Amid the military standoff in the Taiwan Strait triggered by the visit of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan last week, the US is planning to send warships through the Taiwan Strait “in the coming days,” the publication of the United States Naval Institute reported Tuesday.
On Monday, the Pentagon confirmed earlier statements by the White House that the US was planning another so-called “freedom of navigation exercise,” with Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl stating, “We will continue to do Taiwan Strait transits, as we have in the past, in the coming weeks… We will continue to do freedom of navigation operations elsewhere in the region.”
The United States has stationed a carrier strike group, led by the USS Ronald Reagan, in the waters near the island, flanked by the amphibious assault carrier USS Tripoli. The USS America Expeditionary Strike Group is currently in port nearby in Sasebo, Japan.
In recent years the United States has increased the tempo of its provocative operations near Chinese waters, on the other side of the world from the American mainland.
But none of these operations, which routinely involve American and Chinese warships shadowing each other and issuing radio warnings, have ever taken place in such a tense military and political climate.
Chinese forces have indefinitely extended live-fire military exercises around Taiwan that began after Pelosi’s visit, and are concentrating on “honing the capabilities of joint blockade under complex electromagnetic environment,” the Global Times reported.
China’s two aircraft carriers are operating in the area of Taiwan, but have not yet been reported to have joined the drills.
The Global Times reported that the Chinese aircraft carriers are expected to join the drills, and are “expected to deter and cut off routes of external force interference from the east side of Taiwan island.”
Following Pelosi’s trip, the Chinese government and Chinese military forces have cut off communications with their US counterparts, giving the looming standoff between US and Chinese forces an even greater element of danger and unpredictability.
Even prior to Pelosi’s visit, Chinese officials had argued to their US counterparts that the Taiwan Strait should not be considered international waters, raising the prospect that the Chinese navy would seek to block US warships or aircraft from transiting the strait.
The Global Times, paraphrasing a Chinese military expert, noted that “The PLA can set new navigation restriction zones amid its consecutive exercises around Taiwan island, and this will deny US warships from entering the Taiwan Straits from a tactical level.”
It continued, “The US must realize the PLA will not give in an inch when it comes to safeguarding national sovereignty, security, and the major core interests like the Taiwan question, Song said.”
Given this supercharged military climate around the Taiwan Strait, a further US freedom of navigation operation would take on a a far higher level of danger.
The announcement comes amid warnings in sections of the media over the increasing likelihood of a US war with China over Taiwan.
Writing in the Financial Times, columnist Gideon Rachman warned that, “In the past a US-China war over Taiwan seemed like a real possibility—but no more than that. Now an increasing number of experts believe that a US-China conflict is not just possible but probable.”
He cited a statement by James Crabtree, the Asia director for the International Institute of Strategic Studies, who warned, “On our current course some kind of military confrontation between the US and China over the coming decade now looks more likely than not.”
On Tuesday, a series of media reports reported on a war game carried out by the Center for Strategic and International Studies gaming out the consequences of a US war over Taiwan.
Although the participants were not allowed to use nuclear weapons, the hypothetical war was by far the most destructive US military conflict since World War II.
The Wall Street Journal reported that “In the first three weeks after invading Taiwan, China sank two multibillion-dollar U.S. aircraft carriers, attacked American bases across Japan and on Guam, and destroyed hundreds of advanced U.S. jet fighters.”
In the simulated exercise, “Chinese missiles sink a large part of the US and Japanese surface fleet and destroy ‘hundreds of aircraft on the ground’.”
“However, allied air and naval counterattacks hammer the exposed Chinese amphibious and surface fleet, eventually sinking about 150 ships,” one participant told the Journal.
He continued, “To get a sense of the scale of the losses, in our last game iteration, the United States lost over 900 fighter/attack aircraft in a four-week conflict. That’s about half the Navy and Air Force inventory.”
