Conflict

Source: Save Sinjajevina website gallery https://sinjajevina.com/en/gallery

For Love of a Mountain in Montenegro

March 1, 2023 at 1:51 pm

The whole frame of geopolitics…seeks to manage tensions and power struggles among those who rule, while the vast majority of people—as well as plants, animals, land, and water—are controlled, confined, or killed to serve those interests.—Ray Acheson, ‘Abolishing Geopolitics and Building a World Without State Violence,’ Metapolis, September 2022  Read More

The Sound of War

The Sound of War

February 1, 2023 at 12:04 pm

If the dull hum of a nuclear warhead ever mutates to a deafening and life-ending roar of a nuclear explosion, humanity will be extinguished—Tom Unterrainer, END Info 30, Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, March 2022   In 1935, retired US Marine Major General Smedley D. Butler (1880-1941), a veteran of AmericanRead More

Nuclear Warhead Bunker Under Construction San Cristobal Site 1, Cuba, October 1962 (Source:  John F Kennedy Library via Wikimedia Commons)

‘Luck is Not a Strategy’: Dodging Nuclear War

October 12, 2022 at 12:08 pm

“The world really is impossible to manage as long as we have nuclear weapons. It really is a terrible way to have to live in this world.” President John F. Kennedy to British Ambassador David Ormsby-Gore, 21 October 1962   Over 200 blood-soaked days into Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine,Read More

Anti-nuclear arms protesters display a banner during the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA) rally at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, USA, 2011 by Brian Stansberry, CC BY 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

State of the State in a Nuclear Age

September 14, 2022 at 3:04 pm

Author’s Note This month’s ‘War & Peace’ column is dedicated to the memory of Mikhail Gorbachev (1931-2022), the last leader of the Soviet Union, who grasped—as he told the United Nations in 1988—that in the nuclear age, “disarmament” is “the most important thing of all, without which no other issueRead More

Mixed Progress on Banning ‘The Big One’

Mixed Progress on Banning ‘The Big One’

August 10, 2022 at 12:21 pm

One hears the word and wants to know more, but one also wants to forget it. One has heard both too much and not enough about Hiroshima. For the city evokes our entire nuclear nightmare…  Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (1967) Return to Hiroshima on AugustRead More

FH70 Howitzer in Ukraine. (Source: General Staff Ukrainian Armed Forces via Facebook)

Give Peace No Chance?

July 13, 2022 at 11:34 am

  1 Witch. When shall we three met again In thunder, lightning, or in rain? 2 Witch. When the hurlyburly’s done, When the battle’s lost and won. Shakespeare, Macbeth   Shakespeare’s Macbeth opens in the “fog and filthy air” of an “open place,” a no-man’s-land where three witches – theRead More

Remembering the ‘Brief But Brutal’ Falklands War

Remembering the ‘Brief But Brutal’ Falklands War

May 4, 2022 at 1:04 pm

In April 1982, when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, I was a young man of 16: old enough to fight, kill, and die for a British government I was too young to vote for. Forty years on, the UK voting age is still too high (18) and the Army recruitmentRead More

Anti-war inscription ("No War") in the center of Moscow, February 2022. (Photo by Dolche far niente, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Resisting Militarism: Mission Impossible?

March 30, 2022 at 12:46 pm

I want to escape from my own threshold. Where to? The street is dark And conscience shows up ahead of me, white, Like salt scattered for pavements. Osip Mandelshtam (1891-1938)   On 23 January 2015, 49-year-old Ruslan Kotsaba – journalist and blogger, president of the Ukrainian Pacifist Society and anRead More

Akre Camp for Syrian refugees from Rojava in Akre (Aqre) town, Dohuk Governorate, Kurdistan Region of Iraq Levi Clancy, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Helping Refugees

March 16, 2022 at 11:51 am

On March 3, Canada announced new emergency measures to support Ukrainian refugees. We have opened a special pathway for Ukrainians which waives all fees and normal visa requirements, we have established a special family reunification and sponsorship pathway for extended family members of Canadian citizens and permanent residents, we areRead More

Protester in Times Square, 26 Feb 2022 following the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Photo by Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Macho Posturing on the Edge of the Abyss

March 2, 2022 at 10:51 am

The work, my friends, is peace, more than an end of this war – an end to the beginning of all wars, yes, an end, forever, to this impractical, unrealistic settlement of the differences between governments by the mass killing of peoples — Draft of undelivered Jefferson Day speech byRead More