At the outset of this short book, Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies note that the complex nature of the conflict in Ukraine has ‘made it particularly confusing and difficult for the Western peace movement’ to respond to, with many citizens of NATO countries ‘largely oblivious to their own governments’ share of responsibility for the crisis and the carnage’.
Moreover, according to former US assistant secretary of defence Chas Freeman, the war in Ukraine is also now ‘the most intense…
As we head towards the second year of the horrifying war in Ukraine, the British government should be supporting a rapid, negotiated end to the war (see p3 for more on this).
Prime minister Rishi Sunak should be helping to remove obstacles to peace. This includes pressing Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy to lift his ban on negotiating with Russia while Vladimir Putin remains president (see PN 2663).
Instead of seeking peace, the British government is supporting…
The British embassy in Israel will not be moving to Jerusalem.
During the Conservative party leadership contest in the summer, both Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak expressed support for the move.
While prime minister, Truss ordered a review, but, on 2 November, a spokesperson for Rishi Sunak told the London-based New Arab news site: ‘There are no plans to move the UK embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv.’
The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians had warned in…
‘The deepest power is that of determining what people consider normal,’ British historian Timothy Garton Ash wrote in the Financial Times on 13 November.
The next day, British prime minister Rishi Sunak condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine with these words: ‘There can be no normalisation of [Russian president Vladimir] Putin’s behaviour, which has no place in the international community.’
Perhaps Sunak was referring to the massive waves of Russian missile attacks on…
The United States could make a huge contribution to the safety and wellbeing of the Ukrainian people – and to global security – by giving its full support to a peace process between Ukraine and Russia, and by promising that all US sanctions on Russia will be lifted once a peace treaty is signed and Russian forces are withdrawn.
Instead, US president Joe Biden is playing a cynical game by trying to appear as though he is in favour of peace talks, while actually having no interest in…
Nuclear disarmament campaigns have often focused on hardware, on warheads and missiles and submarines.
Nuclear doctrine, or how governments plan to use their nuclear weapons, have had a lot less attention.
This is a pity because there are a lot of easy wins available for the peace movement on doctrine. (Also, the strength of the movement in the 1980s was as much to do with doctrine as it was to do with hardware, I would argue.)
As I noted last issue, an…
As Noam Chomsky has repeatedly pointed out since February: ‘our prime concern should be to think through carefully what we can do to bring the criminal Russian invasion to a quick end and to save the Ukrainian victims from more horrors’ (PN 2660).
This must mean an immediate ceasefire and a quick peace agreement along the lines nearly agreed at the end of March.
The reality is that this brutal and dangerous war will end in one of three ways: the two sides will…
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
As we continue to look at the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we’re joined by professor Stephen Zunes of the University of San Francisco. He recently published an article in The Progressive headlined ‘The US Hypocrisy on Ukraine.’ Zunes condemns the Russian invasion but criticises what he sees as President Biden’s hypocrisy.
He writes: ‘If Biden really believed that…
In the first year of COVID-19, while most of us were watching too much TV and just trying to stay sane, Paul Rogers was revising and rewriting his classic book on global security, Losing Control, to create this updated, enriched and unmissable fourth edition.
Among other things, he added a powerful new section on COVID-19 and the ‘lethally slow’ response of the UK. As part of this section, Rogers criticises the British government’s decision in late 2020 to pre-empt an ongoing…
On top of the fear and horror caused by the month-long Russian onslaught in Ukraine, many people around the world have been shocked and frightened by Russian president Vladimir Putin’s recent words and actions in relation to his nuclear weapons.
Jens Stoltenberg, secretary-general of the nuclear-armed NATO alliance, called Russia’s latest nuclear moves over Ukraine ‘irresponsible’ and ‘dangerous rhetoric’. Also on 27 February, British Tory MP Tobias Ellwood, who chairs the commons…
Boris Johnson told the Conservative spring conference in Blackpool that the Ukraine war was ‘a moment of choice... a choice between freedom and oppression’, where victory for Russia would be ‘a green light for autocrats everywhere.’ (19 March)
He had already given that green light to the autocrats by backing the Saudi war in Yemen wholeheartedly, ever since he became foreign secretary in 2016.
Saudi Arabia’s record on democracy, freedom and human rights is even worse than that…
What if... North Korea had somehow managed to buy the Cape Verde group of islands (about 400 miles off the coast of Senegal) from Portugal in 1965 for, say, £3m?
What if... the North Korean government had then expelled the population of the biggest island in Cape Verde – in order to lease the island to China for military purposes?
What if... China had then built communications, naval and air bases in Cape Verde from 1975 onwards, constructing two 12,000-foot-long runways,…
What if... after finding out that he’d lost the July 1945 election, Winston Churchill had scooped up the royal family and a handful of aristocrats, quite a bit of the British armed forces (including a fair chunk of its military equipment), some financiers from the City of London, and much of Whitehall’s civil service – and then retreated to the Isle of Mull on the west coast of Scotland?
What if... Churchill had loaded all the gold reserves of the Bank of England into a military…
There are two connected Ukraine crises going on. There is a civil war in Eastern Ukraine, in the Russian-speaking Donbass region, which Russia is involved in. There is also a larger confrontation over NATO expansion. The massing of over 100,000 Russian soldiers on the border and the threat of all-out war are linked to both crises.
As we go to press, it’s not clear what is going to happen.
What is clear is that there are nonviolent solutions to both crises.
Solving the…
Gulf News: It was only several months ago that you predicted that the US withdrawal from Afghanistan would cause the collapse of the Afghan army and the government and that’s exactly what’s happened.
That’s what’s [been] unfolding in the last few weeks, as we’ve seen, and yet we see the Biden administration and others express surprise at what’s happened or at least at the speed at which it’s all happened. Where are your thoughts on that?
Chomsky: The basic problem is one that…
