By John LaForge

A June 27 Pew Research Center poll says world opinion of the United States has plummeted since Donald Trump took office. Surveying people in 37 countries, 49 percent held a positive view of the United States, down from 65 percent at the end of 2016. Maybe we could cancel the fireworks this 4th of July considering the insensitive symbolism of vicariously enjoying war.

With the Pentagon’s rockets’ red glare and bombs bursting in air smashing seven majority Muslim countries — Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen — negativity toward the United States is easy to understand. U.S. drone attacks originating in Nevada, 7,200 miles from Iraq, and jet fighter-bomber strikes launched from supercarriers in the Persian Gulf are killing hundreds of frightened bystanders month after month. At least 25 civilians were killed in Mosul, Iraq on Saturday, June 24, when US bombs destroyed four houses.

Every child killed or maimed by U.S.-made weapons inevitably creates enemies among survivors. President Obama (pronounced “Oh-Bomb-Ah”) made the point himself May 23, 2013, in a speech to National Defense University. He said drone attacks “raise profound questions: about who is targeted, and why; about civilian casualties, and the risk of creating new enemies…” And Obama warned that, “U.S. military action in foreign lands risks creating more enemies.”

Whether bombing civilians only “risks” creating enemies or can be positively guaranteed always to do so, is a matter of opinion. But one need only consider the globalized, mechanized, mass U.S. military reaction to 9/11 — and the country’s demonization of whole groups and religions — to know that demands for revenge, retribution, and retaliation always follow the deaths of innocents.

If your business is peddling weapons, you could be smugly satisfied about every civilian wedding party, funeral procession, hospital, or Sunday market hit by U.S. drones, gunships or F-18s. One StarTribune headline on April 2, 2017, directed attention away from our arms dealers. It read, “Civilian deaths a windfall for militants’ propaganda.” Never mind the windfall for war profiteers.

U.S. offers $6,000 for each dead civilian [sarcasm alert]

In the world of weapons sales, nothing is better for business than TV footage of the anguished and grief-stricken after civilians are indiscriminately attacked by “foreigners.” In the countries being bombed, we are those foreigners, occupiers, and militarists accused of cheapening human lives. You decide: when a U.S. gunship obliterated the hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan Oct. 3, 2016 killing 42, the Pentagon offered $6,000 for each person killed, and $3,000 for each one injured.

The government and munitions makers say our bombs are saving people by killing terrorists, and — being a world away from the torn limbs, the burning wounds, the screaming parents — Americans want to believe it. The U.S. dropped 26,171 bombs across the seven states during 2016, according to Jennifer Wilson and Micah Zenko writing in Foreign Policy. Each explosion is guaranteed to produce enough newly minted militants to insure steady orders for more jets, bombs and missiles.

Even with a stockpile of 4,000 Tomahawk Cruise missiles, some in the military say the store could be run low by the bombing of Syria, Iraq and the others. “We’re expending munitions faster than we can replenish them,” Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh told USA Today in December 2015. “Since then, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has asked Congress to include funding for 45,000 smart bombs in the [Pentagon’s] 2017 budget,” Public Radio International reported in April 2016. And now Trump’s SecDef, Gen. James Mattis has asked for far more in the 2018 budget for what he calls an “annihilation campaign.”

Lockheed Martin Corp. was paid $36.44 billion for weapons in 2015, and $47.2 billion in 2016, according to the Stockholm Int’l Peace Research Institute’s February 2017 report. SIPRI says that half of all US weapons exports in 2015 went to the Middle East. Last May’s $110 billion US sale to Saudi Arabia alone is bound to bring peace and stability to the region. Obama’s $112 billion in arms to the Saudis over eight years certainly did. The Kingdom’s fireworks in Yemen will cause “oooohs” and “ahhhs” of a different sort than our holiday firecracker fakery.

This cheering of faux bombs on the 4th while denying that our real ones produce enemies and prolong the war is why terrified villagers, refugees and the internally displaced of seven targeted countries will go on cringing and crouching over their children as U.S. drones and jets howl overhead. But “Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto — ‘In God is our trust’ — And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave, O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

John LaForge, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and is co-editor with Arianne Peterson of Nuclear Heartland, Revised: A Guide to the 450 Land-Based Missiles of the United States.

