One thing is certain – the longer Moscow’s aggression continues, the greater the chance of an atomic nightmare that nobody intended

There’s another risk – that of a battlefield commander deciding on his own to use nuclear weapons. As the late Daniel Ellsberg pointed out, it’s not just presidents or other national leaders who could start a nuclear holocaust; in some situations, lower ranking officers could order a first strike. And there is always the possibility of misunderstandings, errors, and other situations which could accidentally trigger a nuclear war that nobody intended.

Humanity has faced such dangers too many times already, and each time we just barely avoided catastrophe.

For instance, in 1983, at the height of Ronald Reagan’s “new cold war”, one person saved all humanity from a nuclear holocaust.

The threat occured on September 26, when the Soviet nuclear early-warning system reported that five or more missiles had been launched from the United States towards the USSR.

The BBC notes, “The protocol for the Soviet military would have been to retaliate with a nuclear attack of its own. But duty officer Stanislav Petrov – whose job it was to register apparent enemy missile launches” – decided that the alarm was probably false and that he would disobey orders and not report the alarm to his superior officers.

This was not only a breach of orders, it was also a dereliction of duty. The safe thing for Petrov would have been to pass the responsibility on to higher authority.

But instead of doing the safe thing, Petrov did the right thing – and disobeyed his orders.

Had Petrov reported incoming American missiles, his superiors would almost certainly have launched an all-out missile attack against the United States, which would have precipitated a nuclear response from the United States.

Petrov, however, reasoned that the system’s warning was a false alarm. For one thing, why would the United States initiate a nuclear war with an attack of just five missiles?

Petrov knew that the Soviet launch detection system was new and not completely reliable. So even though he was not absolutely sure that the alarm was erroneous, Petrov made the brave decision to ignore his orders.

There have been too many other close calls.

Perhaps the most famous one took place during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. The CIA had tried to overthrow the Castro government in 1961 when it invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs. The invasion was defeated, but Cuban leader Fidel Castro wanted to prevent a larger invasion, so he invited the Soviet Union to place medium range nuclear missiles in Cuba as a deterrent.

The Soviets were far behind the United States in long-range nuclear weapons, so they saw the invitation as a way to lessen Washington’s advantage. It would also even out the advantage the US enjoyed from having nukes positioned in Turkey near the USSR.

Ultimately, it was the determination and diplomacy of U.S. President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khrushchev which was critical in preventing a nuclear war. They made a mutually face-saving deal that allowed both sides to back down while also claiming victory: Russia got a guarantee that the U.S. would not invade Cuba again, and Washington got the Soviet missiles removed from Cuba.

In the midst of the crisis, however, there were several unexpected events which could have turned into an apocalypse. In one case, a Soviet submarine came under attack from U.S. destroyers and two of the three ranking officers wanted to respond with a nuclear-armed torpedo. But the third officer, Vasili Arkhipov, vetoed that option – saving humanity from disaster.

Now, however, rhetoric is once again ratcheting-up between Russia and the US, along with concerns that global nuclear treaties are unraveling, while Russia, the US, and China are renewing their nuclear arsenals.

Image by Cristian Ibarra from Pixabay

The illegal Russian attack on Ukraine is the most likely flash point where a nuclear war could begin.

And as the late former Defense Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg explained, it’s not just presidents or other national leaders who could start a nuclear holocaust.

The danger is even greater now than in 1962, as there are more nuclear powers (France, Britain, Israel, Pakistan, China, India, N. Korea), and today’s nuclear weapons are many times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima.

In January, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock ahead to just 90 seconds to midnight – “a time of unprecedented danger” and the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.

And a new report just released by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a Washington-based nonprofit, finds that nuclear dangers have increased since 2012, especially, “amid spiraling geopolitical tension over conflict near nuclear sites in Ukraine and stalling efforts at nonproliferation and international regulation.”

And in addition to the horrors that are currently being inflicted on the Ukrainian people, many others are suffering as well, from the young Russian “cannon-fodder” being sent to fight an illegal war, to the millions of poor people, especially in Africa, who find it even more difficult to afford food due to Russia again blocking shipments of grain through the Black Sea.

For these reasons and more, the first step to reducing the suffering and the threat of escalation should be an agreement that no nation will employ any kind of nuclear weapon, and and a move to open diplomatic channels to avoid doomsday.

Concerted diplomacy could begin finding ways for Putin to save face even in the ashes of defeat. As Timothy Snyder explained in the N.Y. Times: “Since the Kremlin claims that it is fighting NATO, all Mr. Putin has to say is that Russia stopped NATO from crossing into Russia.”

The ultimate solution to the nuclear threat, as former Soviet leader – and Nobel Peace Prize-winner – Mikhail Gorbachev wrote, would be: “A world without nuclear weapons: There can be no other final goal.”

When will we actually have a “world without nuclear weapons”? President Eisenhower had the answer: “I like to believe that people, in the long run, are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”

We must follow the inspiration of Daniel Ellsberg by “speaking truth to power”, and by creating a global peace movement that will have the vision and strength to demand that governments “get out of the way” and finally rid the world of nuclear weapons – before our luck runs out.

In September 2018, former United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon said: “It is hard to imagine anything more devastating for humanity than all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States. Yet this might have occurred by accident on September 26, 1983, were it not for the wise decisions of Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov. For this, he deserves humanity’s profound gratitude. Let us resolve to work together to realize a world free from fear of nuclear weapons, remembering the courageous judgement of Stanislav Petrov.”

   Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers first because, “Vietnam is where the bombs are falling.” It took him more than four decades to gather all the documents to write this frankly terrifying look at the growing threat of nuclear omnicide.

