Hegseth dismisses war crimes, pooh-poohs the rules of engagement, and projects unequivocal belligerence at a time when the United States is rapidly losing whatever moral standing it once had in the world
Pete Hegseth is the most incompetent person in the Trump regime, with the exception of Trump, and a clear and present danger to the security of the United States.
The latest casualty of Pete Hegseth’s disastrous tenure as Secretary of “War” is Dan Driscoll, who resigned Monday as Secretary of the Army after repeatedly clashing with the Heg.
Driscoll isn’t a liberal in lion’s clothing. He’s an old friend of JD Vance from Yale Law days. He resigned because of his concerns that Hegseth is damaging the Army’s efforts to modernize and adapt to the 21st century battlefield environment — where drone warfare is becoming increasingly important — by firing or pushing out leaders spearheading those efforts.
Pete Hegseth is the most incompetent person in the Trump regime — with the exception of Trump himself — and a clear and present danger to the security of the United States and the world. If Trump won’t fire him, Democrats should impeach him when (hopefully) they take over the House next January, and two-thirds of the Senate should convict him.
A defense official in Europe told CNN that even though Hegseth talks about technology reform, he’s focusing instead on “muscles, dudes in dresses, testosterone.”
Hegseth’s tenure has been disastrous from the moment he walked into the Pentagon. Even if Trump were capable of hearing sound advice, Hegseth hasn’t come close to giving it to him. Instead, he’s been pursuing grievances about DEI, promoting testosterone, and denigrating or firing women and Black officers.
The Army now has no Senate-confirmed secretary or chief of staff (George’s replacement, General Christopher LaNeve, so far doesn’t have the votes to be confirmed).
The Iran war, meanwhile, is requiring the ongoing deployment of 19 warships, air-defense units, fighter squadrons and paratroopers across the region — straining service members and their families and creating a maintenance backlog that could take years to unwind, according to The Wall Street Journal.
TheWashington Post reports that multiple senior military leaders — those still left, that is — have warned Hegseth that the United States cannot indefinitely extend military operations against Iran. Even the chief of naval operations, Admiral Daryl Caudle (who campaigned for the job by signaling agreement with Hegseth’s culture-war obsessions), told Hegseth that the Navy cannot “sustain its current level of support for the Iran conflict because there is no anticipated end date.”
Hegseth’s response? He castigated the media for revealing classified information.
I’ve known many other defense secretaries, starting with Cap Weinberger, who served as defense secretary under Reagan. I can say without fear of contradiction that Pete Hegseth is the stupidest and least qualified of them all.
Hegseth’s incompetence and determination to suck up to Trump helped launch the war against Iran in the first place.
Among the regime’s senior officials, Hegseth was the only one who supported Trump’s fantasies of a quick victory. Marco Rubio was against the war as was JD Vance; even then–Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard told Trump that a war with Iran was not winnable.
Since then, Hegseth has lied his way through more than six months of Pentagon and Iran war mayhem.
At a press briefing in March, Hegseth complained about a CNN report that the Trump administration had underestimated Iran’s ability to disrupt global oil traffic by closing the Strait of Hormuz. “Patently ridiculous,” Hegseth told reporters, adding — even as the strait’s blockage was proving to be Iran’s most powerful leverage in the war — we “don’t need to worry about it.” It was a false and insulting claim to an American public that deserved to know what the Trump regime was planning to do about soaring prices at the gas pump, directly due to that blockage.
He also denied that the U.S. bombed the school where some 175 children were killed — a claim belied by mounting evidence that the U.S. did bomb the school. Hegseth’s further insistence that the U.S. “never targets civilians” was refuted by the U.S. military’s killing of over 200 people on small boats in the Caribbean without evidence they were “narcoterrorists” rather than civilians.
Hegseth then lied about the severity of Iranian attacks on U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf that disrupted logistical support for American forces, leading to the deprivations suffered by the crew of the aircraft carrier the USS Abraham Lincoln.
Hegseth evidently believes that his job is to cheerlead and defend Trump with absurd claims like “We didn’t start this war, but under President Trump we’re finishing it” and “America is winning decisively, devastatingly, and without mercy” and “we will show no quarter for our enemies.” (“No quarter” means kill everyone and take no prisoners, which is a war crime.)
In the days leading up to the U.S. attack on Iran, Hegseth spent his time criticizing “wokeness” at American universities and forcing Scouting America to abandon programs aimed at promoting diversity.
