Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

The exponential increase in the pace of evolution is not really anything new. It has been at an amazing pace that evolutionary change has been increasing practically since the beginning of time. Scientists believe that the process known as evolution started some four billion years ago. At that time, the process of change was so slow that it took about two billion of those years for unicellular organisms to become multicellular organisms. But once that first step was taken, it only took about another 200 million years—a relative blink of an eye—from the birth of the first mammal until the birth of our first ancestor, the first Homo sapiens. Yuval Noah Harari is a scholar who has delved deeply into the possible future that awaits human beings in the technological era. According to his vision, humans are on the verge of seeking to become gods. He refers to this process—as the title of his book indicates—as homo deus . What he means is that as of the 21 st century, the human race ...

In 1984, James Cameron would direct a motion picture destined to become a sci-fi classic. Called The Terminator, and based on a screenplay written by Cameron in collaboration with executive producer Gale Anne Hurd, the movie seemed at the time to be nothing more than a dark, crazy fantasy, an unprecedented tale with no link whatsoever to reality. It was about a future in which artificial intelligence becomes self-aware and decides to eliminate the humans that invented it from the face of the earth. However, with what we know today about technological development, that supposed fantasy has become, in the three decades since the picture was made, visionary and prophetic. More and more futurologists and scientists are predicting that advanced technology will eventually escape from our grasp and begin to govern itself. Linked to that vision of the future is a key idea to the effect that our future destiny will depend in large measure on how we develop and manage advanced techno...

In War — A Crime Against Humanity (Hojas del Sur / Amazon 2015), I discussed the need to strengthen the commitment of international and multilateral institutions to each other and to the establishment of world peace. I said at the time that the UN needed to be restructured to keep the five veto-holding powers on the Security Council from manipulating war and peace according to their own geopolitical agendas, and suggested that the NATO alliance should be bolstered and used to reestablish and maintain peace in areas of the world within their sphere of influence where armed conflicts emerge. Above all, however, I stressed the importance of democracy as the mortar that cements together the building blocks of world peace. I emphasized the importance of not only unifying Western democracies, but also of promoting democracy throughout the world as a major ingredient in the mix of international cooperation and the eventual abandoning of war as a means of settling international dispu...

The crumbling of democracy, the rise of radical neo-nationalism, a now multi-tier nuclear threat, the rapid deterioration of the global environment, the growing threat of a new world war, and the barreling advance of artificial intelligence toward a state beyond our control... These are some of the major challenges facing us today, challenges that are apt to have grave and foreseeable consequences in the not too distant future. Be that as it may, they are being largely ignored at present, as individuals and nations alike seem obsessed with the immediate and hopelessly caught up in the whirlwind of current events and election cycles. At a time when the world has never needed more to be united in the search for peace and cooperation, its leading nations are entertaining the autistic whim of an autocratic minority to embrace isolationist policies and a return to nationalist sentiments. Both literally and figuratively, walls are being erected to divide rather than bridges being built...

The case of Noura Hussein has brought the controversial subject of forced and child marriages to the forefront once again on the world stage. Noura is a Sudanese youth, now nineteen, who was given away in marriage by her family when she was only 15. Shortly after the marriage took place—against the teen’s will—Noura escaped but eventually, after a three-year hiatus, was returned to the custody of her legal husband by the hand of her own father. Once locked up again in her husband’s home, Noura continued to refuse the physical advances of her imposed spouse. In order to consummate the marriage, according to the young woman’s defense, members of the husband’s family held Noura down while he raped her. When he tried to rape her again on his own the next day, Noura stabbed him to death. Seeking help, Noura returned to her own home, but her family turned her in to the authorities. Sudan is one of a large number of countries in the world where marital rape is not considered a cr...

Breaking deals The US president’s unilateral decision this past month to abandon the Iran nuclear accord has suddenly made the world a much more dangerous place. President Donald Trump’s contention that this will somehow help keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons is counter-intuitive, since the whole purpose of the nuclear agreement—reached under the former administration of Barack Obama after two years of arduous negotiations among seven nations—was to put a stay on Iran’s nuclear ambitions and place it on the path to peaceful nuclear development, while avoiding a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, led by Iran’s three major rival powers there, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Iraq. The timing for the Iran nuclear deal offered the added advantage of providing a diplomatic space in which Iran could be gradually integrated back into the world concert of nations, after long years of isolation and hardship imposed by major Western nations led by the United States. The attendant ...