Critically, the war game did not calculate the number of lives that would be lost in such a conflict, but the minimal scenario with such losses would mean the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of lives of people in China, Taiwan and Japan, as well as American sailors and airmen.
Yet despite this horrific prospect, the United States is relentlessly seeking to escalate tensions with China, seeing in war a way out of its protracted economic crisis and the growth of opposition within the working class at home.
Even as the US is escalating its conflict with China, it is encouraging its puppet government in Ukraine to escalate the war with Russia. In the same press conference reiterating US plans to sail through the Taiwan strait, the US for the first time acknowledged sending HARM anti-radiation missiles to Ukraine.
That same day, an explosion occurred at an arms depot in Crimea, in what the Kremlin denied was a Ukrainian attack.
Speaking just hours after the explosion, Ukrainian president and US proxy Volodymyr Zelensky said, “This Russian war against Ukraine and against all of free Europe began with Crimea and must end with—with its liberation. Today it is impossible to say when this will happen. But we are constantly adding the necessary components to the formula of liberation of Crimea … I know that we will return to the Ukrainian Crimea.”
Russian officials have made clear that they would consider an invasion of Crimea as an existential threat. Earlier this year, Malcolm Chambers warned, “Faced with losing Crimea, Putin might consider [the use of nuclear weapons] a worthwhile gamble.”
The systematic and simultaneous US efforts to escalate its conflicts with Russia and China threaten all of humanity with a disaster of monumental proportions. These plans must be opposed by workers all over the world.
Originally published in WSWS.org
On Sunday, August 7th –the day that Jews around the world celebrated Tisha bAv, the traditional day of mourning for the disasters that have occurred throughout Jewish history—the state of Israel brutally slaughtered at least 44 people, including 15 children in the besieged Gaza Strip. Beyond the horrible irony of this massacre, it is difficult for me not to see it as part of a much larger global Holy War.
Not in the sense of the Crusades of history or American and European fears of Islamic Jihad. We don’t have a name yet for this Holy War but its variants stretch far beyond Gaza into the American heartland. We refuse to recognize it because it would require us to look in the mirror. It is a Holy War based on fantasies of power and “chosenness.” Most troubling of all is how these fears and fantasies are grounded in a poisonous distortion of sacred scripture and religious tradition.
As a veteran peace activist, person of Jewish faith, and the former co-director of CODEPINK, I’ve spent most of my life working to end U.S. wars and militarism and for freedom and justice for Palestinians. As I begin my tenure as the executive director of our nation’s oldest interfaith peace and justice organization, the Fellowship of Reconciliation USA [FOR-USA], the dimensions of this Holy War are impossible to ignore.
Closer to home, the ideological underpinnings of this conflict were on display just last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Dallas, TX, where Hungarian autocrat Prime Minister Victor Orban, who rails against race mixing, same-sex relationships, advocating instead for “Christian Democracy” was the opening speaker.
After the 2020 election, right-wing pro-Trump activists planned and carried out a series of so-called “Jericho Marches” to invoke the bloody biblical story of the siege of Jericho as a call to action to keep Trump in office. As January 6th neared, Proud Boys members could be seen praying near the Washington monument, comparing the “sacrifice” they were preparing to make to the crucifixion of Christ. The next evening, they rampaged through town attacking African-American churches and other houses where Black Lives Matter signs were displayed. Tennessee pastor Greg Locke praised the Proud Boys and lauded America as “the last bastion of Christian freedom.”
On January 6 itself, the Jericho Marchers traveled with shofars (Jewish ritual instruments, made from rams’ horns evoking freedom, holiness, and a call to be in the service of God) and American flags to Washington D.C.
The fusing of violence with a blasphemous interpretation of Christianity in the United States has roots in the concept of Christian duty that animated the era of lynchings. Today it takes the form of simple marketing copy. Florida-based gun manufacturer, Spike’s Tactical, markets AR-15 style rifles with Psalm 144:1 — “Praise be to the LORD my Rock, who trains my hands for war, my fingers for battle.”— emblazoned on them.
