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

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

“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

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

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

  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

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

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

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

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