Last year, he didn’t just mistakenly share the military’s plans with the editor of The Atlantic; we now know he shared them with a second Signal group, including his wife, brother, and personal lawyer.
John Ullyot, who resigned as Pentagon spokesman, said Hegseth had brought “total chaos” to the Pentagon and that the Pentagon “is in disarray under Hegseth’s leadership.”
Hegseth dismisses war crimes, pooh-poohs the rules of engagement, and projects unequivocal belligerence at a time when the United States is rapidly losing whatever moral standing it once had in the world.
Mariam Barghouti explores how the Israeli occupation is transforming the landscapes and soundscapes of the West Bank, and the silence left in its wake.
The Israeli occupation doesn’t just happen through laws, military checkpoints, army raids and expanding settlements; it also seeps into and transforms our entire sensory world.
On a drive from Jenin, in the north of the West Bank, to Ramallah, in the centre, I had a jarring realization of how much the Palestinian landscape had changed.
I was returning from an assignment covering the largest mass displacement of Palestinians in the West Bank since 1967. It was dark and late, and all that was in front of me were hundreds of Israeli flags planted by aggressive settlers in the last year. The blue and white flags not only adorned the streets, but acted like lines prepped for a butcher’s cleaver.
New Israeli roads that did not exist months ago now cut through our towns and cities. Home not only looks unfamiliar, it feels like corridors carved for someone else’s future. In the car, I broke down in tears. ‘Please, God. Please, get me home safe,’ I prayed. I’ve driven these roads my whole adult life, and now they feel like death traps.
I put on my high-beam headlights, hoping that if Israeli settlers were attacking Palestinian cars they wouldn’t be able to catch my license plate. I managed to get home safely, but I did not return to Jenin for months.
The daily experiences in the West Bank requires a reconfiguring of our understanding of war. War is not just murdering people and obliterating cities. It’s also the banalities that transform our entire engagement with space, and ourselves.
Sometimes, war is in the acoustics. At any given moment, the skies of the West Bank rumble with mechanical sounds of Israeli drones. They don’t just watch us, they are intentional intrusions on daily life. The monotone buzz creeps closer, then hovers away. The drone is now part of our architecture, sitting in our living rooms, interrupting us in our bedrooms and holding us hostage in our cars.
It is not only the violence of aggressive sounds that is striking, but the noises gradually disappearing beneath.
There was a time when the laughter and cries of children playing outside used to fill my afternoons and evenings. As land annexation stole any recreational spaces for Palestinian children, the streets were the only place left to wander and play. I heard their arguments through my apartment walls. Someone would fall while playing, another would get angry with his friend for not sharing his bike. But mostly, it was laughter and their mothers calling them to come back indoors.
Over the months, and then years, that changed. As the drones got louder, the children got quieter. Rather than cry over a scratched knee, they’re training themselves to survive bullets.
When reporting on Israeli raids, I encounter Palestinian children who can confidently identify the bangs we hear outside. ‘That’s not a stun grenade,’ a 10-year-old explained to me, ‘that’s teargas.’ Over the last two years, their knowledge has expanded. ‘That’s live ammunition, likely a 22-calibre.’ ‘That’s a dumdum bullet, the kind that explodes inside you,’ they tell me. When I visit hospitals to verify information on the wounded, I often find that the kids are right.
Palestinian children have developed an acoustic literacy of occupation because their survival depends on it. Perhaps that’s why, when I do hear them playing, children are pretending to be Israeli soldiers carrying out a raid.
The defining sound of war and the occupation is not the drones or even explosions, but the silence that follows. It is the absence of children playing in the streets.
Annabelle Loma has spoken with her husband only a few times since he attempted to jump overboard from the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln during his current deployment.
Communication has been difficult to come by, and he is now on medical hold.
Loma, who lives in San Diego, said her husband had been repeatedly overextended before he tried to jump from the carrier.
“He’s scared,” Loma said. “He thinks he’ll get a dishonorable discharge, and just because he was burnt out, his 13-year career is ruined, just like that. That’s not fair, that’s not right. That’s not what he should be worrying about right now.”
Loma said she initially received a call from the ship’s ombudsman after the incident but has not heard from anyone with the Navy in recent weeks.
The deployment, which was anticipated to end in May, has been extended with no publicly announced return date.