The weapon used in the mass murder of 19 children and two teachers in Uvalde, TX was manufactured by the Georgia-based Daniel Defense, whose social media that day included a picture of a toddler with a rifle in his lap and the text of Proverbs 22:6, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
The U.S. far-right movement trends older but U.S. neo-Nazi groups are making strong efforts to recruit youth. The Israeli ultranationalist movement however already contains a large number of teenagers.
On the morning of July 20th the Israeli front of this Holy War saw thousands of largely young, Jewish extremists belonging to the Nachala settler movement flock to seven uninhabited sites in the Occupied West Bank. With religious fringes dangling from their waists, blue and white flags in their hands, and M16 rifles slung across their backs, they set up tents and makeshift kitchens and yeshivas. One outpost even included a bouncy castle and cotton candy machine.
They were praised as “inspired,” “dedicated,” and “wonderful,” by Israel’s Justice Minister, Ayelet Shaked, and criticized by the ultra-religious Jewish-Israeli Hilltop Youth movement for not being militant enough. Israeli soldiers and police ultimately dismantled the encampments but the Nachala group has pledged to return and rebuild. That is neither surprising — they claim the Jewish people “were promised the Land of Israel in the Bible” — nor is it an idle threat given the history of horrific settler attacks.
Regardless of your political or religious outlook or how deep the divisions among us currently are, I have to believe that all people of conscience are sickened by this perversion of sacred texts to justify a White and Christian Supremacy, or, in Israel’s case, Jewish Supremacy.
In the spirit of those members and leaders of FOR-USA who preceded me—Martin Luther King Jr, A.J. Muste, Jane Addams, and more — it is time to engage the full moral force of our combined faith traditions in condemning these forms of supremacy and violence that co-opt and pervert religious scripture. It is time to say clearly and unequivocally that the manipulation of the divine in the service of lethal political goals and human rights abuses, whether orchestrated by Christian, Jewish, Islamic, or Hindu fundamentalists is unconscionable.
As an interfaith peace and justice organization, FOR-USA believes that this message must be spread through houses of worship across the country. In memory of Dr. King’s voice telling us that “It’s not the violence of the few that scares me, it’s the silence of the many,” we call on faith leaders and congregants from every faith tradition and political persuasion to break their silence on this distortion of the divine and do what communities of faith do best: preach, pray and pay attention.
- We implore them to preach from the pulpit about the God of peace, love, justice, and mercy.
- We ask them to pray for healing and reconciliation amidst great division and to use their institutional religious platforms and influence to call for freedom and safety; from lifting Israel’s strangling blockade of Gaza to no longer sending US police to trainings sponsored by weapons manufacturers.
- We need them to pay attention to where the spirit is moving amongst us and to call out this obvious deformation of the sacred wherever it occurs and to respond to a world of violence in the only logical way possible, with love and nonviolence.
Ariel Gold stepped into her current role as the executive director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the U.S.’s oldest peace and justice organization, on August 1, 2022. Prior to that, she was the national co-director of the anti-war group CODEPINK, where she specialized in campaigns for Palestinian rights. She is a member of Congregation Tikkun v’Or in Ithaca, NY where she resides and has been a longtime active member of Jewish Voice for Peace.
A vigil was held this evening at the Museum of the Palestinian People to honor the 16 children killed in the Israeli military attack on the Gaza Strip. The attack on 140 sites in the crowded strip killed 44 people and wounded hundreds of others including children ranging in age from four to sixteen.
Museum Curator and Direct Ahmed Mansour stated that for his family who live in central Gaza, “,these attacks are truly a nightmare. It feels like the May 2021 attacks were just yesterday, and everyone I know is living in fear and anxiety. In times like these, it is crucial that we spend time together and make sure that Palestinian families in Gaza, like mine, know that they are not alone.”
