Peace and War

Imagine nuclear winter
It’s easy if you try
Firestorms around us
Soot blocks out the sky
Imagine all the people dying in that way

Imagine there’s an upside
It isn’t hard to do
Something to kill and die for:
Putin would die too
Imagine all the Russians dying in our war, you

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
You’ll have no choice but to join us
And Hillary finally will have won

Imagine there’s no evidence
I wonder if you can
No read more

In the United States you can attend a local “peace and justice” group meeting in almost any city and find people generally open to any new way of thinking or evidence of success that could help advance the causes of peace or justice.

But if you go to too academic a “peace studies” event you are likely to find people very focused on aid and development in distant poor nations selected from the list of those the United States is not heavily bombing at the moment — that, read more

Remarks at Lincoln Memorial, May 30, 2017

Washington, D.C., and much of the rest of the United States, is full of war monuments, with many more under construction and being planned. Most of them glorify wars. Many of them were erected during later wars and sought to improve the images of past wars for present purposes. Almost none of them teach any lessons from mistakes made. The very best of them mourn the loss of a tiny fraction — the U.S. fraction — of the wars’ victims.

But read more

In Moscow earlier this week I mentioned to a Russian friend that racists in my town in Virginia were chanting fascist and confederate slogans plus “Russia is our friend!” He replied: “But we never had slavery; we had serfdom.” He didn’t grasp why Russia was being grouped together with slavery.

Also in Moscow I met an elementary school student who said to me, “I saw a movie, and I want to ask you, in the United States are there black people and do they always read more

Vladimir Posner, who spent his youth in the United States, France, and the Soviet Union, and who cohosted a show with Phil Donahue on U.S. television for years, met with a group of visitors to Moscow from the U.S. on Monday, offering his well-informed views on a range of media-related topics.

Posner said that for years he worked on Soviet propaganda aimed at the United States. The first blow to his full belief in the rectitude of the USSR came, he said, with the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia read more

As I was heading off to visit Russia, a friend told me of a friend who knew a Russian school teacher. I asked if I could visit the school, and I brought along a couple of American friends.

Here’s a video of what we saw there.

We met first with high-school-level students who gave us a tour of the school and then asked us all kinds of smart questions, all in perfect English. These kids were clearly very well educated and very eager to learn anything they could.

We asked them questions as well. read more

Photo by Daily Progress.

While I’ve been in Russia trying to make friends, back home in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, a group of torch-bearing supporters of Robert E. Lee has held a rally generally understood as a proclamation of white supremacy. I’ve previously written at some length about this white identity group, their humanity, their legitimate grievances, and their support for Donald Trump.

They chanted: “You will not replace us!” possibly because the city of Charlottesville read more

Dmitri Babich has worked as a journalist in Russia since 1989, for newspapers, news agencies, radio, and television. He says that he used to always interview people, while lately people interview him.

According to Babich, myths about Russian media, such as that one cannot criticize the president in Russia, can be dispelled simply by visiting Russian news websites and using Google Translator. More newspapers in Russia oppose Putin than support him, Babich says.

If Russian news is propaganda, Babich read more

I’ve been in Moscow some days now and have yet to meet an oligarch (although perhaps they don’t identify themselves). I have met an entrepreneur named Andrei Davidovich. He’s started several companies since his first in 1998, including a software company, a marketing agency, a publishing company, etc. He says it takes 5 days to create a new company in Russia.

He gives U.S. friends thanks for technology, research, and knowledge. He tells the U.S. government thanks for nothing.

Davidovich read more