Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

I recently read, with enthusiasm and fascination, the latest book by MIT Professor Max Tegmark, entitled Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (Knopf, New York, 2017, available on Amazon). While the book has proven controversial—and rightly so—I have to admit that much of my interest in it stems from my own tendency to see the world from a positive viewpoint, and in terms of solutions rather than prophesies of doom, despite current events that make it less than easy to maintain a sunny frame of mind. Tegmark’s is not only a global but also a cosmic view into a future of millions of years hence. In other words, I found myself attracted to this work because of the way in which it looks beyond our fragile and ephemeral present toward a possible future of Humankind in which the seemingly insoluble problems of our current world will have found an intelligent fix that only advanced science can foresee today, but that may end up being calculated into a bright...

It is called NOW, and that’s no coincidence. Clearly, its members have long been tired of being told to wait, to be patient, that their day will come. NOW stands for National Organization for Women, and it is the largest organization of feminist grassroots activists in the United States today. The activists in NOW weren’t “born yesterday”. The organization was founded half a century ago, at the height of the sixties protest era by civil rights firebrands Betty Friedan and Pauli Murray. Friedan (1921-2006) would gain a well-deserved reputation as a leading US writer, activist and feminist, whose book, The Feminine Mystique , was considered by many to have sparked the second big wave of feminist activism in the turbulent 20 th century. She would continue to be a major voice for women’s rights throughout her life, although she would step down as the president of NOW in 1970, after serving at the head of the organization for a four-year term. She would go on to help establish the N...

Those of us who grew up in the South America of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s know all too well about how fragile democracy is. The maximum outward manifestation of the death of a democracy is that culminating moment when tanks roll out of the military bases and onto the streets, elected leaders are exiled or jailed, constitutional guarantees are suspended, and repression of the citizenry is installed as the governing norm. But this is seldom a surprise first sign of the collapse of freedom and democracy. Quite often democratic institutions are in such a debilitated state that a dictatorial takeover is almost a foregone conclusion. Other times these institutions have been so infiltrated by populist and/or other autocratic elements that a coup per se is rendered completely unnecessary and redundant. In these cases, democracy merely whimpers and dies in the chokehold of a political elite or dictator, with no one mounting any sort of vigorous defense until it’s too late. And many time...

Setsuko Nakamura Thurlow Setsuko Nakamura Thurlow was born in Hiroshima in 1932. When Harry S. Truman took the horrifying, inhuman and fateful decision on August 6, 1945, to single out the United States for dubious renown as the only country in history to use the atomic bomb against another people—and did so twice in three days despite the horrendous results of the first attack—Setsuko, now 85, was a 13-year-old schoolgirl. At the precise moment in which the Doomsday Clock struck twelve in Hiroshima, she was only eighteen blocks from the hypocenter of the blast. What she would witness would be the direct results of nuclear holocaust—her city leveled, and friends, family, classmates literally vaporized or melting before her eyes in the expansion wave and firestorm that followed detonation of a primitive US A-bomb known as “Little Boy”.   Detonation over Hiroshima Setsuko’s immediate survival, and the fact that she also survived the nuclear aftermath and has reached ...