Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In truth, the situation couldn’t be simpler: we need to abolish nuclear weapons before they abolish us. Hopefully, Oppenheimer will help prepare the ground for progress in that all too essential undertaking, beginning with a frank discussion of what’s now at stake.
Williams was the dean of what came to be known as the revisionist school of U.S. history that penetrated the myth of American exceptionalism with the facts of history, that the U.S. was an empire from its colonial roots, and behaved much as any other empire.
The debt ceiling is proof that war is not working. We cannot afford it. We have the capacity for complex problem solving, lets finally prove it.
You work for peace because “it’s a moral responsibility to oppose the war machine. And as long as there’s a chance and you’re working at what has the best chance of succeeding, you have to do it.”
It’s as simple — and as bedeviling — as that. In other words, we have to give peace a chance.
Overspending on the military will only dig humanity deeper into a hole that will be ever more difficult to get out of in the relatively short time available to us.
Could the perseverance and courage of people like Paracha, Abd el-Fattah, and the activists for climate justice and human rights — both those who attended the conference at Sharm el Sheik and countless others around the world — make it possible someday to drop the “Yet” and say simply, “We Have Not Been Defeated”?
Militarised adaptation to climate breakdown is akin, as US journalist Christian Parenti argues, to the politics of the ‘armed lifeboat’ that seeks to secure the wealth of the few while training guns on everyone else.
My experience with the Pentagon Papers showed that an act of truth-telling, of exposing the realities about which the public had been misled, can indeed help end an unnecessary, deadly conflict. This example is a lesson applicable to both the nuclear and climate crises we face.