In a separate incident aboard Lincoln, a sailor on watch saw a shipmate preparing to go overboard, and he intervened, according to the sailor’s wife, Maria Rodriguez.
Rodriguez said her husband called out to the sailor before reaching the individual and grabbing their arms, pulling them onto the deck. Her husband told her the sailor had not yet gone over the side when he got there. Three other sailors heard the commotion and came running to help.
Rodriguez’s husband told her about the incident several days after it happened.
“He said he hadn’t felt adrenaline like that in his life, and he was just so thankful he was able to get to [the sailor] in time, to stop them from going overboard,” Rodriguez said.
She did not know what happened to the sailor afterward.
Separately, Stars and Stripes reported Tuesday that sailors described an incident in which watchstanders stopped a crew member from jumping overboard. Stripes reported that the crew was informed about the incident through a shipwide announcement.
More than 200 family members attended a meeting in San Diego last week with acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao. During a separate virtual meeting later that evening, families raised concerns about sailors’ mental health, exhaustion and safety, according to recordings of the meeting reviewed by MS NOW.
Vice Adm. Joseph Cahill, commander of Naval Surface Forces, acknowledged the strain on sailors and their families during the virtual meeting.
“We hear you loud and clear [regarding] the impact this has on families, on service members and the long-term ability of us to stand, sustain our forces’ health,” Cahill said, according to MS NOW.
Cahill described deployment-resilience counselors and chaplains aboard warships, along with Human Factors Councils designed to review factors affecting sailors’ well-being and identify related risks.
The Navy has said Lincoln’s leadership is continuously assessing sailors’ psychological readiness and that the carrier has access to counselors, chaplains, medical professionals and other support services.
The Navy did not provide a precise number of sailors who have attempted to go overboard or engaged in self-harm aboard Lincoln during the current deployment.
Shelby Sanders, whose mother is serving aboard Lincoln, said connecting has been difficult over the past eight months. When her mother does manage to send a note, Sanders said, she can tell she’s struggling.
“When she can email me, she’s definitely down,” Sanders said. “I think they’ve had five weeks of non-stop combat operations or something like that, so that makes it really tough to communicate consistently or even know if we’ll be able to. It sucks.”
Sanders is preparing to begin her senior year of high school without knowing whether her mother will be home for the milestones that normally mark the year.
“I don’t know how to enjoy starting my senior year when my mom isn’t here, you know?” Sanders said. “Will she be back before homecoming? My birthday? Christmas? I have no idea, and that’s all that I think about.”
Manuel Guevara, whose son is serving aboard Lincoln, said he sounded exhausted, down and worried the last time they spoke.
“Us being out there keeps wars out of our country, but it sucks having your family away. It makes the homecoming that much sweeter, but the uncertainty of when that day will come starts to eat away at you,” Guevara said.
The Navy father said it is difficult to stay focused when he hears about problems aboard the ship and knows his son is worried about day-to-day circumstances, such as eating, doing laundry and having adequate living conditions.
“I don’t want to worry that the circumstances of this deployment will get the best of my son, and he doesn’t make it back home,” Guevara said. “That’s an unbearable burden on my heart.”
The Navy is preparing the USS Theodore Roosevelt carrier strike group to relieve Lincoln, Cao told families at the San Diego meeting. Officials have not provided a timeline, however, citing operational security.
Meanwhile, Loma is caring for the couple’s three children, and her husband remains in medical hold.
“I’m trying to keep a happy face for our three kids,” she said. “They’re little, they miss their daddy, they just want to know mommy and daddy are okay. So I can’t just worry and break down, even though I want to — every single day.”
Simply put, the U.S. maintains a first-strike nuclear option to be deployed against even a non-nuclear enemy. Paradoxically, China does have a “no first use” policy for its nuclear arsenal. Hey, U.S. adversaries, don’t even look at us the wrong way!
How radically and overtly hypocritical that the U.S., the greatest military power in the world—holding such a nuclear posture—initiated a war with Iran on the basis that the country mightone day develop nuclear weapons, even though there is no conclusive evidence that it intends to do so. But then, this is how big bullies operate.
The blindness of Americans to the reality of nuclear annihilation begins with a national hypocrisy, one that we hold as the first and only nation to ever use nuclear weapons in war, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It is a striking example of our hypocrisy that is blatantly clear to most of the world beyond our borders.
For nearly two decades, I have been arrested, ignored, and dismissed for protesting nuclear weapons—but as the Doomsday Clock inches toward midnight, giving up is not an option.