   In brief, Ellsberg shows that the deliberate targeting of civilians in mass bombing campaigns – a central element in U.S. nuclear war plans – actually began during the Second World War, when the governments of Britain and the United States adopted the same tactic as initially used by fascist Germany and Japan. For instance, around 25,000 innocent people were burned to death in the horrific fire-bombing of Dresden. It was ever worse in Tokyo, where people, “became blazing torches unable to move in the melting asphalt.” Approximately one-hundred thousand people perished in that firestorm. And these were non-nuclear attacks.

   Contrary to the U.S. government position, there was no military justification for using nuclear weapons on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, as Generals Dwight Eisenhower and Douglas MacArthur confirmed – the Japanese government was already trying to surrender. About 185,000 people died in those unnecessary bombings. (One of the true motives for using nuclear weapons on Japanese civilians was to let the Soviets know who was the lone superpower in the post-war world).

   Ellsberg shows how the current nuclear war-fighting plans of the U.S. and Russia also target cities, with casualties expected to be literally in the billions, all around the world. Any survivors of the nuclear bombing would probably envy the dead, as they would have to not only cope with the trauma of their devastating experiences, but also with the effects of the smoke that would rise into the atmosphere, “forming a blanket blocking most sunlight around the earth for a decade or more.” This “nuclear winter”, according to Ellsberg, “would reduce sunlight and lower temperatures worldwide to a point that would eliminate all harvests and starve to death” nearly everybody who survived the nuclear war itself.

   He also explains that it’s not just presidents or other national leaders who could start a nuclear holocaust; lower ranking officers could order a first strike (as General Jack D. Ripper did in the powerful film, Dr. Strangelove), but there is always the possibility of misunderstandings, errors, and other situations which could accidentally trigger a nuclear war that nobody intended. We have come too close to such a catastrophe many times over the years.

   During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, for example, the determination and diplomacy of U.S. President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khrushchev was critical in preventing a nuclear war – but just barely. In spite of their intentions, there were several unexpected events which could have turned into an apocalypse. In one case, a Soviet submarine came under attack from U.S. destroyers and two of the three ranking officers wanted to respond with a nuclear-armed torpedo.  But as Ellsberg reports, the third officer, Vasili Arkhipov, vetoed that option – saving humanity from disaster.

   The danger is even greater now, as there are more nuclear powers (France, Britain, Israel, Pakistan, China, India, N. Korea), and today’s nuclear weapons are many times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima.

   And the potential for unintended escalations in places like Ukraine, Iran, and Korea only increase the chances of a nuclear confrontation that nobody intends.

   Part of the problem is that most people have no idea how dangerous a situation we are now facing, and some entertain the dangerous idea that it is possible to emerge victorious after a nuclear holocaust. Actually, this question was answered in the TV sitcom, “Happy Days”, when the Cunningham family was trying to decide if they should build a bomb shelter in their backyard. When his father said that nuclear weapons were needed for the U.S. to win a nuclear war, his son Ritchie (Ron Howard) sagely replied, “Does anybody win a nuclear war?”

   Another cause of the arms race, of course, is the power of what President Eisenhower rightly called, “the military-industrial complex” which profits to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars every year, and is not shy to make contributions to its allies in both political parties.

   It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the nuclear arms build-up that was started by President Obama was continued by Trump and is continuing under President Biden – a plan to modernize the three legs of the nuclear triad – submarines, bombers and land-based missiles – at a cost of over $1 trillion.

   Michael T. Klare, professor of peace studies, wrote, “the US military has…committed itself and the nation to a three-front geopolitical struggle…in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East…What appears particularly worrisome about this three-front strategy is its immense capacity for confrontation, miscalculation, escalation, and finally actual war…”

   In January, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock ahead to just 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.

   And now, with the criminal Russain invasion of Ukraine, the danger of some sort of nuclear catastrophe is greater than it was in the Cold War.

   The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) was awarded the 2017 Nobel peace prize for the organisation’s efforts to abolish nuclear weapons globally. Its founder, Tilman Ruff, says America’s aggressive new nuclear policy is “a blueprint for nuclear war”.

   ICAN sponsored a prohibition treaty which was adopted by the United Nations general assembly last July, when two-thirds of the world’s countries – 122 nations – voted in favour of the treaty outlawing nuclear weapons. The treaty will come into force when 50 countries have ratified it.

   None of the nuclear states, including the US, signed on.

   Humanity is now at its most dangerous moment in history.

   We do, however, have alternatives.

   For starters, Ellsberg made a very convincing case for a drastic reduction in the numbers of nuclear weapons, which would significantly reduce the risks of an apocalypse.

   The good news? The 70,000 nuclear weapons that were in existence thirty years ago have been reduced to “only” around 15,000 – so progress is possible.

   To go further, we must heed the advice of Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, William Perry and George Shultz. “In 2007, these four leading Cold Warriors, who served at the highest levels of government under Republican and Democratic presidents, endorsed the goal of ‘a world free of nuclear weapons’ and outlined an agenda to achieve that goal.”

   Fifty-five years after the death of Martin Luther King, we should remember that he was not only fighting for civil rights, but that he understood the connections between the “triple evils of racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. The great problem and the great challenge facing mankind today is to get rid of war …”

   Over $2 trillion goes to world military spending every year, and the illegal invasion of Iraq alone will cost the U.S. around $5 trillion. When we finally put an end to militarism, think of all the good that we could do when the money and resources that now go to war is invested in such common goods as eliminating poverty, cutting taxes, funding health care, and creating millions of jobs in renewable energy, reforestation, and other “green” projects.

   We must also create situations that bring out the best, not the worst, in us. One of the important insights in The Doomsday Machine is that the people Ellsberg knew who planned for nuclear war were, in his words, “not evil…They were normal Americans, capable and patriotic.”

   The ultimate solution, as former Soviet leader – and Nobel Peace Prize winner – Mikhail Gorbachev wrote: “A world without nuclear weapons: There can be no other final goal.”