As people gathered at the museum, many of whom brought flowers, candles and other tributes to honor the memory of all those killed, a moment of silence has held in their memory before a short, impassioned statement was made regarding the resolve of the Palestinian people to continue in their 74-year struggle against the occupation. The name of each child killed was read aloud along with their age while nearby on the iron stair railing was a display showing a photo of each of the children adding a personal touch to the horrific tragedy.
Among Israel’s stated objectives for the preemptive operation “Breaking Dawn” that was planned to last a week, was the assassination of key leaders of the Islamic Jihad movement in Palestine. To that end, the bombing and missile strikes did kill both Tayseer Jabari, the chief of operations in the northern Gaza Strip, and Khaled Mansour, a commander. Unfortunately, as usual, many innocent lives were lost as well.
Israel now claims that the loss of lives can be attributed to errant missiles launched by terrorists in Gaza against targets in Israel. As in every Israeli military operation in Gaza, the blame of loss for innocent lives is always placed beyond their responsibility. The pro forma response has become meaningless as it follows the same script of asymmetrical warfare against a captive population. Unfortunately, the wars in Gaza continue to exact a heavy toll in loss of innocent civilian lives while not changing the dynamics on the ground other than to reinforce Palestinians’ resolve to continue their struggle against their occupier.
In the aftermath of the attack, the already fragile hospital infrastructure in the Gaza Strip is increasingly unable to continue operating due to insufficient electrical power along with insufficient medical supplies. Under even more intense pressure due to the large number of injuries, the hospitals will soon be forced to close. Making matters worse, the backup electrical generators for emergency use are said not to be operable due to lack of critical fuel supplies.
Just prior to a cease-fire being announced, the Israeli military claimed that “508 rockets” had been fired on Sunday towards Israel in response to Israel’s provocation of having the military accompany 2,000 Jews onto the Haram al Sharif, a Muslim Holy site, to pray during the Jewish holiday Tisha B’Av. The holiday acknowledges August 7 as the date of destruction for both Solomons Temple (423 BCE) and the Second Temple (70 CE).
While an important Jewish holiday, praying on the mount by Jews is the stuff of intense reaction by Muslims for the incursion. In turn, Muslims are not allowed anywhere near the Western Wall that is most holy to Jews.
(This article has previously appeared in Nuzeink.
Phil Pasquini is a freelance journalist and photographer. His reports and photographs appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Pakistan Link and Nuze.ink. He is the author of Domes, Arches and Minarets: A History of Islamic-Inspired Buildings in America.
Xenophobia is a global crisis, but in South Africa, it takes a particularly violent form. The day-to-day accumulation of insult and harassment from within the state and society periodically mutates into open-street violence in which people are beaten, hacked and burned to death. If there is a useful point of global comparison, it may be with the communal riots that rip Indian cities apart from time to time.
The state has tended to stand down while a neighborhood is roiled with xenophobic violence. When it does move in, after the destruction, removal of people from their homes and killing have stopped, it usually arrives to arrest migrants rather than the perpetrators of the attacks. It is overwhelmingly impoverished and working-class African and Asian migrants who must face this pincer movement from the mob and the police.
The severity of the situation in South Africa first came to global attention in May 2008 when xenophobic violence, sometimes intersecting with ethnic sentiment, took 62 lives. At the time, the country was ruled by Thabo Mbeki, a man with deep and genuine Pan-African commitments. But by the end of 2007, Jacob Zuma’s path to the presidency was clear, and the ethnic chauvinism he had introduced into the public sphere was rampant. The limited social support offered by the state was increasingly understood to be tied to identities such as ethnicity, nationality and claims to be part of long-established communities.
By the time that Zuma took the presidency in May 2009, it was common for party officials in his home province of KwaZulu-Natal to tell impoverished people that they had not received houses, or other entitlements, because of an “influx” of “foreigners” or people “from other provinces”—a euphemism for ethnic identity. There were cases where people, seeking the approval of political authority, began to “clean” their communities themselves.