Scott Fina, Current Affairs, July 2026
Our tiny protest gathering at Vandenberg had a “micro-Woodstock” feel to it. One of us was dressed like an angel, in a white gown with flashing, battery-powered lights on wings attached to her back. She held a peace sign that also had blinking lights. She started beating a drum she had brought, and broke into an Indigenous chant she had learned from a local Chumash (Native American) community, whose descendants continue to protest military installations on their ancestral homelands. She had driven hours to the military base from her home in central Los Angeles—the likely source of her captivating creativity.
So, there we were, observing the flight of the most dangerous weapon ever created and possessed by humanity: an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that had been launched from an underground silo on the base. The Minuteman III ICBM we were watching could carry multiple nuclear warheads. Fortunately, the missile was not armed, and its launch was a test, sending it 4,200 miles over the Pacific Ocean to the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. The U.S. military has adopted a nickname for such missile flights: “Glory Trips.”
As protesting observers, we failed to see any glory in the exhibition of the ICBM test launch. But if watching an ICBM launch isn’t glorious enough for some folks, they can go to the U.S. Department of War (DOW) website and check out the “multimedia experience” of the military’s nuclear triad delivery system. The online presentation blatantly and unabashedly explains in detail how the U.S. military can readily make nuclear strikes against its adversaries using not only land-based, silo-launched missiles, but also submarine and fighter plane launchings of nuclear bombs.
The DOW’s flashy, action-filled nuclear triad website is full of bravado, and seemingly overloaded with testosterone. It looks like a violent video game. One can imagine Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, messing around with the website, tapping at the keyboard with one hand, while holding a beer in the other.
Interestingly, the introductory section of the DOW nuclear triad website includes a statement which reads, in part, “…the triad ensures a credible and flexible nuclear deterrent, providing the president of the United States with options to accomplish objectives if deterrence fails.”
Those are nuclear options currently available for Donald Trump, who alone has the authority to order a nuclear attack. Having such choices on which weapons to use has got to be alluring, if not tempting, for our president. Imagine what goes on in his brain at times when he thinks about the power he has over nuclear weapons and the fate of humanity. Think, “eeny, meeny, miny, moe…”
On top of all its muscle flexing, there is another feature in the U.S. nuclear weapons policy that exhibits a kind of bullying. I refer here to the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) published by the Biden Administration in 2022. The NPR remains operative under the Trump Administration.
Consider this statement in the NPR, which is readily available for the world to see:
We conducted a thorough review of a broad range of options for nuclear declaratory policy – including both No First Use and Sole Purpose policies – and concluded that those approaches would result in an unacceptable level of risk in light of the range of non-nuclear capabilities being developed and fielded by competitors that could inflict strategic-level damage to the United States and its Allies and partners.
Simply put, the U.S. maintains a first-strike nuclear option to be deployed against even a non-nuclear enemy. Paradoxically, China does have a “no first use” policy for its nuclear arsenal. Hey, U.S. adversaries, don’t even look at us the wrong way!
But wait! There’s more going on with the U.S. nuclear arsenal: modernization.
The replacement of over 400 ICBM Minuteman III missiles is currently in the works. These weapons have been in use (on alert but not fired off) for over 55 years, and have been kept viable thanks to “a series of life extension programs,” according to the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center. In the early 2030s, even more deadly ICBM Sentinel missiles will take their place. According to the Air and Space Forces Magazine, these new ICBMs will cost over $140 billion.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Many protesters at Vandenberg have also gone to prison for their nonviolent, civil disobedience: crossing a green line that demarcated where protest was allowed. The case of one courageous protester, Dennis Apel, who was arrested 15 times at Vandenberg, landed at the U.S. Supreme Court……………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Hundreds of Americans protest against nuclear weapons every year at various military bases, and also at private corporate facilities that are connected to the U.S. nuclear program (and make big bucks). Unfortunately, anti-nuclear protesters often go unheard in the U.S., regardless of the often deep, personal sacrifices they make. Also, those voices have been aging and declining in number over the years.
Since I first joined protesters at Vandenberg in 2008, our numbers have dwindled to less than a dozen who gather monthly at the main gate. Annually, on or around the dates of August 6 and August 9—the anniversaries of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively—the number of protesters grows to a few dozen at Vandenberg, with most coming from Los Angeles. The somewhat larger crowd draws a good number of well-armed, military security guards who line up in formation a hundred yards down the base entry road.
