two exhibits in the Weisman Museum at the University of Minnesota present two contrasting worldviews, a truly sociopathic one supporting mass-murder manufactured by the U.S. government in 1917-1918, and a caring and decent one created by individuals and small organizations in the 1960s. I hope visitors are catching on to the necessity and urgency to choose the right one. See if you can spot the difference:

German people are monsters coming to get you unless you fork over your money for more bullets and poison gas!

Mass murder is unacceptable and should not be normalized.

Ilhan Omar is the second person this year to win a Democratic Party nomination for Congress in a Democratic Party district with a platform advocating peace in a way not seen inside the Beltway. The first was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York City, whose advocacy for peace I wrote about. Ilhan Omar has just won the nomination from Minnesota’s Fifth District.

Last May I was in Russia when fascists held a rally in my hometown of Charlottesville, not to be confused with their larger rally which followed in August.

Throughout the day before the summit in Helsinki, the lead story on the New York Times home page stayed the same: “Just by Meeting With Trump, Putin Comes Out Ahead.” The Sunday headline was in harmony with the tone of U.S. news coverage overall. As for media commentary, the Washington Post was in the dominant groove as it editorialized that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is “an implacably hostile foreign adversary.”

Remarks Delivered by Pat Elder for World BEYOND War at the No to War No to NATO Summit, Brussels, July 8, 2018

Aren’t there any American flags flying here? Are we going to salute the troops? Pledge allegiance to the flag? No? What kind of empire is this?

A largely ignorant American public is the propane that fires the stove of Trump’s brand of fascism.

An overwhelming majority of the American public is convinced that Trump is a liar who does not “share their values” or “care about people like them.” At the same time, many believe that he can “get things done.”

The neo-liberal order we loathe involves dumbing down the American public to accept 18th century notions of unbridled capitalism. The high school textbooks glorify war and empire. God and the flag and the church and the military and Jesus and America and mom and apple pie are mixed in a kind of patriotic pablum that is fed daily to the masses.

here have been two developments in the past month that illustrate clearly what is wrong with the White House’s perception of America’s place in the world. Going far beyond the oft-repeated nonsense that the United States is somehow the “leader of the free world,” the Trump Administration has taken several positions that sustain the bizarre view that such leadership can only be exercised if the United States is completely dominant in all relevant areas. Beyond that, Washington is now also asserting that those who do not go along with the charade and abide by the rules laid down will be subject to punishment to force compliance.

Remarks at Peace Resource Center of San Diego, June 23, 2018.

There are three things that are almost always underestimated: the U.S. military budget, altruism, and sadism.

First, the military budget.