Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

In 2012, the Nobel Prize Committee awarded the European Union what is, perhaps, its most coveted honor: the Nobel Peace Prize. The committee’s choice drew some scathing attacks from critics within the EU itself. Mostly from those with axes to grind, politicians whose constituencies had been affected by the worst financial/economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s and the usual harbingers of doom who are always predicting the disintegration and demise of that multinational compact. But seen within the context of the seven decades of the post-war era, it seems at least disingenuous to express disdain, let alone condemnation, for the Nobel Committee’s pick, since the EU’s role in maintaining peace in Europe following two devastating world wars simply cannot be overstated. The EU won the Nobel for what it has undeniably provided: “the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.” Even more importantly, it won the world’s top peace prize...

Last year, when few people had ever heard of Steve Bannon or knew anything about him, writer Ronald Radosh wrote a piece for the Daily Beast in which he recounted an informal conversation he’d had in 2013 with the former Breitbart News executive director and now top aide to US President Donald Trump. Radosh wrote that he had attended a book-signing party held at Bannon’s posh townhouse in Washington DC. He’d been observing a photo of Bannon’s daughter, Maureen, a West Point Military Academy graduate and an officer in the US Army’s elite 101 st Airborne Division. According to Radosh, the picture had caught his attention because it showed Maureen Bannon in combat fatigues sitting with a machine-gun across her lap on an elaborate seat that turned out to be none other than Saddam Hussein’s gold throne. The casual conversation that ensued, according to Radosh, began with Bannon’s saying, of his daughter, “I’m very proud of her.” But what came next would be even more surprising to the...

The sudden rise of the latest expressions of populist nationalism has triggered panic in both democratic and wholly capitalist organizations worldwide. It is a phenomenon that traditional pundits failed entirely to foresee but that erudite democrats from Noam Chomsky and Joseph Stiglitz on the left to Robert Kagan and George Will on the right have been warning about for some time now. But as that phenomenon has burgeoned over the past few years, taking strong root in both Western Europe and the United States, first think-tanks and then major multilateral organizations have had to start accepting it as real and as a clear and present danger, not only to capitalist democracy as a systemic Western framework, but also to liberal economics as the world has known it up to the present. Lagarde One such organization is the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in this case an institution about which one might add, “Better late than never.” In all fairness, ever since the worldwide crisis...

To read Parts I, II and III, please visit the following links: http://vivoonwarpeaceandjustice.blogspot.com.ar/2016/08/the-rise-of-nationalist-populism.html http://vivoonwarpeaceandjustice.blogspot.com.ar/2016/08/the-rise-of-populist-nationalism-part.html http://vivoonwarpeaceandjustice.blogspot.com.ar/2016/09/the-rise-of-populist-nationalism-part.html Although an undercurrent of populist nationalism has been surging toward the surface since the turn of the millennium, it is no coincidence that it has become a fully-fledged international trend in the years since the 2008 world financial crisis, the catalyst for which was the US mortgage debacle and the ensuing stock market crash that it triggered. Nor is right-wing populist nationalism the only manifestation of rage and frustration on the part of common citizens at what they perceive as a broken system and as a worldwide “game”—led by the West—in which the deck is definitively stacked against them. Trumpism in the US, Nigel...

To read Parts I and II, please visit the following links: http://vivoonwarpeaceandjustice.blogspot.com.ar/2016/08/the-rise-of-nationalist-populism.html http://vivoonwarpeaceandjustice.blogspot.com.ar/2016/08/the-rise-of-populist-nationalism-part.html In a recently released documentary video written and directed by Kelly Nyks, Peter D. Hutchinson and Jared P. Scott for PF Films ( http://requiemfortheamericandream.com/ ) , the internationally esteemed dean of US intellectuals, Noam Chomsky, provides, like no one else to date, a clear, concise analysis of how the much-touted American dream has become an American nightmare for all but a privileged elite. And as goes the United States, so too goes the world, often with devastatingly multiplied effect. The failure of the majority of the public to understand the causes behind this dream’s demise and, worse still, their lack of tools for dealing with it, are at the root of the fears and frustrations currently fueling populist nationa...