The soldiers wait for protesters to cross the green line, and every year, a few do. Over a loud speaker, the military officer in charge of the formation warns these brave folks to cross back over the line within two minutes or they will face arrest. The protesters ignore the command, are handcuffed, cited, and then driven off the base in a van by the soldiers.
This scene is both moving, and a little comical, depending on one’s perspective. You see, these days most of the protesters at Vandenberg are old and grey (including myself). We are also a motley group, and frumpy. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine us as a collection of outsized Ewoks from a Star Wars film, standing up to Stormtroopers of the Galactic Empire. If someone played a John Williams score over a music box in the background, we’d have a real show.
Admittedly, probably most Americans would see the protesters at Vandenberg as preposterous, daring to confront the most powerful military on the planet with little hope of disarming our nation of nuclear weapons. Perhaps we are. But we are driven by a moral and humane purpose. . And if observers—even those who are patriotic—were more objective and opened their eyes widely, they might see what we protesters deeply sense: that the huge and deadly U.S. nuclear arsenal and forces contain our nation’s own demise.
The blindness of Americans to the reality of nuclear annihilation begins with a national hypocrisy, one that we hold as the first and only nation to ever use nuclear weapons in war, killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people. It is a striking example of our hypocrisy that is blatantly clear to most of the world beyond our borders……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The most recent, significant multilateral treaty, the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), was adopted at the United Nations in 2017, and entered into force in 2021. In sum, this treaty calls for nations around the world to either commit to never creating, possessing, testing, or transferring nuclear weapons if they have not yet done so, or to fully rid themselves of nuclear weapons—disarm—if they already have them.
To date, 95 nations have signed onto the TPNW. While that seems promising, it really isn’t, yet. The TPNW has been ignored by all the nuclear states, including the U.S. Still, it’s premature to write the treaty off at this point. But consider what looms over humanity’s head in the meantime.
The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), an international coalition of non-governmental organizations and winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, warns that even limited nuclear conflicts will cause global devastation.
………………………. The second Trump Administrationhas said it is pursuing a “peace through strength” policy in national security and foreign affairs. The National Defense Strategy emphasizes the importance of modernizing the U.S. nuclear deterrent in response to increased nuclear threats.
“Peace through strength!” That doesn’t quite sound like a winning catchphrase that could inspire adversaries to surrender their nuclear weapons. More accurately, the image I get is Pete Hegseth crushing an empty beer can against the side of his head. Add on the “weapons modernization” program and you don’t really improve nuclear deterrence, but embolden the arms race already in place by nuclear adversaries.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..What JFK described in his peace address is a very different America, one that respects other nations and treasures humanity. It presents an America that tries to lead, rather than rule the nations around the world. Consider these comments:
“What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. … I am talking about …the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, … that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.
I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.”
Currently there is a movement in Congress echoing JFK’s thinking on peace……………………………………………………
JFK’s thinking on peace is radically different from Trump’s and Hegseth’s. In our day and age, Kennedy’s perspective would be widely held as preposterous—just like the case of protesters who make personal sacrifices in attempts to waken our nation to see its almost hypnotic violence and self-destruction threatened by nuclear weapons.
……………………………………………………………………………………………Recently, the DOW has posted television and social media ads about “peace through strength” that compliment its multimedia presentation on the nuclear triad. One asks: how do most Americans carry on daily life, seemingly unconscious of the deeply disconcerting possibility of nuclear Armageddon? Is it because our populace is errantly convinced that immense, superior weaponry will fully protect us from our adversaries? Have we drank a soon-fatal dose of the potion of military propaganda? https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-fear-of-nuclear-armageddon-leads-me-to-protest
Donald Trump is now the ultimate face of the U.S. nuclear power industry.
What could go wrong?
If you are advocating atomic energy in any form, you are promoting The Donald’s latest and largest fiscal fleecing of the American people. It mirrors his mega swindles in crypto and so much more—except this time with apocalyptic impact.
It’s a hyper-push for nuclear power.
As The New York Times this week headlined the “Climate Forward” column of Claire Brown: “Trump’s plans for nuclear power lurch ahead.”
Her July 7th piece began: “President Trump wants to quadruple nuclear power production in the United States by 2050. To get there, developers would need to build about a hundred times as much nuclear capacity in the next 25 years as they did in the past 25. In recent weeks, a series of government announcements have nudged the country a bit closer to that goal.”
