Global

Can Israel be pressured? Or is Tel Aviv the only exception to the global political order in which every country, big or small, is subjected to pressures and subsequent change in attitude and behavior? 

he “Peaceful Atom” has transformed Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine into a nuclear war.

Like all nukes anywhere, Ukraine’s 15 operating atomic reactors are pre-deployed weapons of radioactive mass destruction. As a global threat to the future of human life on this planet, they have escalated this crisis to a danger level that parallels the apocalyptic US/USSR madness of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.

As Putin’s troops penetrate the Ukrainian countryside, even a relatively minuscule attack on any of those power plants could blow out radiation far in excess of a nuclear weapon attack. They could (again) blanket Ukraine, Belarus and much of Europe with lethal radioactive fallout arriving in the United States within ten days. Their downwind death toll could dwarf Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Fittingly, the Russian assault quickly focussed on Chernobyl, whose April 26,1986 Unit 4 explosion blew out apocalyptic clouds that have since killed more than a million people worldwide.

Hollywood is popularly perceived as a realm of romance and glamor. But over the decades the entertainment industry has also been the site of intense labor organizing and struggles between craft and trade employees against management and owners, in the form of studio executives, producers and movie moguls. In this article we take a look back at a teachable moment for organized labor: The 2007-2008 strike that rocked Tinseltown and how the workers organized to win one of the rare union triumphs during the Bush era.

War is fairly well known for killing, injuring, traumatizing, destroying, and rendering homeless. It's somewhat well known for diverting massive resources from urgent needs, preventing global cooperation on pressing emergencies, damaging the environment, eroding civil liberties, justifying government secrecy, corroding culture, fueling bigotry, weakening the rule of law, and risking nuclear apocalypse. In a few corners it's known for being counterproductive on its own terms, endangering those it claims to protect.

I sometimes think we fail to properly appreciate another ill effect of war, namely what it does to people's ability to think straight. For example, here are some opinions I've heard in recent days:

Russia cannot be at fault because NATO started it.

NATO cannot be at fault because Russia has an awful government.

To suggest that more than one entity could be blameworthy on the same planet requires claiming that they are each exactly equally at fault.

Nonviolent noncooperation with invasions and occupations has proven itself very powerful but people shouldn't actually try it.

Podcast here: https://kpfa.org/episode/flashpoints-february-23-2022
With Special Guests: Linda Pentz Gunter, Joseph Mangano, Myla Reson
Also see Harvey's Article: Nuke Power at the Brink of Bankruptcy, War, Apocalypse

When Nelson Mandela was freed from his Robben Island prison on February 11, 1991, my family, friends and neighbors followed the event with keen interest as they gathered in the living room of my old home in the Nuseirat Refugee Camp in the Gaza Strip. 

Only threat, pain and inflicted hell preserve peace, right?

Get the bad guy! Russia: bad. If it invades Ukraine, such a “voluntary war of aggression,” according to David Leonhardt of the New York Times, “would be a sign that Putin believed that Pax Americana was over and that the U.S., the European Union and their allies had become too weak to exact painful consequences.”

One can frequently disagree with government policies without necessarily regarding them with disgust, but the Joe Biden Administration has turned that corner, first with its senseless promotion of a new Cold War that could turn hot with Russia and, more recently, with its actions undertaken to undermine and punish Afghanistan. The fact that the White House wraps itself in the sanctimonious, self-righteous twaddle that is so much the hallmark of the political left is bad enough, but when the government goes out of its way to harm and even kill people around the world in pursuit of an elusive global dominance it is time for the American people to rise up and say “Stop!”

Fifty-nine years ago, Bob Dylan recorded “With God on Our Side.” You probably haven’t heard it on the radio for a very long time, if ever, but right now you could listen to it as his most evergreen of topical songs:

I've learned to hate the Russians
All through my whole life
If another war comes
It's them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side

In recent days, media coverage of a possible summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin has taken on almost wistful qualities, as though the horsemen of the apocalypse are already out of the barn.

Fatalism is easy for the laptop warriors and blow-dried studio pundits who keep insisting on the need to get tough with “the Russians,” by which they mean the Russian government. Actual people who suffer and die in war easily become faraway abstractions. “And you never ask questions / When God’s on your side.”