   When will we actually have a “world without nuclear weapons”? Again, President Eisenhower had the answer: “I like to believe that people, in the long run, are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”

   We should follow the inspiration of Daniel Ellsberg by “speaking truth to power” and creating a global peace movement that will have the vision and strength to demand that governments “get out of the way” and finally rid the world of nuclear weapons – before our luck runs out.

Tribalism is also growing within the United States of course,: racism, homophobia, blue states versus red states, neo-nazis declaring, “Jews will not replace us!”, and simmering anger — dramatically illustrated by the January 6 attempt to violently overthrow the government in order to keep a demagogue in power.

There are increasing threats to elected officials, vote counters, and other public servants.

And in the first 150 days of 2023, “…there have been 263 mass shootings — incidents with 4 or more people shot — reported in the U.S., with 327 victims killed. Both those figures are the highest ever recorded this early in a year.” []

Of course, there are a host of factors that contribute to these dangerous trends, from inequality and “lives of despair” to toxic “masculinity”, internet silos, and Fox “News”, along with those politicians and their backers who employ the old tactic of “divide and conquer”.

At a rally in Charleston, South Carolina on Saturday, Senator Bernie Sanders explained that the ruling elite and monied oligarchy win, “when they divide the working class and those living in poverty.”

“In every way that you can think,” said Sanders, “there are really smart people—out there polling today—saying: How do I get you to vote against your own self-interest? How do I get black and white and Latino and Native American, Asian American, gay, and straight against each other so that the big-money interest laugh all the way to the bank.”

“So what our movement is about, is precisely the opposite of what the big-money interests want,” he continued. “They want to divide us up and we are determined to bring working people together—black and white and Latino—all of us together around an agenda that works for us not just the billionaire class!”

A related issue is “identity politics” – the tendency of people to identify primarily with “their kind” – whichever group that is – rather than humanity as a whole. (And no group is more focused on their racist “identity” than the Ku Klux Klan).

In fact, the whole idea that humanity is divided into “races” is a relic of European colonialism (as I explained in this essay).

This us-versus-them dichotomy is extremely flexible, however, depending on the circumstances. It is the norm, for instance, to see strangers work together cooperatively when they face a common threat, such as after a hurricane or an earthquake.

The challenge is to be aware of our tendency to “otherize” people and to resist this natural, but unhealthy, tendency.

One very powerful example of the triumph of humanity over identity is the story of the American heroes who literally put themselves in the line of fire to end the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson was 25 years old when he was piloting a helicopter along with two crewmates: Glenn Andreotta, 20 years old, and Lawrence Coburn, who was just 18. On March 16, 1968, they were on patrol when they noticed a number of wounded and dead civilians all over the area. They stopped several times to attend to the victims, and a short while later, they saw other Vietnamese being chased by a U.S. Army patrol. That’s when Thompson chose humanity over tribalism and did the courageous thing – he told his crew to land the helicopter between their fellow U.S. Army troops and the Vietnamese civilians. Thompson got out of the copter and ordered the soldiers of Charlie Company to stop the massacre – or else.

His men backed him up, and the killing stopped.

Thompson then radioed two nearby pilots to come to his aid, and around a dozen Vietnamese civilians were taken out of harm’s way.

It is estimated that up to 500 Vietnamese had been killed during this massacre – and almost all were women, children, and the elderly.

The bravery of Thompson and his crew saved hundreds, perhaps even thousands of Vietnamese lives.

As usual, the U.S. military tried to cover up the story, as they did with dozens of similar atrocities in Indochina. However, in 1969, U.S. freelance journalist Seymour Hersh’s investigation discovered the truth about the My Lai massacre. (In 1970 Hersh was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting).

In 1998, thirty years after their heroic actions, Thompson, Andreotta, and Coburn were finally awarded the Soldier’s Medal.

Along with their bravery, these heroes have provided a powerful example of how important it is to take to heart the words of Betrand Russell and Albert Einstein, who wrote in 1955 that it imperative to: “Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.”

And when we do remember our own humanity, we also remember the humanity of other people.

Given today’s problems, from wars to the climate crises to hunger to growing nationalism to epidemics and nuclear weapons, the only hope we have is that enough of us will take those words to heart and stand for the right thing against tribalism and conspiracy theories.

In fact, launching a war of aggression is the most serious crime under international law. As the Nuremberg tribunal stated in the aftermath of the Second World War:

“To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

The International Criminal Court, which was created over two decades ago to investigate war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity, established a treaty known as the Rome Statute.

And yes, the International Criminal Court was right to issue an arrest warrant for Putin’s actions, specifically for the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children from occupied areas of Ukraine to Russia.

Not surprisingly, there was a bipartisan push in Congress to hold Putin to account for his horrific actions.

And yet – the hypocrisy of the U.S. and its allies is astounding.

It’s not just that Washington (like Moscow) has never officially joined the ICC or recognized its right to hold their leaders accountable.

The most glaring element of U.S. hypocrisy is that its leaders have been guilty of dozens and dozens of more brutal war crimes, beginning with the genocidal treatment of the Native peoples of this continent, extending to the Monroe doctrine and its invasions of countries such as Cuba, the Philippines, and Mexico. (President Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 ‘corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine asserted the U.S. government’s right to invade any country in the Western Hemisphere).

However, this short essay will just deal with some of the worst war crimes that Washington has committed since the Second World War.

In 1953, the United States and its ally, Great Britain, staged a coup against the democratically-elected and non-sectarian government of Iran, primarily to prevent the Iranian people from gaining control of their own oil fields. Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, was a beloved figure in Iran. During his tenure, he introduced a range of social and economic policies, the most significant being the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry. The U.S. and Britain then staged a coup and installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah, whose brutal dictatorship was overthrown in 1979 by the fundamentalist religious forces of the Ayatollah Khomeini – and which is still in power today.

(In 2013, the CIA publicly admitted for the first time its involvement in the 1953 coup).