Now, almost 15 years since the 2008 attacks, the situation is much worse. Most South Africans have lived in a state of permanent crisis since the colonial capture of land, cattle, and autonomy. But for most young people, that permanent crisis no longer takes the form of the ruthless exploitation of labor under racial capitalism. Last year, youth unemployment hit 77.4 percent, the highest out of all G20 countries. As Achille Mbembe, the Cameroonian philosopher who writes from Johannesburg, argued in 2011, the intersection of race and capitalism has rendered people as “waste.”
The pain of young lives lived in permanent suspension is often turned inward. There is a massive heroin epidemic, depression and anxiety are pervasive, and rates of violence, much of it gendered, are terrifying.
In this crisis of sustained social abandonment, there are attempts, sometimes extraordinarily courageous, to build forms of politics around the affirmation of human dignity. They have often met serious repression, including assassination. But unsurprisingly, there are also attempts to build forms of popular politics around xenophobia, some of them with fascistic elements. Young people, mostly men, are summoned to the authority of a demagogic leader, given a rudimentary uniform in the form of a T-shirt and the opportunity to exercise some power in the name of “cleaning” society. Perversity is dressed up as virtue.
At the same time, all the major political parties, including the ruling African National Congress (ANC), have moved sharply to the right and have become increasingly xenophobic. In government, the ANC has always run a highly exclusionary migration regime and is now moving to end the permits, established more than 10 years ago, that gave around 178,000 Zimbabweans the right to live, work and study in South Africa.
Its rhetoric has also moved sharply to the right. The party’s spokesperson, Pule Mabe, recently declared “open season on all illegal foreign nationals,” adding, “we can no longer guarantee their safety.” The party’s policy conference in early August proposed “a well-coordinated strategy for tracking down illegal foreigners.” That strategy explicitly included the recommendation that “ANC branches must take the lead in this regard.”
Many analysts take the view that the ANC, which has already lost control of many of South Africa’s major cities, will not be able to win the next national election in 2024. As the party faces the prospect of losing power for the first time since the end of apartheid, the temptation to scapegoat migrants for its failures is escalating. Alarmingly, the new parties taking the political space opened by the rapid decline in support for the ANC are more or less uniformly forms of authoritarian populism centrally organized around xenophobia.
Former business mogul turned politician Herman Mashaba’s ActionSA party, which is making rapid electoral advances, mixes hardcore neoliberalism with xenophobia. In 2018, Mashaba staged a “citizen’s arrest” of a migrant and then tweeted, “We are [not] going to sit back and allow people like you to bring us Ebolas in the name of small business. Health of our people first. Our health facilities are already stretched to the limit.” This conflation of a vulnerable minority with disease evokes the horrors of historical forms of fascist mobilization.
Public speech from the state, government and most political parties routinely conflates documented and undocumented migrants as “illegal foreigners,” “illegal foreigners” with criminals, and, in recent days, following a horrific gang rape on the outskirts of a decaying mining town, rapists. When the police come under pressure to respond to concern about criminality, they frequently arrest migrants, often including people with papers rather than perpetrators of actual crimes.
The mass-based organizations of the left, with political identities rooted, to a significant extent, in the factory, the mine or the land occupation have often opposed the turn to xenophobia, and it is common for migrants to hold positions of leadership in these kinds of organizations. But while they can provide nodes of refuge, they lack the power to effectively oppose the rapidly worsening situation at the national level.
With no national force with the vision and power to offer an emancipatory alternative to the poisonous politics, sometimes with fascist elements, that turns neighbors against each other, the country is on a knife edge.
Richard Pithouse is an academic and journalist in South Africa. He is the coordinator of the Johannesburg, South Africa, office of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research; the director of the Forge, a cultural space; and the editor-at-large of Inkani Books.
This article was produced by Globetrotter.