It continued: “Nuclear power has broad bipartisan support in Congress, and many climate experts have embraced it as a low-emissions source of energy. Other experts remain opposed, arguing that it is too expensive or that the safety risks are too high.”
Through its Truth Social corporate front, the Trump Family has bought a major interest in TAE Technologies, a $6 billion California-based plunge into nuclear fusion.
To serve that investment, Trump is scamming his presidency to funnel billions of public dollars into a “Peaceful Atom” from which he expects to personally profit.
Right now, he’s pushing through Congress a $17.5 billion interest-free slush fund to promote more U.S. reactor construction.
Similar handouts from George W. Bush and Barack Obama fed two new nuclear power plants in Georgia. Originally promised at around $15 billion, the two plants fired up last year some seven years late and nearly $25 billion over budget. Their most recently reported price tag approaches $40 billion. Their output will never compete with renewables. They’ll bleed Peach State mega-cash as long as they operate.
Two abandoned nuclear plants in South Carolina blew $9 billion outright. The double debacle bankrupted Westinghouse, once the world’s leading reactor producer.
Meanwhile Trump pushes so-called Small Modular Reactors, hyped to power data centers that produce his beloved crypto. Projected to operate around 2030, SMR cultists hope their juice might (at best) cost a mere three times the proven cost of solar panels, and four times or more than that of currently operating onshore wind turbines.
But despite Trump’s frantic efforts to kill it, the real-world transition to green “Solartopian” renewables may be. Epic advances in battery technology essentially eliminate any need for the base-line power nuclear plants produce when they don’t break down or blow up. California’s battery capacity is now seven times as large as the maximum output that can be produced by the state’s last two hyper-expensive Diablo Canyon nuclear power plants.
Those dangerously decrepit reactors are surrounded by at least a dozen earthquake faults. They sit just 45 miles from the San Andreas fault.
In 2013, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission site inspector Dr. Michael Peck warned that Diablo might not withstand a credible quake from the seismic faults surrounding it. Peck’s warning was ignored. Now he is gone from the commission. In the Trump era, no such report could be written in the first place.
In 2018, California adopted a comprehensive plan to shut Diablo and to phase in renewables. The transition was hugely accelerated by massive advances that have dropped battery prices while expanding their capabilities. Through at least part of most days now, California gets 100% of its electricity from renewables, much of it coming from solar panels in the Central Valley.
But “green” Governor Gavin Newsom is trashing the transition. In 2022, he handed Diablo’s owner, PG&E, billions in Trump-style grift while promoting his own run for The White House. As a result, California’s electric rates are now the highest in the continental U.S.
Meanwhile, Trump attacks the green competition with billions of public dollars to buy out leases from wind and solar projects, which threaten to produce electricity far cheaper than his beloved nukes. With the epic spread of cheap batteries (which are also fueling a global boom in electric vehicles) more than 80% of the world’s newly installed electric generating capacity now comes from renewables. All Trump’s mob-style assaults in the U.S. are being challenged in court and at the grassroots. But the global market push remains unrelenting.
Despite the growing danger as they deteriorate from age and maladministration, atomic reactors have been federally shielded from accident insurance requirements since 1957. Amidst escalating safety concerns, Congress has extended the liability exemption to SMRs, meant to power thousands of the crypto-loving data centers now being vehemently opposed by grassroots citizens throughout the US.
Last year Trump became the first U.S. president to fire a chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The U.S. Supreme Court has now confirmed the royal prerogative of a sitting president to fire any regulatory official. In the wake of Musk’s DOGE purge of at least 100 technical experts at the NRC, Trump is now sole arbiter of health and safety regulations, which are now in terrifying free fall at the 94 licensed U.S. nuclear power plants.
Trump also wants to put new reactors on military reservations, shredding residual NRC restraints through the even looser Department of Energy.
Two operating U.S. nuclear power plants (at North Anna in Virginia and Perry in Ohio) have already been significantly damaged by earthquakes (Perry twice). With neither accident insurance nor credible safety regulation, Trump/Nukes Inc. is a sitting duck for terror attacks. Russian drones have already damaged reactors and fuel storage sites at Ukraine’s Zaporizhia and Chernobyl. Others have been under fire.