By Robert C. Koehler

America serves up its news in a cauldron from hell, or so it sometimes seems. The fragments are all simmering in the same juice: bombs and drones and travel bans, slashed health care, police shootings, the Confederate flag.

Double, double, toil and trouble . . .

Suddenly I’m thinking about the statues of Confederate generals taken down in New Orleans, the Confederate flag yanked from the state capital in Charleston, S.C. . . . and the secret flag the authorities can’t touch. Ray Tensing was wearing such a flag — a Confederate flag T-shirt — on July 19, 2015, while he was on duty as a University of Cincinnati police officer. That afternoon, he pulled over Samuel DuBose because of a missing front license plate. Less than two minutes into the stop, DuBose — a dad, a musician, an unarmed black man — had been shot and killed.

This is so commonplace that, while it may be news, it’s hardly surprising. Tensing was fired from his job. He went to trial for murder, twice. Both ended in hung juries. OK, that’s not surprising either. Cops are almost never convicted in such shootings. But what I can’t get out of my mind is the T-shirt. It’s what places this story fragment within the American news cauldron: the quiet hatred of it, the implicit sense of dominance, the armed racism. Tensing wasn’t a “loner” with an agenda. He was an officer of the law; he served the public. Yet he was secretly honoring the same agenda (the same god?) as Dylann Roof, the young man who killed nine African-Americans two years ago at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C.

This is the crossing of a line. Official public action — armed action, no less — is still permeated with poison.

Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

“As Senate Republicans rolled out the Better Care Reconciliation Act,” Rolling Stone reported, “. . . the halls outside the office of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were starting to get a little crowded. Sixty disability rights activists from grassroots group ADAPT, many of whom were using wheelchairs, staged a ‘die-in’ to protest steep Medicaid cuts in the bill. They were arrested and removed by Capitol Police, with witnesses saying that some protesters were dropped by police officers dragging them from their chairs.”

A vote on the bill, as we all know by now, has been postponed because of the controversy it has generated across the country, the die-ins that have been held at senators’ offices, and the Congressional Budget Office determination that the legislation would wind up causing, ultimately, 22 million people to lose their health insurance, which translates into thousands of people dying prematurely. What T-shirts were the 13 (Republican, male, white) senators who wrote this bill wearing?

Maybe their T-shirts bore dollar signs rather than Confederate flags, but the connection resonates. Public policy emerges from what we believe to be right, perhaps without the least reflection or awareness. And there is a consensus of fear, scapegoating and dehumanization that has always dominated a portion of American policy as well as individual behavior. Some people’s lives just don’t matter. Or they’re in the way.

With the current president, reckless individualism and public policy merge, sometimes shockingly, as with, for instance, Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban, which the Supreme Court partially removed from the oblivion two lower courts had assigned it.

According to The Guardian: “The nation’s highest court said the 90-day ban on visitors from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, along with a 120-day suspension of the US refugee resettlement program, could be enforced against those who lack a ‘credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States.’”

So the chaos at airports will continue, and families from these “bad” countries can be split apart. Somehow I don’t see this as a separate, isolated piece of news but part of the big picture of what President Trump might call American greatness, which is to say, American dominance. And of course many of the people who would attempt to enter the United States from these countries are refugees of the wars we are waging or facilitating there, which are making their homes unlivable.

“The enemies may rotate, but the wars only continue and spread like so many metastasizing cancer cells,” Rebecca Gordon wrote recently.

“Even as the number of our wars expands, however, they seem to grow less real to us here in the United States. So it becomes ever more important that we, in whose name those wars are being pursued, make the effort to grasp their grim reality. It’s important to remind ourselves that war is the worst possible way of settling human disagreements, focused as it is upon injuring human flesh (and ravaging the basics of human life) until one side can no longer withstand the pain. Worse yet, as those almost 16 years since 9/11 show, our wars have caused endless pain and settled no disagreements at all.”