On the 77th anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki during WWII was cause for a small group of anti-war activists to demonstrate at the White House to draw attention to both that disaster and the ongoing legacy of nuclear war that continues to threaten the world. The setting was appropriate as nearby on the sidewalk in a tent at Lafayette Square a peace vigil against nuclear war has been ongoing for the past 41 years. Originally started by William Thomas, a peace activist, the tent is manned 24 hours a day by anti-war activists in protesting against nuclear war.
Meanwhile across the street on the pavement a single bouquet acted as a reminder in calling for us to repent for the lives lost in the bombing 77years ago of Nagasaki. Activists also displayed graphic photographs of those who had been killed and injured by the nuclear explosion to show the human suffering and lingering effects many endured. Among the photos as a reminder were signs declaring nuclear war as both immoral and illegal according to international agreements.
The threat of nuclear war in today’s world is now even greater among the many nations now possessing such weapons and the state of mind of those despots in whose hands they lie as they continue to threaten the world with a nuclear holocaust if they don’t get their way in resolving various disputes and issues. We live in very dangerous times. Even more so since today’s modern nuclear weapons are many times more powerful than those used on Japan during WWII.
The death toll in Nagasaki was estimated to be 40,000 with another 60,000 injured during the initial explosion. Five months later, the effect of both radiation exposure along with those who died of their injuries from the initial blast brought an evolving final death total up to an estimated 140,000. And for many years and decades afterward people continued to die from exposure to the bomb’s radiation and injuries they had suffered.
The 21-kiloton bomb code named “Fat Man” that was dropped on the city was 40% more powerful than that dropped on Hiroshima only three days earlier. The Nagasaki blast destroyed an area of 43 square miles with almost everything in its center being completely leveled.
While the Nagasaki bomb was more powerful and destructive than that of the Hiroshima bomb, it is that city that is most often associated with nuclear war. Oddly too, as fate would have it, Nagasaki was not the initial target for the bomb that day. Poor weather conditions aborted dropping the bomb on the initial target and the city was chosen at the last minute on the return flight back to base when the bombardier saw a break in the clouds of the city below.
(This article has previously appeared in Nuzeink.)
Phil Pasquini is a freelance journalist and photographer. His reports and photographs appear in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Pakistan Link and Nuze.ink. He is the author of Domes, Arches and Minarets: A History of Islamic-Inspired Buildings in America.
Malthus’ “Essay on The Principle of Population”
T.R. Malthus’ “Essay on The Principle of Population”, the first edition of which was published in 1798, was one of the the first systematic studies of the problem of population in relation to resources. Earlier discussions of the problem had been published by Boterro in Italy, Robert Wallace in England, and Benjamin Franklin in America. However Malthus’ “Essay” was the first to stress the fact that, in general, powerful checks operate continuously to keep human populations from increasing beyond their available food supply. In a later edition, published in 1803, he buttressed this assertion with carefully collected demographic and sociological data from many societies at various periods of their histories.
The publication of Malthus’ “Essay” coincided with a wave of disillusionment which followed the optimism of the Enlightenment. The utopian societies predicted by the philosophers of the Enlightenment were compared with reign of terror in Robespierre’s France and with the miseries of industrial workers in England; and the discrepancy required an explanation.
The optimism which preceded the French Revolution, and the disappointment which followed a few years later, closely paralleled the optimistic expectations of our own century, in the period after the Second World War, when it was thought that the transfer of technology to the less developed parts of the world would eliminate poverty, and the subsequent disappointment when poverty persisted.
Science and technology developed rapidly in the second half of the twentieth century, but the benefits which they conferred were just as rapidly consumed by a global population which today is increasing at the rate of one billion people every fourteen years. Because of the close parallel between the optimism and disappointments of Malthus’ time and those of our own, much light can be thrown on our present situation by rereading the debate between Malthus and his contemporaries.
