Reading Time: 10 minutes A Canadian embarrassment involving a Ukrainian WWII soldier given undue applause is being put to bed with a political resignation. But we need to deal with the underlying illiteracy in our war history as well.
war
Posted inEthics and Morality
How to spare billionaires from terrorist attack
Reading Time: 10 minutes This week for Humanist Book Club, we’re looking at the most infamous facet of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (2020). Yes, this near-future speculative fiction imagined quite a few ways to tackle climate change: a state-backed crypto coin to incentivize carbon sequestration, Antarctic drilling to pump meltwater out from shifting glaciers, tinting […]
Posted inWar and Peace
Can we ever truly combat climate change in a world at war?
Reading Time: 6 minutes According to The Guardian, which has not given up on its war counter since February 24, 2022, we are now over 572 days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Every day, this media outlet and many like it try to keep the world aware of the fact that, even if our terminology differs, we in […]
Posted inWar and Peace
The ethical quagmire of Jenin, for all of us
Reading Time: 6 minutes As I noted in a four-part series on Israel and the West, writing on Middle Eastern conflict is plagued by the immediate search for bias, with which to dismiss any competing intel from “the other side”. Al Jazeera will always report with certain priorities. The Times of Israel will report with others. And as situations […]
Posted inWar and Peace
After Memorial Day: Where the US struggle goes from here
Reading Time: 6 minutes It was a complicated Memorial Day weekend in the US, and not just because of the nation’s now-quotidian gun violence, or because the current debt ceiling crisis threatens an already “degraded” US military with further hits to “readiness and morale”. Just prior to the weekend’s events, which honor and mourn people who died in the […]
Posted inDeep Dive
Kissinger’s century, and US complicity
Reading Time: 8 minutes As Henry Kissinger turns 100 on Saturday, and his actions and legacy are once again reviewed, it’s important to remember that he was not a solo actor but an agent of US foreign policy and philosophy.
Posted inNews
A tale of two gun countries
Reading Time: 5 minutes Last Wednesday, a 13-year-old opened fire on students in his school, killing nine and wounding seven others, possibly following the “kill list” he’d made in advance. He will not be prosecuted due to his age, but while he undergoes psychiatric evaluation his parents were arrested, and his father, the owner of the firearms used, faces […]
Posted inWar and Peace
Wagner Group in Sudan: The paramilitarization of war continues
Reading Time: 6 minutes One bad war easily gives way to others. In recent leaks of US espionage, one name figured highly: the Wagner Group, a Russian paramilitary outfit that has been contracting work in conflict zones for the last few years, and which is a key presence in Russian operations in Ukraine. The concern in US espionage documents […]
Posted inWar and Peace
Too little, too much: This week in war crimes, leaked intel, and book bans
Reading Time: 5 minutes One key facet of humanism is the importance of being informed. How can one pursue policy that improves human agency without a clear understanding of what limits us? But in at least three ways this past week, we’ve been presented with the challenges of staying informed in as useful a manner as possible: through footage […]
Posted inWar and Peace
‘Clash of civilizations’ rhetoric in US committee hearing on China
Reading Time: 6 minutes In the wake of 9/11, the world did not go gently into the US invasion of Iraq, but messaging around the “war on terror”, which had started with Afghanistan, certainly built momentum to that end. On the weekend of February 15, 2003, anti-war protests across 600 cities saw six to ten million protesters pushing back […]