In 1954, the CIA destroyed the democratic government of Guatemala, whose President, Jacobo Árbenz, had the audacity to declare that the U.S.-based United Fruit Company should give some land back to the poor peasants of his country. A vicious dictatorship was then installed. (By a strange “coincidence”, U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, CIA director Allen Dulles, had close ties to the United Fruit Company).

Overall, the U.S. intervened militarily in Latin America dozens of times in the 1950s and beyond, such as the military coups in Brazil and Chile, invading Panama and Grenada (and the Bay of Pigs in Cuba) and perhaps most dramatically in Central America, especially in the 1980s. They backed the death squads in Honduras and El Salvador and launched a full-scale guerrilla war against the democratic Sandinista government of Nicaragua, which escalated dramatically under Ronald Reagan.

As detailed by David Vine in, The United States of War, the CIA-run “contras” killed 40-50,000 Nicaraguans.” Moreover, according to former Foreign Service officer Todd Greentree, the Contras were, “‘brigands and brutes who raped women, executed prisoners, and enjoyed murdering civilians.'”

The toll was: “75,000 dead in El Salvador, and 200,000 dead in Guatemala, in what’s widely considered a genocide. The majority in each case were civilians and poor peasants…”

Overall, “between just 1946 and 2000, the CIA intervened in an estimated eighty-one national elections…” around the world.

The U.S. supported government repression in Indonesia in the mid-1960s that resulted in the deaths of between 800,000 to a million civilians.

And then there was the genocidal U.S. attack on Vietnam (as well as Cambodia and Laos)

When the French colonialists were defeated in Vietnam in 1954, the Geneva Treaty called for national elections in 1956. Washington sabotaged it because, as President Eisenhower admitted, the nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh would win 80% of the vote. So “Ike” created a puppet dictatorship in the southern part of Vietnam and installed its leader. When Vietnamese resistance came close to victory in the early 1960s, Washington increased its military presence.

It seems that John F. Kennedy had decided in 1963 to start withdrawing troops, but he did not live to carry out his plan.

In 1964, then President Lyndon Johnson orchestrated a phony “attack” supposedly carried out by the North Vietnamese against U.S. warships. This “Gulf of Tonkin” lie led the U.S. Congress to give Johnson a blank check to escalate the killing and extend the bombing to North Vietnam.

The war crimes committed by the United States in Indochina ranged from horrific massacres, such as at My Lai, to carpet bombing and the use of napalm, a chemical which sticks to a person’s skin while it burns.

The United States dropped more bombs on Indochina that in all of World War Two.

As I noted elsewhere,

“Although the United States lost the military conflict, more than three million Indochinese were killed, with more than 58,000 Americans dead or missing. By the standards established by the United States and its allies after the Second World War at Nuremburg and in the UN Charter, Mr. Johnson and his advisers would be considered war criminals.”

Johnson, his sucessor Richard Nixon, and Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger are all war criminals.

In the 1980s, Washington was a strong ally of the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, providing billions in aid and supporting him in the war with Iran, even after Hussain used poison gas against his Kurdish citizens. However, that relationship deteriorated, and after the United States attacked Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait, President George H. W. Bush declared the end of the so-called “Vietnam syndrome” – the reluctance of the U.S. public to support large-scale wars.

The brutal sanctions that Bush and President Clinton imposed on Iraq brought incredible suffering to the people of that country. In one of the most shocking moments during a 60 Minutes interview in 1996, journalist Lesley Stahl discussed with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright how much the Iraqi people had been suffering from the sanctions placed on the country following 1991’s Gulf War. “We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,” Stahl said. “And, you know, is the price worth it?” “I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright answered, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

While the figure was later found by public health specialists to be exaggerated, child mortality in Iraq, before and after the 2003 U.S. invasion, has been twice that of neighboring countries.

Finally, there is the all-out U.S. attack on Iraq and Afghanistan that began 20 years ago.

“Removing Saddam Hussein from power had been a long-term goal for many in the Bush/Cheney administration…Shortly before the 2000 presidential election, a prominent group of neoconservatives, organized as the Project for a New American Century, articulated this goal…of ensuring complete U.S. geopolitical-economic domination…” [David Vine. The United States of War, p. 272.] The terrorist attacks of 9/11 gave these warmongers an excuse to launch what Bush called a “crusade” in the Middle East, which as Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve acknowledged was: “…largely about oil”.

As I have noted,

“As everyone now knows, the Bush administration made two serious allegations as their excuse to begin what UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan…called an “illegal” war: that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and that ties existed between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.”

“Both were lies.”

“This act of ‘preventive’ war was a violation of international law, and George Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and others in that circle may also be considered war criminals.”

Iraq War. Photo by Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

And, I would add, so should Colin Powell, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and a host of lesser bureaucrats who knew better, but who chose to support an invasion that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, and perhaps two hundred thousand Afghans, and has contributed so much to the violence and misery in the Middle East today, including millions of desperate refugees.

Needless to say, none of these criminals have ever faced justice.

So yes, do call out Putin for the war criminal that he is, but his crimes pale in comparison to those of so many of the people in power in Washington.

Almost all of those scarcities are artificial.

There are, of course, real, pressing problems. Before we can imagine solutions to them, though, we must have them in our consciousness, something that neither the insular American education system nor the infotainment that passes as “news” on television encourage us to do. The frantic search for profit above all other values holding us back.

I am not the first, of course, to notice this impediment. Albert Einstein himself wrote, “This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career.”

As for the pressing challenges, here are some of those items not featured at the top of the hour on most news programs:

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates, “half of Afghanistan’s population experiences acute hunger. Some 3.5 million people are displaced due to conflict…The health care system is collapsing, fundamental rights of women and girls are under threat, farmers and herders are struggling amidst the climate crisis, and the economy is in free fall.”