Trump has infamously launched outright war on Iran’s nuclear weapons production. But as in Ukraine, a single drone could turn any of the world’s 400-plus reactors into a radioactive weapon of mass destruction, plunging us into an economic, ecological and health abyss from which we might never recover.
Meanwhile, an industry that hypes itself as “climate friendly” burns at 500 to 600 degrees Fahrenheit. In France, the U.S. and elsewhere, commercial reactors super-heat lakes and rivers that can no longer cool them, while boiling billions of marine organisms.
Seven decades after the first commercial reactor opened in Pennsylvania, The Donald is the undisputed self-dealing face of the “Peaceful Atom.”
He’s its top investor. He rules the shell of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. He’s the presidential purveyor of taxpayer grift and chief hit man aiming to kill the renewable competition.
If you are for nuclear power, you are for Trump power.
What could go wrong?
Harvey Wasserman wrote the books Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth and The Peoples Spiral of US History. He helped coin the phrase “No Nukes.” He co-convenes the Grassroots Emergency Election Protection Coalition at www.electionprotection2024.org Karl Grossman is the author of Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power and Power Crazy. He the host of the nationally-aired TV program Enviro Close-Up with Karl Grossman (www.envirovideo.com)
I came across the views of Marta Havryshko in a YouTube video on June 15th, in a lengthy audio essay.
What struck me about this speech, was that it comes from a Jewish Ukrainian woman, who is describing her own observations, living in Ukraine today. I also found the title of her speech very interesting – The tragedy of Memory Politics in Ukraine, Israel & the West. That’s because I cannot help noticing that in the prevailing commentaries on Ukraine, the commentators seem to have forgotten the complexity in Ukraine’s recent modern history.
Marta Havryshko is aware of this complex history. She has been living through the most recent part of it. She sees it from a Jewish perspective, and she is no fan of Putin’s Russia. But – she also brings her awareness of history to current affairs in Ukraine, and she is no fan of Volodymyr Zelensky either.
I tried to transcribe the entire 95 minutes of her speech. It is too long for an article, but I will include excerpts here, to illustrate her themes. She discusses Ukraine’s troubled history of anti-semitism, and the Nazi period in Ukraine. She focusses on Zelensky and the current accepted views on Ukraine’s history – the apparent forgetting of the facts in that history, as Ukrainian extreme nationalism now flourishes.
Marta describes her childhood, and education in Ukraine. She learned at school the history of Soviet Russia’s oppression of Ukrainians, and of the heroic freedom fighters who resisted the Russians:
“I was was raised on this nationalistic myth about glorious fighters, members of the Ukraine underground movement the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the organisation of Ukraine nationalists. We learned all these patriotic songs. Our family gatherings involved histories about Soviet repressions and actually, the house that my parents built was on the territory on the land that was seized by Soviets in 1939. Some of my family were involved on the ground in the Ukrainian nationalist movement and they were oppressed. Some of them were booted in prison and some of them were sent to Siberia. So I was raised in this highly nationalistic environment.
When I became a student at Lviv National University actually I met almost the same atmosphere. Lviv is a very nationalistic city with the biggest monument to Stepan Bandera (leader of the UPA). My home was close to Bandera street, and many streets had these partisan names.”
Marta explains how the memories of wartime events have now become confused, enmeshed into present day views and anti-Russian fervour.
“After 2014 this very western Ukraine nationalistic historical myth started to move eastward. After 2022 it became really the national myth promoted on the very national level. That’s why for example under President Zelensky we nowadays have streets named Bandera and Shukhevych (another UPA leader) in Kirik, home town of our president Zelensky.
This myth is cultivated in Ukraine in war time. Another dimension of this very troubling development in is that Nazi apologism is flourishing because many members of the Ukraine nationalists on the ground during the second world war were members of auxiliary police under German occupation and some of them occupied chief positions, so they were not just ordinary rank and file policemen – they were chiefs of police. Vasyl Levkovych, for example, is a very glorious figure in this nationalist pantheon. Those people nowadays are celebrated as freedom fighters and their direct participation in the holocaust is obscured, is marginalised and silenced and even denied.
At the holocaust memorial I was really shocked. I saw these fancy souvenir magazines with Daddy Bandera socks and Daddy Bandera bags. In one day I spent almost three hours in the city center and I saw an amount of different hate symbols like SS bolts, like black sun like Nazi eagles, like swastikas. I never saw in my life. in Western Europe, this concentration of these Nazi hate symbols. and the amount of different hate symbols – SS bolts, black sun, Nazi eagle, different combinations of swastikas. In Ukraine it’s so normalised – why? Because it’s a part of military culture nowadays. Those symbols are adopted primarily by military actors and by soldiers. The trust in Ukraine military is so high in Ukraine society – approximately more than 90% of Ukrainians nowadays trust Ukraine military. That’s why they just accept this.