We condemn, we bring to trial, the armed hatred and racism of individuals, but far too rarely do we ever bring the whole system, or a serious segment of it, to trial. That’s because it takes a movement to do so. The civil rights movement and the movements that followed — antiwar, women’s rights, environmentalism — did that, and we changed as a nation. But not enough.

It will take another movement of ordinary people to continue this evolution. I know it’s underway: I feel the courage, for instance, of the disabled die-in participants. We’re at a new beginning.

Robert Koehler, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor.

On June 15th, 1955, Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day joined a group of pacifists in refusing to participate in the civilian defense drills scheduled on that day. These drills were to prepare the citizenry in the event of a nuclear attack, and involved evacuations of city centers, taking shelter in subway tunnels, and, for schoolchildren, “duck-and-cover” to hide under their school desks. Such actions would be futile if a nuclear attack were underway, but the drills were part of a government propaganda program to convince Americans that nuclear weapons were a necessary part of the US arsenal, and that it would be possible to survive a nuclear war.

In this particular case, Operation Alert was a nationwide, mandated, legally enforced drill. Dorothy Day, fellow Catholic Workers and other pacifists informed the media that they would disobey the law, and refused to evacuate public spaces and work places for the proscribed fifteen-minute period. Instead, they sat on park benches in City Hall Park, quietly praying and meditating. All 27 – and a shoeshine man who was taken into custody by mistake – were arrested. They were branded murderers by their judge, who accused them of being responsible for the simulated deaths of three million New Yorkers.

Day said she was doing “public penance” for the United States’ first use of atom bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She and other protesters plead guilty to the charges, but the judge ultimately refused to send them to jail, saying, “I’m not making any martyrs.” For the next five years, Dorothy Day and many others engaged in similar acts of civil disobedience, refusing to cooperate with the civilian defense drills.

In 1960, more than 600 New Yorkers joined them at City Hall Park, with simultaneous demonstrations at CCNY, Brooklyn College, Queens College, Columbia University and several New York City high schools in noncooperation with the drills. When young mothers with children joined the protests in 1960, opposition to the drills increased, and the drills were stopped after the 1961 protest. Historians point to these campaigns and many others of the time as drivers toward the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty negotiated, signed by President Kennedy, and ratified by the US Senate.

This campaign is an excellent example of the power of nonviolent action, combining noncooperation with drills, civil disobedience of unjust laws, public acts of protest and persuasion, among others. The pacifists also used letters, speeches, trials, public statements, and interviews to convey the immorality of nuclear weapons and to expose the hidden agenda of the US government. The careful strategizing of noncooperation and protests brought a halt to the civilian defense drills, demonstrating to the US government that the populace would not passively comply with the unspeakable horrors of nuclear weapons.

As we know, the work is far from complete. With one trillion dollars slated for expanding the nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years, it may be time to dust off this chapter of nonviolent history, and tackle modern nuclear challenges with organizing nonviolent action.

Author/Activist Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of The Dandelion Insurrection and other books, and the Programs Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence.

If we had a nickel for everyone who has muttered some variation on “I worry about Donald Trump’s finger on the nuclear button,” we could finance an anti-Trump Super-PAC.

Obviously the temperament of the leader of any nuclear nation matters deeply. But there will be moments when it matters not whether the leader is sober and restrained, because the action will be elsewhere, further down the chain of military command and control. Thousands of military personnel around the world have access to nuclear weapons. We are told that battlefield commanders of the Pakistani army deployed in Kashmir are free to unleash their tactical nukes without the command and control of their political leaders.

