Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

By now, there can be little doubt in any realistic person’s mind that Saudi-born journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi was lured to the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, where he was briefly tortured and interrogated before being brutally murdered by agents of the Saudi government, his body apparently later cut up and removed from the consulate in several containers and disposed of in an as yet undisclosed location. Jamal Khashoggi The original Saudi government narrative that Khashoggi visited the consulate and then left was swiftly exposed by Turkish authorities as a lie, when they publicly declared that they had security camera footage and audio that proved the Washington Post editorialist had been murdered inside the consulate. The Saudis didn’t bother to ask how Turkey’s Erdogan government had come by this evidence. It was obvious that they had it and that the jig was up regarding the lie about Khashoggi’s having left the Saudi diplomatic mission. It was a story that wasn’...

After reading through the latest UN report on global climate change, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that there is a way we humans can maybe manage to survive climate change. The bad news is, if we don’t implement, within the next decade or so, immediate, urgent and serious steps to ensure human survival in the near future, we’re toast. And the news gets worse. The ceiling for keeping absolute catastrophe at bay is a total rise in global warming of no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Period. The climactic phenomena that we have been witnessing in recent years—prolonged drought, vast wildfires, unprecedented flooding, record summer heat, record winter storms, much more frequent and much more powerful tropical storms, typhoons and hurricanes, much increased cyclone activity, etc.—are all the result of a single-degree increase in global temperature above pre-industrial levels. On our current course, in which a small group of countries is...

In its most damning report yet, a United Nations investigative team has flatly accused the government of Myanmar (ex-Burma) of perpetrating gross genocidal crimes against the ethnic minority known as the Rohingya people. The main focus of genocidal incidents has taken place in Rakhine State, where the largest Rohingya settlements have traditionally been located. But the UN study also drew on testimonies regarding criminal abuse in Kachin and Shan States. The Rohingya people claim that their roots in Myanmar go back at least a thousand years. Their name—which is also the name of the Indo-European language that they speak—means, literally, “the people of Rohing”. Rohing was the ancient name of the kingdom that would later be known in British colonial times are Arakan, and today is known as Rakhine State. The Rohingya, therefore, justly consider themselves indigenous to the region. The Myanmar government, for its part, brands the Rohingya as “foreigners”—refusing to term them...

The exponential increase in the pace of evolution is not really anything new. It has been at an amazing pace that evolutionary change has been increasing practically since the beginning of time. Scientists believe that the process known as evolution started some four billion years ago. At that time, the process of change was so slow that it took about two billion of those years for unicellular organisms to become multicellular organisms. But once that first step was taken, it only took about another 200 million years—a relative blink of an eye—from the birth of the first mammal until the birth of our first ancestor, the first Homo sapiens. Yuval Noah Harari is a scholar who has delved deeply into the possible future that awaits human beings in the technological era. According to his vision, humans are on the verge of seeking to become gods. He refers to this process—as the title of his book indicates—as homo deus . What he means is that as of the 21 st century, the human race ...

In 1984, James Cameron would direct a motion picture destined to become a sci-fi classic. Called The Terminator, and based on a screenplay written by Cameron in collaboration with executive producer Gale Anne Hurd, the movie seemed at the time to be nothing more than a dark, crazy fantasy, an unprecedented tale with no link whatsoever to reality. It was about a future in which artificial intelligence becomes self-aware and decides to eliminate the humans that invented it from the face of the earth. However, with what we know today about technological development, that supposed fantasy has become, in the three decades since the picture was made, visionary and prophetic. More and more futurologists and scientists are predicting that advanced technology will eventually escape from our grasp and begin to govern itself. Linked to that vision of the future is a key idea to the effect that our future destiny will depend in large measure on how we develop and manage advanced techno...

In War — A Crime Against Humanity (Hojas del Sur / Amazon 2015), I discussed the need to strengthen the commitment of international and multilateral institutions to each other and to the establishment of world peace. I said at the time that the UN needed to be restructured to keep the five veto-holding powers on the Security Council from manipulating war and peace according to their own geopolitical agendas, and suggested that the NATO alliance should be bolstered and used to reestablish and maintain peace in areas of the world within their sphere of influence where armed conflicts emerge. Above all, however, I stressed the importance of democracy as the mortar that cements together the building blocks of world peace. I emphasized the importance of not only unifying Western democracies, but also of promoting democracy throughout the world as a major ingredient in the mix of international cooperation and the eventual abandoning of war as a means of settling international dispu...