“Afghanistan’s needs amount to over US $8 billion in funding this year.”

How many of our news programs or our high school social studies classes inform us that the U.S. sanctions on the Taliban spill over onto the civilian population, exacerbating this dire situation?

Then there’s the less dramatic suffering that the mass media rarely cover, such as the tens of thousands of refugees in Central America, Africa and the Middle East.In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, conflict has driven almost five million people from their homes and another million have become refugees abroad. “At the same time, almost a third of the country’s 90 million people are going hungry…”

Overall, the World Health Organization reports that, “As many as 828 million people were affected by hunger in 2021 – 46 million people more from a year earlier and 150 million more from 2019.”

One result of poverty is child mortality. UNICEF reported that, “On average, 14,000 children died before age 5 every day in 2019”. EVERY day.

And then there’s the ongoing suffering in Yemen caused primarily by Saudi Arabia’s military intervention. The UNHCR remarks, “After more than six years of conflict, Yemen remains the world’s largest humanitarian crisis and millions of displaced Yemenis are only a step away from famine.”

According to the UNHCR: “Ongoing conflict has displaced four million Yemenis, devastated the country and fractured its health services and food supplies, leaving 66 per cent of the population dependent on humanitarian aid.

“Civilians bear the brunt of the crisis, with more than 20 million Yemenis now in need of humanitarian assistance.”

A vital key to understanding these problems – and finding solutions – is to ask, “Who profits?”

Regarding Yemen, the Brookings Institute reported that, “Saudi Arabia has spent a fortune buying arms from America and Britain to prosecute a war that has killed almost a quarter of a million people — the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe in our lifetime.” Three American administrations have enabled the war. “A total of 73% of Saudi Arabia’s arms imports came from the U.S., and 13% from the U.K.”

Not surprisingly, what President Eisenhower called the, “Military-Industrial Complex” is getting richer thanks to this conflict. Brookings writes, “In the five years before the war, U.S. arms transfers to Saudi Arabia amounted to $3 billion; between 2015 and 2020, the U.S. agreed to sell over $64.1 billion worth of weapons to Riyadh, averaging $10.7 billion per year.”

Sales of U.S. military equipment to foreign governments amounted to $138 billion in the 2021 fiscal year. Sales included $3.5 billion worth of AH-64E Apache attack helicopters to Australia and $3.4 billion worth of CH-53K helicopters to Israel. (Sales of U.S. military equipment in the prior fiscal year were even higher at $175 billion. Reuters)

The United States has the highest military budget in the world – $801 billion in 2021. That constituted 38 percent of the total military spending worldwide that year, which amounted to 2.1 trillion U.S. dollars.”

According to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, U.S. military spending is…more than that of the next nine countries combined, .e.g. China, India, U.K. Russia, etc.

Statistica noted as of August 5, 2021, “The United States had a market share of 39 percent in international arms exports between 2017 and 2021.”

“American support for Saudi Arabia — which includes providing 70 percent of its weapons and technical support that its air force relies on to conduct its bombing campaign against Yemen…”

“…most of the sales also involve just four companies: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon and General Dynamics. The four were involved in 58% all the major offers made since the Biden administration took office.”

…

“The concentrated lobbying power of these companies — including a “revolving door” from the Pentagon’s arms sales agency and the leveraging of weapons export-related jobs into political influence — has been brought to bear in efforts to expand U.S. weapons exports to as many foreign clients as possible, often by helping to exaggerate threats.”

The Quincy Institute observes that, “Shortly after the president’s visit, on August 2, 2022, the Pentagon announced offers of missile defense systems to Saudi Arabia and the UAE worth over $5 billion…”

William D. Hartung writes, “the risks of arms sales in fueling conflicts, enabling human rights abuses, and drawing the United States into conflicts that don’t promote its national interests are too often discounted in favor of their alleged benefits.”

The U.S. Department of Defense is the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world and a key contributor to climate change. “The US military is one of the largest climate polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more CO2e (carbon-dioxide equivalent) than most countries.”

Science Daily says that the “U.S. military consumes more hydrocarbons than most countries — massive hidden impact on climate.”

The purpose of listing these examples of human misery is not just to remind us of their existence. It’s to raise the question of why we allow such atrocities to continue. In other words:

If you and the people you care about were the victims of these crimes and atrocities, would you accept that the rich countries were not only failing to provide the needed assistance, but in many cases, actually profiting from some of these crises?

If we educate ourselves about our world, which is easier to do than ever, we can mount pressure on our governments, which have the power and wealth to address all of these crimes – without making life harder on their own citizens. Moving promptly to green energy, for instance, would actually save trillions in energy bills. Helping developing countries would be much cheaper than fighting wars with them. The answers are not rocket science: tax the billionaires, cut wasteful spending, shut down tax havens, stop selling weapons to human rights abusers, target aid to those who really need it – there are many options.

When we hear how people around the world are already feeling the impact of the growing climate crisis, we need to remember that it is actually a glimpse of our own present and future: forest fires, droughts, disease, floods, migrations, food shortages, and so on.

As Noam Chomsky wrote, while we cannot be certain that we will be successful in addressing these threats, we can be certain of disaster if we don’t try.

The latest polling shows that 72% of Americans believe that democracy is in serious danger. Even more strikingly, 43% said civil war was at least somewhat likely in the next 10 years.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor and currently professor of public policy at the University of California, has warned us about the threat coming, “from an increasingly authoritarian-fascist Republican party”.

Nevertheless, there is still a lot that we can do to reverse this alarming trend before it is too late. And the most effective way to do so is fairly obvious: make life better for everybody.

The United States has faced many serious problems before, and we have been able to resolve them non-violently (mostly) for the past 150 years. The difference now has a lot to do with the increasing stress and anxiety that most people are feeling in their daily lives.

These conditions are central to understanding the growing anger that we see everywhere, including, of course, in politics.

