A blog about a criminal enterprise
Recently, the opinion polls indicate that Donald Trump – a convicted criminal, a pathological liar, and the latest in a long string of rightwing demagogues – is likelier than not to be elected President of the United States.
I was born and raised during World War II, a time when fascist armies seemed on the verge of conquering the world, and perhaps this accounts for my feeling of alarm at the current revival of rightwing extremism in the United States and elsewhere. This alarm seems justified
For some time, it’s been apparent that the world’s nations are not meeting the growing challenges to human survival.
A key challenge comes from modern war.
Over the centuries, as military weapons have grown ever more destructive, war-related devastation has grown accordingly. World War II was the deadliest military conflict in human history, with an estimated 70-85 million people perishing from the war directly or through
On September 10, 2021, during an important diplomatic meeting that occurred by telephone, U.S. President Joseph Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping affirmed the necessity of a better relationship between their two nations. According to the official Chinese summary, Xi said that “when China and the United States cooperate, the two countries and the world will benefit; when China and the United States are in confrontation,
The world is currently engulfed in crises—most prominently, a disease pandemic, a climate catastrophe, and the prevalence of war—while individual nations are encountering enormous difficulties in coping with them.
These difficulties result from the global nature of the problems. An individual nation is unable to institute adequate measures to safeguard public health because diseases spread easily across national boundaries. Similarly, an individual nation cannot stave off the deterioration
Have you noticed recently that things are collapsing?
Sure, the rightwing, nationalist rulers of many countries never stop telling us that they have made their nations “great” again.
But we would have to be dislocated from reality not to notice that something is wrong―very wrong. After all, the world is currently engulfed in a coronavirus pandemic that
We live with a profound paradox. Our lives are powerfully affected by worldwide economic, communications, transportation, food supply, and entertainment systems. Yet we continue an outdated faith in the nation-state, with all the divisiveness, competition, and helplessness that faith produces when dealing with planetary problems.
As we have seen in recent weeks, the coronavirus, like other diseases, does not respect national boundaries, but spreads easily around the world. And how is it being
To: The people of the world
From: The Joint Public Relations Department of the Great Powers
The world owes an enormous debt of gratitude to Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi, Boris Johnson, and other heroic rulers of our glorious nations. Not only are they hard at work making their respective countries great again, but they are providing you, the people of the world, with a choice between two opportunities for mass death and destruction.
Throughout the broad sweep
In recent years, internationalism―cooperation among nations for promotion of the common good―has acquired a bad reputation.
Of course, internationalism has long been anathema to the political Right, where a primitive tribalism and its successor, nationalism, have flourished for many years. Focusing on their nation’s supposed superiority to others, a long line of rightwing demagogues, including Adolf Hitler (“Deutschland