Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

WORLD BEYOND WAR AND THE QUEST FOR PEACE Directed by author and international peace activist David Swanson, World Beyond War is an organization whose aim is not only to bolster world peace awareness, but also to actively inspire popular support for ending the scourge of war—an aim that I share and that is the thesis for my latest book. War: A Crime Against Humanity . Like me, World Beyond War has begun its research and activism by accepting the fact that war is not merely the occasional use of mass violence as the continuation of political and diplomatic processes, but rather—like torture and racism before it—a nefarious institution that has been incorporated, like an indelible stain, into the fabric of society. Therefore, it’s not enough to seek ways of preventing war—although that would at least be a start, instead of always taking the violent path of least resistance—but rather, it is necessary to embrace the need to abolish this pernicious institution entirely. And, I woul...

Buenos Aires It’s spring today in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s autumn in the Northern Hemisphere. Pope Francis is visiting the United States after his historic trip to Cuba. And somewhere on the global and local news schedules these events may figure prominently—and so too will the refugee crisis in Europe and some of the major wars that are causing it, as well as the reluctant decision of the world’s most powerful nation to (finally) start receiving more than a tiny smattering of those displaced by wars in which its foreign policy, and those of other permanent members of the UN Security Council, have figured prominently. What you’ll hear a lot less about, however, is what is sometimes known as World Peace Day. That’s right, the annual event officially known as the International Day of Peace is today and, with unfortunately few exceptions, the world is oblivious to its existence. The International Day of Peace is a United Nations holiday. The UN General Assembly passed the re...

  A mass murder in the heart of a major southern US city recently   brought to the fore once again the lasting effects of racism on US society, a century and a half after the bloody Civil War that ended the kidnapping and enslavement in that country of millions of black Africans. Victims of the Emanuel AME massacre Despite the hard-fought battles of the US civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s and the undeniable advancement that, against all odds, African Americans have achieved in the last fifty years, no objective analysis of American society today can conclude that deep-rooted racism is no longer an issue there, or that black society as a whole has achieved overall equality with white society. And the massacre of nine African Americans carried out by a lone white gunman at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, earlier this year is not an isolated case of continuing racial unrest in the US, but rather, a high-p...

Few except the most adamant of “Iranophobes” on the outer reactionary fringe in the United States, Israel and Saudi Arabia could see the agreement reached between six major world powers and the government of Iran as anything but historic, no matter what sort of reservations one might have about certain details of the pact. The truth is that reaching an accord was the difference between making a bad situation a lot worse or seeking to create a less confrontational Middle East, between isolation and understanding, indeed, between war and peace. And only the blindest or most ill-intentioned of opponents are incapable of seeing this. Viewing the agreement reached last week between Iran and the so-called P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council―China, France, Russia, the UK and the US―plus Germany) as “permitting” Iran to become a nuclear nation is missing the point entirely. The fact is that Iran already is a nuclear nation and has been for some time. It has be...

A deadline came and went without incident last Tuesday, in talks being held in Vienna between Iran and the so-called P5+1―the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (the US, the UK, China, France and Russia) plus Germany―regarding the Arab nation’s atomic energy program. The fact that all parties involved decided to remain at the negotiating table for another week should bring a sigh of relief to everyone but hardline warmongers everywhere in the world, because it is of vital importance to world peace that a workable nuclear agreement be reached between the leading military powers and Iran. Failure of this to happen and an ultimate walkout by the US and/or Iran might very likely lead to new and even more expansive conflicts in the Middle East in the future, and to the ghost of nuclear war in an area of the world fraught with multilateral hostilities and rivalries. US President Barack Obama has twice this week warned that the United States will “walk away” if the fin...

Peace remains ever more elusive in the beleaguered nation of Yemen. Talks held in Geneva, Switzerland, last week to seek an end to the sectarian violence in that Arab country foundered miserably.  UN Special Envoy  Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed traveled to the Geneva talks with what he apparently thought were modest enough objectives: an at least temporary truce and agreement on a seven-point plan for extending peace beyond a ceasefire. But hopes for a cessation of hostilities throughout the Muslim holy month of Ramadan (June 17 to July 17)―let alone for approval by both sides of any sort of agreement―were quickly dashed when negotiators failed even to get the warring sides to meet in the same room. Instead, Amhed and his team had to meet with the two warring sides―Houthi rebel-led delegates from Sana ′a and representatives of Yemeni President-in-exile Abd Radduh Mansur Hadi― in separate rooms, thus carrying out a sort of “shuttle diplomacy” between the two belligerents, ...

The 16-year-old girl, her face already bloodied, tries to escape  but is surrounded by the mob. Minutes later her body would lie  ablaze on the ground, as the perpetrators watched her burn.   A recent series of lynchings in Guatemala has once again drawn attention to that Central American country’s reputation for violence. News reports point to at least a score of lynchings in Guatemala so far this year, in which mobs attack, beat and often then burn to death individuals suspected of crimes. The latest Guatemala lynching went viral in the social media, in a video that showed how a mob of at least 25 people in the village of Río Bravo first savagely beat and then burned alive a 16-year-old girl. The girl, said to be the daughter of a convicted gang member, was suspected of taking part in the gang murder of a taxi driver, allegedly for not paying a “protection fee” to the gang. She was reportedly accompanied in that crime by two males, both of whom...