Perhaps the most striking example of this phenomenon is what have been termed, “deaths of despair”.

The American Council on Science and Health defines them as deaths due to suicide, overdoses, and alcoholic liver diseases, with contributions from the cardiovascular effects of rising obesity.

These deaths disproportionately impact Caucasian males without a college degree.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, there was a large increase in drug overdose deaths alone from April 2020 to April 2021. “The center estimates 100,306 drug overdose deaths in the U.S. over that time, a 29% rise from 78,056 overdose deaths over the same period one year prior.” (That toll is twice as many as the number of Americans who died during the U.S. war in Vietnam).

Anger, despair, and toxic “masculinity” is another major factor. As the Washington Post reported:

“Males are overwhelmingly responsible for violence in the United States, according to the most recent crime data published by the FBI. They committed about 80 percent of all reported violent crimes in the country in 2020, including 87 percent of homicides…Men themselves are often the targets, making up nearly 80 percent of people murdered in the country and also nearly 80 percent of suicides.”

Adding to the crisis is the fact that the United States has a much less comprehensive safety net than other rich countries, such as Canada, Denmark, and Japan. Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky notes, “the only other place that has come close with a similar phenomenon was Russia after the collapse of the USSR, both in terms of decreased life expectancy (mostly men) and its causes.”

(In fact, in 1993, I had the chance to ask Mikhail Gorbachev what he thought about the potential rise in Russian nationalism after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. He replied that, as long as living conditions improved, it would probably not be a major problem. Then the oligarchs took over and life did get worse for most Russians).

The classic examination of this crisis of inequality is, “Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism”, by Anne Case and Angus Deaton.

Their main point is that, “the deaths of despair among whites would not have happened, or would not have been so severe, without the destruction of the white working class…”

Not surprisingly, the decline in wages, along with the growth of economic inequality, has slowly undermined all aspects of the lives of working people. In particular, the “increase of deaths of despair were almost all among those without a bachelor’s degree.”

In their middle years, the risk of severe mental illness among whites with a bachelor’s degree, “is only a quarter of that faced by those without a bachelor’s degree.” Part of the problem is that the less educated are often underpaid and disrespected, “and may feel that the system is rigged against them.”

And even though black mortality rates remain above those for whites, in the past three decades, the gap in death rates between blacks and whites with less than a bachelor’s degree fell markedly.

Also, we must not forget the role that the pharmaceutical companies played in this horror, as they literally made hundreds of billions of dollars in profits from pushing OxyContin and other opioid painkillers.

The outcome of the 2016 election, the January 6 attack on democracy, and the increasing threats of violence are, according to Case and Deaton, “a gesture of frustration and rage that” made “things worse, not better. Working-class whites do not believe that democracy can help them…”

So, how do we improve people’s lives while reducing anger and the threats of violence? It’s not easy, but it’s not rocket science either.

Improve wages and working conditions for everybody, reduce economic inequality, and provide more comprehensive and affordable services like parental leave, medical care and social services.

Making college education affordable is another crucial step.

Of course, there are many other areas where the United States can make improvements, but whatever the choices, in the words of John Fogerty: “The time is now!”

When I was teaching Political Science, some of the most memorable events were the teleconferences that Noam Chomsky did with my students.

During a discussion of international trade treaties, Noam singled out the work of Maude Barlow, then Chairperson of the Council of Canadians, as being instrumental in defeating the proposed international “corporate bill of rights” known as the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI).

That victory was just one of a lifetime of Barlow’s achievements, starting with her work for women’s rights in the early 1980s, including as advisor on women’s issues to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (father of the current Prime Minister, Justin).

In 1985, Barlow, along with progressive thinkers such as Margaret Atwood, founded the Council of Canadians. The CoC focuses on issues such as promoting democracy and equality within Canada, as well as Canada’s role in international affairs.

She wrote her first book on the Canada–U.S. trade deal in 1990.

After more than two decades of tireless work, Barlow was awarded the Right Livelihood Award (the “Alternative Nobel”) in 2005 – but she was just getting started.

From 2008–2009, Barlow served as the United Nations Senior Advisor on Water to Miguel D’Escoto Brockman, President of the U.N. General Assembly. (Note: D’Escoto first came to the world’s attention as Foreign Minister in the Sandinista government in Nicaragua when the U.S. was conducting its terrorist “contra” war. When I interviewed him later, I asked what was the biggest mistake that the Sandinistas made. D’Escoto replied: “We underestimated the aggression of the United States”).

Barlow led the campaign to have water recognized as a human right by the U.N. She has also fought the corporate takeover of freshwater supplies in order to guarantee that people will never lack access to this vital resource.

It will not come as a surprise that the U.N. campaign was resisted by both private water utilities and bottled water companies like Nestlé. Nevertheless, in 2010, the United Nations formally voted to enshrine access to clean water as a human right.

She also was instrumental in the formation of the Blue Communities Project, which calls on cities to adopt a water commons framework by:

· Recognizing water and sanitation as human rights.

· Banning or phasing out the sale of bottled water in municipal facilities and at municipal events.

· Promoting publicly financed, owned and operated water and waste water services.

Blue Communities have been declared around the world, in Spain, Greece, Brazil, Germany, Chile and so on – as well as in the U.S. and Canada, of course.

In her 20^th book, “Still Hopeful: Lessons From A Lifetime of Activism”, she cites the incredible ten year struggle of the people of Bolivia to reverse an agreement that was made between their government and the World Bank to privatize the water system of its third largest city, Cochabamba. The government granted a 40-year concession to run the debt-ridden system to a consortium led by Italian-owned International Water Limited and US-based Bechtel Enterprise Holdings.

Maude Barlow, Still Hopeful: Lessons from a Lifetime of Activism. Click here.