Famine, disease and war
Malthus classified the checks to population growth as “preventative” and “positive”. Among the preventative checks he mentioned late marriage, and what he called “vice”. This included birth control, of which he disapproved. If he had been living today, I think that Malthus would consider birth control to be the most humane method for preventing excessive growth of population.
Among the positive checks to population growth, are the three terrible Malthusian forces, famine, disease and war. Today, each of these has taken on new and terrifying dimensions.
The climate emergency
The threat of catastrophic climate change came to the attention of scientists after the time of Malthus. However, this existential threat to the future of human civilization is connected to Malthus’ work by the fact that one of the driving forces behind climate change is population growth. Furthermore, climate change contributes to threats from famine, disease and war.
Our footprint on Nature’s face has grown too large
At present, the total human economy is demanding more from the environment than the environment can regenerate. If we go on with business as usual, then within a decade it would take two Earths to regenerate the resources that we collectively demand. Most economists are focused on growth, but endless growth of anything physical on a finite planet is a logical impossibility. We need a new economic system, a new social contract, and a new and more considerate relationship with our environment.
Famine today
I have for decades been predicting that by 2050, population growth, climate change, and the end of the fossil fuel era would combine to produce a severe and widespread global famine, involving billions rather than millions of people. However, population has grown faster than predicted, reaching 8 billion in November, 2022. Climate change has also developed more rapidly than predicted. Already today drought is threatening agriculture in many parts of the world, and heat is damaging crops. Food prices have risen dramatically during the last few years, and a considerable fraction of the world’s population is already experiencing food insecurity. According to the United Nations, in 2020, 40 percent of the world’s population could not afford a healthy diet.
Disease today
The last two years have been dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, but other diseases, such as tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, malaria, water-borne diseases, and infection with worms continue to produce many millions of deaths every year. The World Health Organization needs money to combat these diseases, but instead the world continues to spend immense amounts of money on war. Currently 2 trillion dollars are spent every year on armaments, and the total amount spent on war is much larger.
War today
Today the United States is waging a proxy war against Russia, with Ukraine as the battle-ground. Simultaneously the US is threatening China. In both cases, there is a great danger that nuclear weapons may be used.
War was always madness, always immoral, always the cause of unspeakable suffering, economic waste and widespread destruction, and always a source of poverty, hate, barbarism and endless cycles of revenge and counter-revenge. It has always been a crime for soldiers to kill people, just as it is a crime for murderers in civil society to kill people.
But today, the development of all-destroying thermonuclear weapons has put war completely beyond the bounds of sanity and elementary humanity. A thermonuclear war would destroy human civilization, together with most of the plants and animals with which we share the gift of life. We must strive to abolish not only nuclear weapons but also the institution of war itself.
A freely downloadable book
I would like to announce the publication of a book which deals in detail with the issues discussed above. It may be downloaded free of charge from the following link:
https://eacpe.org/content/uploads/2022/08/Famine-Disease-and-War-by-John-Scales-Avery.pdf
Other books on global problems and on cultural history may be found at the following web addresses:
http://eacpe.org/about-john-scales-avery/
https://www.meer.com/en/authors/716-john-scales-avery
John Scales Avery is a theoretical chemist at the University of Copenhagen. He is noted for his books and research publications in quantum chemistry, thermodynamics, evolution, and history of science. His 2003 book Information Theory and Evolution set forth the view that the phenomenon of life, including its origin, evolution, as well as human cultural evolution, has its background situated in the fields of thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, and information theory. Since 1990 he has been the Chairman of the Danish National Group of Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Between 2004 and 2015 he also served as Chairman of the Danish Peace Academy. He founded the Journal of Bioenergetics and Biomembranes, and was for many years its Managing Editor. He also served as Technical Advisor to the World Health Organization, Regional Office for Europe (19881997).
http://www.fredsakademiet.dk/ordbog/aord/a220.htm. He can be reached at avery.john.s@gmail.com. To know more about his works visit this link. https://www.johnavery.info/
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