Global

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.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

– William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, 1919

pocalyptic thinking has been with us for a long time, and it sometimes ushers in actual apocalypses, albeit at human scale, without biblical finality. For a century now, the Yeats poem above has served as an increasingly common reference point for those who fear apocalyptic events approaching. Today such fears are varied, the threats are real, and reactions range from crisis-mongering to self-serving denial, making any rational, coherent societal response almost impossible.

Geoengineering, according to the Royal Society of the United Kingdom, is defined as "the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic (man-made or corporate-caused)climate change" and divides methods into two types: carbon dioxide removal from the atmosphere, and solar radiation management aimed at reducing heat coming in (from the sun)or reflecting more of it out.

I write this week’s Duty to Warn column the day after the biannual Duluthairshow.com (July 7-8, 2018). Sunday evening, over 8 hours after the last the last plane touched down, a heavy thunderstorm partially cleansed the area of some of the toxic aviation fuel residue that contaminated the air, soil and water in the area. The weather during the previous 72 hours however, was perfect, with clear blue skies and 80 degree temps that have persisted now for nearly 4 days. Today, Monday, July 9, the skies continue to be deep blue and clear with actual cumulous clouds.

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.

Trivia Pursuit Question of the Review: What great film director tried to adapt Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” in the early 1930s?

One of the best things that theater and film can do is take us long and ago and far away to experience actual historical events and figures. An excellent case in point is William Manus’ WWII-era set Their Finest Hour: Churchill and Murrow, which co-stars Michael Karm as the Prime Minister, Tyler Cook as the CBS broadcaster and Chantelle Albers as Pamela Churchill Harriman. This drama, which brings alive the Battle of Britain and real life personages, is on the boards in L.A. at the Brickhouse Theatre through July 22.

C.J. Hinke has produced probably the best collection I’ve read of writings by and about conscientious objectors and war refusers behind bars. It’s called Free Radicals: War Resisters in Prison.

"Knowledge is power; but who hath duly Considered the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day's dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavor to its one roast with the burned souls of many generations."-- George Eliot,from the author’s last novel,Daniel Deronda

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There was something quite odd about the very welcome news that some Google employees were objecting to a military contract, namely all the other Google military contracts. My sense of the oddness of this was heightened by reading Yasha Levine’s new book, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet.

I have just spent a couple of days in New York City. Returning to Virginia on Wednesday morning, I had a somewhat strange experience. I cleared through my emails before leaving the hotel and also read through a number of the featured news articles. One, in particular, caught my eye. It described how the Democratic Party primary in Queens New York had returned a startling result. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won over mainstream incumbent Joe Crowley, signaling that not everyone in the Democratic Party is buying into the Clinton model of good governance by big donors and powerful interest groups. Many want change and even a radical departure from the political game whereby media savvy pressure groups and narrow constituencies are pandered to to create a governing majority.

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.