A blog about a criminal enterprise
In December 1934, Arthur Henderson, a leader of the British Labour Party, declared in his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize that the immense human suffering caused by World War I “led to the very clear realization that international anarchy must be abandoned if civilization was to survive.”
Unfortunately, that realization did not go very far or very deep. Although, since that time, international law has been refined, nations remain far from adhering to its provisions or accepting its
Donald Trump’s illegal retention of classified U.S. government records reminded me that I have been reading these kinds of sensitive official files after their declassification―and learning from them―for decades.
The reason is that I am a scholar of international history and, in this connection, have drawn upon such material in my research. Governments keep secrets, and to understand the full story of their behavior, it is often necessary to dig into the documentary evidence.
When I first
Late January of this year will mark the first anniversary of the entry into force of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This momentous international agreement, the result of a lengthy struggle by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and by many non-nuclear nations, bans developing, testing, producing, acquiring, possessing, stockpiling, and threatening to use nuclear weapons. Adopted by
Although, beginning in about 2015, nationalist political parties made enormous advances in countries around the world, more recently they have been on the wane.
The nationalist surge was led by a new generation of rightwing populist demagogues who, feeding on public discontent
Two related events—the 75th anniversary of the January 24, 1946 UN General Assembly Resolution 1 (which established a commission to plan for the abolition of nuclear weapons) and the January 22, 2021 entry into force of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (designed to finally implement that goal)—should be a cause for worldwide celebration.
In fact, however, they are a cause for shame. The nine nuclear powers have