Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

Photo from the Rise up Times Some people divide the world into optimists and pessimists, into positive and negative thinkers, into “glass half-full and glass half-empty” types. Those people will probably try to tell you that it’s negative to focus on “the bad stuff” and conclude from this that the world is becoming an ever more violent, dangerous and heartless place and that this kind of thinking is, in the end, merely a perception brought on by ever-increasing connectivity with the rest of the world. They’ll tell you that there was always violence and chaos in certain parts of the world, but that those of us who didn’t live in those places simply didn’t know about it, whereas, today, everybody’s connected to everybody else all the time, so unlike before, we now know what’s going on in the rest of the world—instead of being blithely ignorant, one might conclude. Therefore, they will tell you, the idea that the world is growing more violent and war-like by the day is a mere erro...

The lightning surge of the Sunni militant ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, a.k.a. ISIS) that took shape earlier this month appears to demonstrate that both Western-leaning Iraqi authorities and US intelligence have sorely underestimated this fundamentalist threat and extremist leaders’ capability to make good on it. In Mosul, the Arab country’s second largest city, over the past few days many defending officers and troops have thrown down their weapons and fled before the advance of a few thousand determined and well-seasoned militants, many of whom are believed to have previously been fighting in Syria’s civil war—neither on the side of the  repressive Bashar al-Assad regime nor for the pro-western rebels of the Syrian National Militia, but against all comers for their own cause: the establishment of a pan-Arabian fundamentalist Islamic state. Embattled Iraqi PM Nouri al-Maliki By the end of this week, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was under pressure to ...

An incident in high-profile civil disobedience in Egypt, where court actions and death sentences against citizen protests have been the focus of international controversy, this week struck a new parallel with the case of Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillan in a New York court, which I commented on in my previous blog post. http://vivoonwarpeaceandjustice.blogspot.com.ar/2014/05/the-american-pussy-riot.html   The incident that I refer to is the sentencing of Mahienour El-Massry—sometimes dubbed “the voice of the Egyptian revolution” and a renowned defender of the rights of Egypt’s women—to two years in prison for protesting against recent violations of human and civil rights. A 28-year-old lawyer, Mahienour was tried and convicted of taking part in an unauthorized demonstration and of violating the country’s so-called Protest Law. The conviction refers to a December 3, 2013 protest demonstration in Alexandria that was broken up by police using tear gas and baton charges. ...

Pussy Riot members Naezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina The visit earlier this month of two of Russia’s Pussy Riot members to Occupy Wall Street activist Cecily McMillian—who is in Riker’s Island jail in New York awaiting sentencing this coming Monday (May 19) for striking a police officer—sent out a symbolic message about some disturbing similaries between the standards for freedom of expression in Vladimir Putin’s Russia and in post-9/11 New York City. The incident in which Cecily has been tried and convicted took place on March 17, 2012 (Saint Patrick’s Day). It occurred during the eviction of protesters by New York City police from Zuccotti Park in the Wall Street financial district. The park was the scene of a prolonged sit-in demonstration, which spread to other major cities across the country, organized by Americans fed up with the kind of complicity between big business and government that led to the 2007 stock market crash and subsequent Federal bailout—a multi-bi...

When we released my latest book, El crimen de la guerra (soon to be published in English as War Is a Crime against Humanity ) toward the end of last year, it would have been hard to predict the current situation, in which the world, practically overnight, has returned to a state not unlike that endured throughout the post-World War II years of the Cold War, which only ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Clearly, the world has not lived in a state of blissful peace since that time. Indeed, there are currently more than thirty armed conflicts being waged worldwide, with the worst of them—such as the war in Syria—claiming tens of thousands of lives and leaving millions homeless and displaced. But it is, nevertheless, the first time since the end of the Cold War that East and West are once again in a divisive mood with Moscow and Western leaders flexing their rhetorical muscles and hovering on the brink of disputes that are potential powder kegs. Russian President Vladimir...