Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

I think I speak for many when I say that for “boomers” like myself—those of us who grew up in the Cold War years of the post-World War II era—it is singularly disturbing to witness how quickly the world appears capable of regressing from the time of relative peace and cooperation painstakingly forged after the fall of the Berlin Wall at the end of the 1980s to a frightening and paranoid climate of East-West power struggles and the general panic that they engender. And just let me say to those who aren’t panicked and afraid, you probably should be. As I have stated a number of times in both essays and public presentations, I believe that we are currently facing the most dangerous time for world peace since the Cold War era. And the development of this new—yet old—climate of impending world violence has come at an absolutely dizzying rate, since the collapse of tolerably good relations between Russia and the West over the Ukrainian crisis—underscored by superpower rivalry in Syria...

As of this first week of October, Syria (and the world) became a lot scarier place. Already hell on earth, with half of its population displaced by war, hundreds of thousands killed and hundreds of thousands more injured or mutilated, the Syrian nation is now facing not only the airstrikes by the 60-country US-led coalition on Islamic State targets, but also the direct intervention of the Russian military against any and all rebels seeking to overthrow Moscow’s friends and allies in the harsh, authoritarian Bashar al-Assad regime. Syria is strategic to Russia in its Middle-Eastern backyard, and Moscow has a close-knit relationship with the ruling Assad family dating back to 1970, when Hafez al-Assad came to power after a series of military coups starting in 1963 and in which he gained ever greater control, rising from defense minister to prime minister and, finally, to president, an office he held for 30 years, before handing power down to son Bashar in 2000. Even before the 1970s...

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...