Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

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

I’ve been mulling over this month’s historic US presidential election for the past few days since its stunning result, and no matter how positive I try to be, I can only conclude that the United States and, by extension, the world are at the starting point of what can only be described as a “worst case scenario” for world peace, cooperation and understanding. To start with, President-elect Donald Trump is, arguably, the least prepared US president in history. His net training has been focused entirely on business—with only the slightest of pure economic studies—nor is he, like most politicians who eventually hold that country’s highest political posts, an attorney. That in itself wouldn’t necessarily be a fatally limiting factor. Former US President Jimmy Carter, for instance, was a proud honors graduate of the Annapolis Naval Academy and a farmer-businessman before launching his political career. But he was, arguably, one of the most committed of US presidents to human and civil