Oscar Olivera, the executive secretary of the Cochabamba Federation of Factory Workers, explained that: “From that water war, we not only recovered water for all, we created new forms of social coexistence and human bonding. We recovered trust in one another, and that caused us to lose our fear.”

Despite such significant victories, however, Barlow acknowledges that despair is not unreasonable in the face of the multiple existential crises that humanity is facing regarding democracy, our environment, growing inequality and poverty, and military conflict, to name a few.

Hope, on the one hand, is a multi-faceted phenomenon. It can be vital to coping with – and improving on – an unhealthy status quo.

On the other hand, hope can lead us to be passive in times when decisive actions – individually and socially – are required.

The dilemma regarding “hope” was the key point in the Greek legend of Pandora’s jar. It contained all of the evils of the world and when she opened it, they began to escape. When she quickly closed the lid, one evil remained: (passive) hope.

Barlow definitely does not buy into mindless optimism that humanity will definitely be able to address the multiple crises that we are facing, nor does she succumb to despair that we are helpless in the face of these existential challenges.

Instead, we are treated to an eloquent and personal account of her experience of more than four decades as an organizer, activist, and writer in her fight against greed, patriarchy, pollution, and inequality, among other evils. She provides no simple answers because there aren’t any. (In the wise words of San Francisco detective Sam Spade – aka Humphrey Bogart in, “The Maltese Falcon”: “It’s not always easy to know what to do.”)

Not surprisingly, it is younger people who are the most affected by these threats to our collective well-being. It is their future especially that are in danger. Barlow asks what can be done to, “inspire young people to see that the life of an activist is a good life…find joy in the struggle to make a better world…help them not to be overwhelmed with the enormity of the task ahead?”

That was her primary motivation for writing “Still Hopeful”.

(As an aside, a high school teacher recently told me that, while her students are anxious about their future, she has noticed a sense of activism that reminds her of the youth movements of the 1960s and ‘70s).

Barlow’s writing is clear and concise, and her narrative is enhanced by personal stories that are included when describing the lessons that she has learned in her decades of fighting for social and environmental justice.

One of her critical insights is that we cannot depend on our governmental and corporate “leaders” to do the work of creating a better world. In Barlow’s view, it is consistent, grassroots organizing and public education, at both the local and national levels, that has the best chance to lead to the kinds of change that could vastly improve our ecological, political, social, and economic realities.

And here’s one intriguing reason why hopelessness and inaction are not justified:

Research by Harvard professor Erica Chenoweth has shown that it takes only around 3.5% of the population actively participating in organizing and non-violent protests to ensure that significant political change will take place. Of course, a democratic movement must have fairly widespread support and work as much as possible within the limits of the electoral system too; but if they do so, people have a surprisingly good chance of success. The U.S. civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam war movements are two of the more significant examples. (And never forget that it was the power of the global peace movement that forced Nixon to abandon plans to drop nuclear bombs on the Vietnamese people).

Barlow explains that such grassroots movements need both, “a vision of what we want” as well as clear and “concrete goals and plans”, in order to have a real chance to make that vision a reality She notes that every achievement that societies have made, such as workers’ rights, medicare, steps toward Indigenous sovereignty, and so on, took years of community effort.

The problem with hope, as we have seen, is remaining passive in the “hope” that our political and corporate leaders will suddenly, somehow, see the light and change their ways. In fact, it is more likely that benevolent aliens from the planet Tralfalmadore will arrive to bring peace and love than the 1% will suddenly change their selfish ways…

For Barlow, active, compassionate, and inclusive hope is our best path out of our collective crisis.

Summing up, in the aftermath of the pandemic, Barlow notes that:

We now truly understand the need to ensure public health at a global level and that means it cannot be profit driven. The fight for human rights and racial, religious and gender equality has entered a new stage and is widely supported. Public appreciation for working people and their unions has never been higher as we commit to class justice as well…Never has there been a greater need for principled and informed activism – and hope.

And it helps to remember that, very often, nothing changes until a tipping point is reached – and then everything changes.

More than ever, we should remember what The Rascals sang many years ago:

“If we unite, it will all turn out right!”

However, NATO in general and the United States in particular followed an unnecessary and dangerous policy of political and military expansion that quite predictably aggravated tensions in Eastern Europe.

As part of his effort to dismantle the Soviet empire in 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev was naturally concerned to ensure the safety of Russia. To put this worry into context, Russia had been invaded by Napoleon in the 19^th century, attacked by Germany (and Austria-Hungary) in the First World War, and attacked by Nazi Germany in the Second World War.

The Nazis killed about 27 million people in the Soviet Union.

Given that bloody history and the fact that West Germany was part of NATO in 1990, it is not surprising that Russians were concerned about their security. Assurances were given by Western leaders. For example, on January 31, 1990, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher promised that NATO would rule out an expansion of its territory towards the Soviet borders.

Just over a week later, on February 9, during talks about the reunification of Germany, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker told Gorbachev that NATO would not expand, “one inch eastward”. ¹

One day later, on February 10 at a meeting in Moscow, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Gorbachev agreed in principle to German unification and membership in NATO, as long as NATO did not expand to the east – and they formally signed the deal in September 1990.

Similar assurances were made by French President François Mitterrand, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and other western leaders.

Despite these promises, NATO did expand towards Russia, and in 1997, dozens of foreign policy veterans (including former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and former CIA Director Stansfield Turner) sent a letter to then-President Bill Clinton calling, “the current US-led effort to expand NATO…a policy error of historic proportions.” They predicted, accurately, that:

In Russia, NATO expansion, which continues to be opposed across the entire political spectrum, will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition, undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West [and] bring the Russians to question the entire post-Cold War settlement.” ²

“Even George Kennan, rightly considered to be THE architect of the US Cold War strategy of containment, also worried about NATO expansion:

I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else.”

Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are—but this is just wrong.” ³

Despite the promises (and the threat of empowering the hawks in Russia), Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined NATO in 1999, with Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia following in 2004.