One of the lesser-known pivotal moments of the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred on a Soviet submarine deep beneath the Atlantic. From an article in the Guardian, October 2012: “In late October, 1962, during the Cuban missile crisis, the decision to sidestep WWIII was taken, not in the Kremlin or the White House, but in the control room of a Soviet submarine under attack by the US fleet. The submarine’s batteries were failing, air conditioning was crippled, communication with Moscow was impossible, and Savitsky, the captain of the ship, was convinced that WWIII had already broken out. He ordered the B-59’s ten kiloton nuclear torpedo to be prepared for firing against the USS Randolf, the giant aircraft carrier leading the task force. The launch of the B-59’s torpedo (2/3 the power of Hiroshima) required the consent of all three senior officers aboard. Vasili Arkhipov, one of the three, was alone in refusing permission. It is certain that Arkhipov’s reputation was a key factor in the control room debate. The previous year the young officer, son of peasant farmers near Moscow, had exposed himself to severe radiation in order to save K-19, a submarine with an overheating reactor. That radiation dose eventually contributed to his death in 1998. What saved us was not only Arkhipov’s clear-headedness under great stress, but the established procedures of the Soviet navy, which were respected by the officers aboard the B-59.”

How bizarre, this barely, rarely acknowledged truth: we all owe our lives to one ethical Russian man, a man already sick unto death with nuclear radiation.

In 1940, speaking of the Nazis and Mussolini, the poet Wallace Stevens wrote of the “absence of any authority except force.” Held up against Trump’s simplistic and bullying bombast, how refreshing are the outspoken convictions of the late Muhammed Ali, who refused to go to Vietnam and kill people with whom he had no quarrel. Too many of us prefer the comforting lie that soldiers in Vietnam died for our freedom. Has not the absence of any authority except force, with a few quiet intervals, been a constant ever since?

The most frightening element in our present world situation is not only that nuclear weapons could slip out of the control of national leaders, but also that there is no non-military endgame in sight for many contemporary conflicts. Terrorists multiply faster than we can kill them with our drones—indeed, because we kill them and their friends and families. The United States especially seems to know only the endless use of overwhelming force, actual or potential. The two major candidates for president, sadly, share this empty lack of vision, one dangerously habituated to military options, the other dangerously inexperienced in their use. There is no vision of other, better ways to stabilize an unstable planet, such as increased humanitarian aid, adherence to international law, and non-violent processes of mediation and reconciliation.

We are a young, great, and dynamic nation, made so by the genius of our Constitution and our Bill of Rights. Our original sin, still not fully confronted and repented, is our treatment of Native Americans and African slaves. Our contemporary temptations have been materialism and militarism. But our future includes the inevitable end of exceptionalism.  While we may persist with our nativist pride in our freedom and prosperity, the philosopher Teilhard de Chardin got it right: “The age of nations is past. The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the earth.” The three greatest challenges we face are global in scope and require global cooperation: climate, food, and nuclear weapons. We’re all in this together.

That “common sense” is lacking among the nuclear powers. Instead, they are playing a game of chicken that accelerates toward the purest folly. However effectively Mr. Obama represented us in his visit to Hiroshima, there was a haunting distance between his rhetoric and the obscenely expensive renewal of our nuclear arsenal that our government is planning. No matter whom we choose to allow access to the nuclear button, before America can “become great again,” we need national repentance and reflection. Perhaps this will yield a new vision of our commonality and interdependence with all peoples. If we can grow into that understanding, we will no longer need anyone’s finger on the nuclear button.

Winslow Myers, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is the author of Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide and serves on the Advisory Board of the War Preventive Initiative.

Last year, Charles Koch, the billionaire and conservative activist, initiated a project called “Bridge to Wellbeing.”  Sponsored by his Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the project has been offering workshops in various states to help individuals find ways of enhancing their wellbeing.  If you go to the “Bridge” website, you’ll find a listing of workshops on such subjects as healthy eating and cooking, growing your own food, couponing and personal budgeting, saving energy in the home, and effectively managing personal time.

According to journalist Jane Mayer, author of Dark Money:  The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, Koch supported this new initiative as a way to counter an increasingly negative public image while attempting to reframe public discussions of the “free market” ideology he has so long espoused.  Although the program may seem like a minor curiosity with so much attention focused on presidential politics, it is significant because its central concern – wellbeing – represents a nexus of issues affecting almost every aspect of American life today.  From the declining lifespans of white, middle-aged Americans (particularly those without a high school education) to record levels of suicide (up by 24% from 1999 to 2014), from the lead-tainted waters of Flint, Michigan, to the opioid epidemic now afflicting over two million Americans, you’ll find it hard to read a newspaper today without seeing some reference to a serious issue affecting the physical and emotional health of our citizens.  And the troubling fact is that each of these issues is inextricably linked to a web of related problems.

