Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

When I was young, I fancied myself a hippie. I also considered myself an artist. I was a         musician and a painter. What I bought into wasn’t the psychedelic drug culture that grew up around the hippie movement, but the “flower power” philosophy on which that movement was based, and which created a veritable cultural revolution that caught on around the world. It was a philosophy that promoted everything that should be the accepted norm in the world—peace, harmony, empathy, cooperation. Above all, love. The hippies were seen by the establishment as “crazy kids”. But the learning moment that the hippie movement offered to the world came through its opening of minds of all ages not only to the possibility, but also to the appropriateness of its philosophy of love and kindness. In that context, it wasn’t the hippies who were “crazy”, but the establishment, the sick societies that sold war, division, racism, repression and violence as the nor...

About a decade ago, I asked myself seriously why it was that if every major religion preached peace, and if almost every major nation professed adherence to one major religious faith or another, the world has lived in an almost constant state of war since the dawn of organized society. Over the course of my search for answers to this conundrum, I have come to certain conclusions about war and peace that, with year’s end upon us, I’d like to share with you. 1. War is easier to promote than peace. Governments, and indeed the mainstream religions, have a long and horrible history of supporting war over peace. Still today, the world is cursed with not only political wars but also with “holy wars”, which in both cases respond to ulterior motives based on power and greed rather than on their declared “patriotic” or “religious” causes. War is basically the path of least resistance. It is much easier to stir up destructive feelings of hatred for “the other”, and to sound the clarion...

Tolerance...Except in select circles, it’s a word you don’t often hear any more in this age of growing political incorrectness. But it remains the single-most important key to community by community peace. As such, it is also the prime key to world peace. That said, although the need to imbue people with tolerance may not be an innate necessity, the societies, often indeed the families, into which we are born, tend to start undermining, from the time we are very small, the natural tolerance with which we come into the world. An infant doesn’t care what color the skin is of the person who is caring for him or her. Infants couldn’t care less what religion their care-giver professes, what sports team they are a fan of, how much money they have, what social class they belong to, where they went to school, whether they are literate or illiterate, whether they are gay or straight, or whom they voted for in the last election. The only thing small children care about is the care and...

By now, there can be little doubt in any realistic person’s mind that Saudi-born journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, where he was briefly tortured and interrogated before being brutally murdered by agents of the Saudi government, his body apparently later cut up and removed from the consulate in several containers and disposed of in an as yet undisclosed location. Jamal Khashoggi The original Saudi government narrative that Khashoggi visited the consulate and then left was swiftly exposed by Turkish authorities as a lie, when they publicly declared that they had security camera footage and audio that proved the Washington Post editorialist had been murdered inside the consulate. The Saudis didn’t bother to ask how Turkey’s Erdogan government had come by this evidence. It was obvious that they had it and that the jig was up regarding the lie about Khashoggi’s having left the Saudi diplomatic mission. It was a story that wasn’...

After reading through the latest UN report on global climate change, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there is a way we humans can maybe manage to survive climate change. The bad news is, if we don’t implement, within the next decade or so, immediate, urgent and serious steps to ensure human survival in the near future, we’re toast. And the news gets worse. The ceiling for keeping absolute catastrophe at bay is a total rise in global warming of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Period. The climactic phenomena that we have been witnessing in recent years—prolonged drought, vast wildfires, unprecedented flooding, record summer heat, record winter storms, much more frequent and much more powerful tropical storms, typhoons and hurricanes, much increased cyclone activity, etc.—are all the result of a single-degree increase in global temperature above pre-industrial levels. On our current course, in which a small group of countries is...

In its most damning report yet, a United Nations investigative team has flatly accused the government of Myanmar (ex-Burma) of perpetrating gross genocidal crimes against the ethnic minority known as the Rohingya people. The main focus of genocidal incidents has taken place in Rakhine State, where the largest Rohingya settlements have traditionally been located. But the UN study also drew on testimonies regarding criminal abuse in Kachin and Shan States. The Rohingya people claim that their roots in Myanmar go back at least a thousand years. Their name—which is also the name of the Indo-European language that they speak—means, literally, “the people of Rohing”. Rohing was the ancient name of the kingdom that would later be known in British colonial times are Arakan, and today is known as Rakhine State. The Rohingya, therefore, justly consider themselves indigenous to the region. The Myanmar government, for its part, brands the Rohingya as “foreigners”—refusing to term them...