US planners were warned again in 2008 by US Ambassador to Moscow William Burns (now director of the CIA) that:

…NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would seriously affect Russian security interests. ⁴

The possibility of stationing nuclear weapons in Poland and Ukraine would naturally concern Russia, which worried that they might give NATO the capacity to launch a nuclear first-strike. (In 1961, the U.S. instituted a naval blockade around Cuba and threatened to invade the island when the Soviet Union placed nuclear missiles there).

It is not unreasonable that Putin called on the West to halt NATO expansion, negotiate Ukrainian neutrality, and remove missiles, troops and bases near Russia.

Had the US been genuinely interested in avoiding war, it would have taken every opportunity to de-escalate the situation. Instead, it did the opposite nearly every step of the way.

Again, although there was no excuse for Putin to invade Ukraine, “calling it ‘unprovoked’ distracts attention from the US contribution to this crisis. The US ignored warnings from both Russian and US officials that a major conflagration could erupt if the US continued its path…” ⁵

Given the suffering of the people of Ukraine (as well as the Russian “cannon fodder” who are also victim’s of Putin’s war, and the brave people inside Russia who are standing up to Putin), and the danger of nuclear omnicide, it is more important than ever for Western audiences to direct our governments to make peace a true priority.

Remember, the United States is not a force for peace and justice in the world. A partial list of their crimes is horrific: Iran, Guatemala, Indonesia, Chile, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq (remember the WMD – not), Afghanistan, and Vietnam (over 3 million people killed).

And now Yemen. As Edward Hunt wrote in The Progressive:

“An estimated 377,000 people have died in the war. Nearly 60 percent of these deaths are due to the humanitarian crisis, which is making it nearly impossible for the Yemeni people to access food, water, and health care. Most of these indirect deaths have been young children, who have been devastated by malnutrition . . . A study commissioned by the United Nations Development Programme estimates that, in 2021, a Yemeni child under the age of five died every nine minutes due to factors related to the war.” ⁶

Are Western countries outraged? Hardly. Britain, Canada, and other NATO countries are still selling military equipment to Saudi Arabia as it continues to slaughter Yemenis. The United States supplies spare parts for Saudi/UAE coalition war planes, along with maintenance and a steady flow of armaments. Noam Chomsky explains that,

“The Saudi and Emirati air forces cannot function without U.S. planes, training, intelligence, spare parts. Britain is taking part in the crime, along with other Western powers, but the U.S. is well in the lead.” ⁷

In Afghanistan, millions of people are facing starvation, a crisis made much worse because Washington is refusing to release billions of dollars of Afghanistan’s central bank reserves. One result is that,

“…more Afghans are forced to resort to the unimaginable to survive: since August, the number of Afghans resorting to negative coping capacities has risen sixfold, such as selling young daughters into marriage, pulling children out of school to work, selling organs…”

UNICEF recently warned that more than a million Afghan children will need treatment for severe acute malnutrition this year and 13 million kids in total will need humanitarian assistance. ⁸

And let’s not forget about the Palestinians, living in what Desmond Tutu and Amnesty International called an “apartheid” state. Stephen Zunes accurately notes that, “If Biden really believed that countries have a right self-determination he would…support Palestinian self-determination…” ⁹

As the most powerful nation on Earth, the United States has more influence on global affairs than any other state actor. And while there are numerous and complex explanations for its actions, multinational corporations, especially those who profit from war and the threat of war, have the most influence on U.S. policy.

The problem is hardly new. In 1961, U.S. President (and five-star general) Dwight Eisenhower warned against, “the unwarranted influence”, of the “Military-Industrial Complex”, which will do anything to increase profits, which grow as arms sales increase and which benefit from wars.

So, while moral outrage over Russian crimes in Ukraine is completely justified, we in the West need to avoid simplistic good guy/bad guy dichotomies.

A global peace movement, like the one that prevented the United States from using nuclear weapons against the Vietnamese, is our best hope to reduce the risk of wars and other existential crises. As Nicolas Haeringer observes (in Informed Comment), “We can turn concrete acts of solidarity into the new norm…” ¹⁰ and reduce the unacceptable amount of suffering from conflicts, hunger, and poverty, as well as addressing the climate crisis.

It’s up to us.

…..

1. Bryce Greene. “Calling Russia’s Attack ‘Unprovoked’ Lets US Off the Hook”. FAIR. 4 March 2022. [https://fair.org/home/calling-russias-attack-unprovoked-lets-us-off-the-hook]

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Edward Hunt. “As War Rages in Yemen, the United States Evades Responsibility”. 9 March 2022. The Progressive. [https://progressive.org/latest/war-in-yemen-us-evades-responsibility-hunt-220309]

7. C.J. Polychroniou. “Noam Chomsky: Russia’s War Against Ukraine Has Accelerated the Doomsday Clock”. Truthout. 30 March 2022. [https://truthout.org/articles/noam-chomsky-russias-war-against-ukraine-has-accelerated-the-doomsday-clock]

8. Jake Johnson. “Biden Won’t Release Afghanistan’s Central Bank Assets, Even in Face of Collapse”. Common Dreams. 30 March 2022. [https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/03/30/afghanistan-facing-total-collapse-biden-refuses-release-central-bank-assets]

9. Stephen Zunes. The U.S. Hypocrisy on Ukraine”. The Progressive. 1 March 2022. [https://progressive.org/latest/us-hypocrisy-on-ukraine-zunes-220301]

10. Nicolas Haeringer. “We must turn solidarity with Ukraine into the new normal for all refugees”. Informed Comment. 29 March 2022. [https://www.juancole.com/2022/03/solidarity-ukraine-refugees.html]

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Peter G. Prontzos, Professor Emeritus.

Political Science and Interdisciplinary Studies.

Langara College. Vancouver, Canada

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Informed Comment.