Peace and War

 

Here’s a fairly typical image of a sort that constantly clogs up my FaceBook page. I take it to be the full and open expression of someone or some group’s honest outlook. I don’t think they’d identify themselves at the bottom as “Jesus, Republicans & Other Bullshit” if they were self-censoring.

And I certainly appreciate the cursing and the criticism of religion.

Here are my concerns:

“We’ve been at war now for over 12 years.”

No, we haven’t. read more

Tom Engelhardt keeps churning out great books by collecting his posts from TomDispatch.com. His latest book, Shadow Government, is essential reading. Of the ten essays included, eight are on basically the same topic, resulting in some repetition and even some contradiction. But when things that need repeating are repeated this well, one mostly wants other people to read them — or perhaps to have them involuntarily spoken aloud by everybody’s iPhones.

We live in an age in which the most read more

It seems like we just got through dealing with the argument that war is good for us because it brings peace. And along comes a very different twist, combined with some interesting insights. Here’s a blog post by Joshua Holland on Bill Moyers’ website.

“War has long been seen as an endeavor urged on by the elites who stood the most to gain from conflict – whether to protect overseas assets, create more favorable conditions for international trade or by selling materiel for the read more

This.

The Nobel Peace Prize is required by Alfred Nobel’s will, which created it, to go to “the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” The Nobel Committee insists on awarding the prize to either a leading maker of war or a person who has done some good work in an area other than peace.

The 2014 prize has been awarded to Kailash Satyarthi read more

Dostoievski once had a character imagine what a head would think if for some seconds it were aware of having been cut off by an executioner’s guillotine, or if somehow it were aware for a full minute, or even for five minutes.

I should think such a head would think thoughts entirely dependent on the circumstances and that the type of blade that committed the murder wouldn’t affect the thoughts too greatly.

I loved you, it might think, thinking of its loved ones. I did well there, if read more

By David Swanson, originally published by Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity

Last year, public pressure played a big role in stopping US missile strikes on Syria. The biggest difference between then and now was that televisions weren’t telling people that ISIS might be coming to their neighborhood to behead them. There were other, smaller differences as well: Britain’s opposition, Russia’s opposition, and the difficulty of explaining to Americans that it now made sense to join a war on the same side as al Qaeda.

But there’s another big difference read more