For example, the increased death rates for middle-aged white Americans (ages 45-54 years) was first discovered last year by the Princeton economists Angus Deaton and Anne Case, who found that the increase in mortality from 1999 to 2013 (22% for people with a high school education or less) had much to do with increasing levels of distress, chronic pain, alcohol and drug abuse, and suicide.  The contamination of Flint’s water system, meanwhile, has also been a painful reminder to many observers that over half a million American children ages one to five have excessive levels of lead in their blood.  This poisoning is traceable to lead paint in older homes, to soil tracked into the homes, and to water sources – and it disproportionately affects children in poor communities and communities of color.

Free-Market Individualism

For many years, Charles Koch and his brother David have vilified the idea of collective responsibility for the kinds of health-related problems described above, and the Bridge to Wellbeing program is no different in its approach.  If you visit the Bridge website, you’ll find a section entitled “Policies Affecting You,” and the brief policy statements appearing there address a wide range of issues, from “Health Care and Entitlements” to “Energy and Environment” and “Technology.”  In all the statements, an ideology of free-market individualism predominates.  You can see it in assertions that government spending on food stamps has “grown out of control in recent years;” or that minimum wage legislation has been “hurting the unemployed and the very same young and low-skilled workers it is intended to help;” or that the use of the federal Clean Water Act of 1972 to protect wetlands is an abuse by federal regulators who have employed the act to “relentlessly expand their reach over both land and water use.”

This ideology supports the economic self-interest of a family with immense holdings in oil, gas, coal, chemicals, and lumber, but it has little to do with meaningful efforts to advance human wellbeing.  Though the “Bridge” workshops may have merit in their own right, the program as a whole evades the fact that people’s physical and emotional health requires strong social supports.  No number of workshops on budgeting or healthy eating will clean up the waters of Flint or address the systemic racism and environmental injustice that led to their contamination in the first place.  No helpful classes on couponing will address the rent and mental health crises in my home county of Los Angeles, where 47,000 people are now living on the streets, with the number rising each year.

For many years, Charles Koch and his brother have been major players in orchestrating the growing influence of free market, or neoliberal, ideology over American government at all levels, and it is no surprise to see the ideology dominating Republican presidential politics over the past year.  Yet the challenges to our wellbeing will not go away no matter who is elected this November, and the illusory nature of Mr. Koch’s bridge reminds us of what is at stake.

We need only connect the dots to see that Mr. Koch’s structure is a bridge to nowhere. The only true bridge to human wellbeing is a just society.

Andrew Moss, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is an emeritus professor at the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where he taught a course, “War and Peace in Literature,” for 10 years.

Democratic socialism used to be a vibrant force in American life.  During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Socialist Party of America, headed by the charismatic union leader, Eugene V. Debs, grew rapidly, much like its sister parties in Europe and elsewhere:  the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party, the Swedish Social Democratic Party, the Australian Labor Party, and dozens of similar parties that voters chose to govern their countries.   Publicizing its ideas through articles, lectures, rallies, and hundreds of party newspapers, America’s Socialist Party elected an estimated 1,200 public officials, including 79 mayors, in 340 cities, as well as numerous members of state legislatures and two members of Congress.  Once in office, the party implemented a broad range of social reforms designed to curb corporate abuses, democratize the economy, and improve the lives of working class Americans. Even on the national level, the Socialist Party became a major player in American politics.  In 1912, when Woodrow Wilson’s six million votes gave him the presidency, Debs–his Socialist Party opponent–drew vast, adoring crowds and garnered nearly a million.

This promising beginning, however, abruptly came to an end.  Socialist Party criticism of World War I led to a ferocious government crackdown on the party, including raids on its offices, censorship of its newspapers, and imprisonment of its leaders, including Debs.  In addition, when Bolshevik revolutionaries seized power in Russia and established the Soviet Union, they denounced democratic socialist parties and established rival Communist parties under Soviet control to spark revolutions.  In the United States, the Socialists fiercely rejected this Communist model.  But the advent of Communism sharply divided the American Left and, worse yet, confused many Americans about the differences between Socialists and Communists.  Although the Socialist Party lingered on during the 1920s and 1930s, many individual Socialists simply moved into the Democratic Party, particularly after its New Deal programs began to steal the Socialist thunder.

The Socialist Party’s situation grew even more desperate during the Cold War.  With the Communists serving as cheerleaders for the Soviet Union, Americans often viewed them as, at best, apologists for a dictatorship or, at worst, subversives and traitors.  And the Socialists were often mistakenly viewed the same way.  By the 1970s, the once-thriving Socialist Party was almost non-existent.  Some of its remaining activists, led by Michael Harrington, broke away and organized the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, which later morphed into Democratic Socialists of American–a group that dropped third party campaigns, called attention to the value of democratic socialist programs, and worked with progressive forces in the Democratic party to secure them.  But, for several decades, it made little headway.

And, then, remarkably, democratic socialism began to revive. Of course, it had never entirely disappeared, and occasional polls found small-scale support for it.  But, in December 2011, a startling 31 percent of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center said that they had a positive reaction to the word “socialism,” with young people, Blacks, and Hispanics showing the greatest enthusiasm.  In November 2012, a Gallup survey found that 39 percent of Americans had a positive reaction to “socialism,” including 53 percent of Democrats.

Why the rising tide of support for socialism in recent years?  One key factor was certainly a popular backlash against the growing economic instability and inequality in America fostered by brazen corporate greed, exploitation, and control of public policy.  In addition, college-educated young people–saddled with enormous tuition debt, often under-employed, and with little recollection of the Soviet nightmare–began to discover the great untold political story of the postwar years, the remarkable success of European social democracy.

Of course, Bernie Sanders played an important role in this public reappraisal of democratic socialism.  Once a member of the Young People’s Socialist League, the youth group of the old Socialist Party, Sanders forged a successful political career as an independent, serving as a popular mayor of Burlington, Vermont, a U.S. Congressman, and, eventually, a U.S. Senator.  During these years he consistently attacked the greed of the wealthy and their corporations, assailed economic and social inequality, and stood up for workers and other ordinary Americans.  For many on the American Left, he provided a shining example of the continued relevance of democratic socialism in America.

Sanders’s plunge into the Democratic Presidential primaries, though, drew the attention of a much larger audience–and, as it turned out, a surprisingly sympathetic one.  Although the communications media were quick to point out that he was a socialist, a fact that many assumed would marginalize him, he didn’t run away from the label.  Perhaps most important, he presented a democratic socialist program in tune with the views of many Americans:  universal healthcare (Medicare for All); tuition-free public college; a $15/hour minimum wage; increased Social Security benefits; higher taxes on the wealthy; big money out of politics; and a less militaristic foreign policy.

This sounded good to large numbers of voters.  In June 2015, shortly after Sanders launched his campaign, a Gallup poll found that 59 percent of Democrats, 49 percent of independents, and 26 percent of Republicans were willing to support a socialist if he were the candidate of their party.  This included 69 percent of Americans 18 to 29 years of age and 50 percent of those between 30 and 49 years of age.  To the shock (and frequent dismay) of the political pundits, Sanders’s poll numbers rose steadily until they rivaled those of Hillary Clinton, the presumed Democratic nominee, and he won 20 of the Democratic state primaries and caucuses conducted so far.  Indeed, polls showed that, if he became the Democratic nominee, he would win a landslide victory in the race for President.

But whether or not Sanders reaches the White House, it’s clear that democratic socialism has made a comeback in American life.

Dr. Lawrence Wittner, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is Professor of History emeritus at SUNY/Albany. His latest book is a satirical novel about university corporatization and rebellion, What’s Going On at UAardvark?