Ukraine military nowadays is full of different far right groups. They are sponsored and they are celebrated as freedom fighters. In the Ukraine military we have overt Nazi apologists. For example we have the Niga named after the Nachtigall Battalion formed by the Germans and this battalion participated in the Nazi Barbarossa plan against Russia in 1941. From the documents of some participants of this unit we know that they participated in anti-Jewish pogroms.
Especially after 2022 so many neo-Nazis and far right groups neo-Nazis and far right groups were empowered and they openly promote their agenda. They openly celebrate Nazi units. Why? Because their ideology is.” Those guys are lesser evil because they fought our eternal enemy, meaning Russia. And they compare themselves with Nazis.So it’s not only Putin who compares them with Nazis, but that they themselves compare themselves with Nazis, and it’s ridiculous, it’s just crazy.”
Marta explains “memory politics” as a strategy, a weapon of war:
Those who are against military mobilisation are not a minority any more, Those who want to have peace with Russia, those who want to build a relationship with Russia on good terms, who don’t want to be engaged in eternal war with Russia, they are “bad Ukrainians” – you need to view Russia as the eternal enemy. For our children, this means only permanent war. With the anti-Russian project and narrative we will be in constant war with the superior angry and very powerful aggressor., in constant destruction.
We don’t want to spend our lives, sacrificing our life for what? – for our political elites. Ukraine is now a colonial client of the West, The West is deciding what money will go where, what laws will be adopted. In our fight against the Russian imperial state we are becoming a colony of Western imperialism. No-one is talking about this, because it’s a “good” empire.
We still have enormous casualties, and those casualties are hidden.
Memory politics is the main issue. They make movies etc about Russian atrocities but never about Ukrainian atrocities. Ukraine killed Ukrainian students in occupied Donbass, in Spring 2022. It was painful to see how many people denied it, and then justified it, blaming those students for “collaboration with Russia,” some were trying to present this as collateral damage.
The state is pouring so much money into commemorating this war. It’s about producing, inflicting emotions. First of all it’s always in both Ukrainian and English language, It’s for Western audiences, to inflict emotion, to inflict empathy, to present Ukraine as poor victim, to present a black and white picture when Ukraine is of course presented as the forces of good, and Russia as the forces of evil. Nothing of course about what happened to the people of Donbass in 2014, 2015, 2016 – always about guilt of Russia, bad Russia, crazy Putin, imperialism in Russian blood, and angels Ukraine.
So memory politics is a part of Ukraine war propaganda. Many intellectuals are engaged in this propaganda, and many receive grants from abroad. And it supports the Western agenda: Many many Western people – who discovered Ukraine only in February 2022 – see Ukraine as this angel, who was unjustifiably attacked, and is bleeding, and needs support to continue resistance. Nobody is asking those people kidnapped in the vans. Nobody asking those women, their sisters, their mothers, their wives – “Do they want to fight, to be sent to the meat-grinder against their will?” This myth of resilience, of this nation, who would rather die than live under Russian occupation. But this myth is produced by Zelensky propaganda. I must admit they’re doing a very good job in this, because Zelensky is very good at entertainment – it’s his profession.
It’s so pathetic watching Elon Musk’s groveling bootlickers fall all over themselves on social media to defend their favorite oligarch from criticism as he becomes the world’s first trillionaire.
They’re like “Don’t be mean to the trillionaire, just become a trillionaire yourself! All you need is luck, connections, wealthy parents, the ruthlessness to step on anyone who gets in your way, and a willingness to cooperate with murderous imperial institutions like the Pentagon and the CIA!”
It’s so gross how many fawning admirers this freak still has. The trillionaire is not your friend.
People who say “Zionism is just the belief that Jews should have a homeland” are hilarious. Zionism isn’t some abstraction; we can all see its material manifestations with our own eyes. We can all see that Zionism means genocide, apartheid, and nonstop wars and abuse.
This isn’t some kind of theoretical debate where we all get to have our own opinions about what Zionism is and what it entails. It’s 2026, not 1890. The facts are in and the case is closed, kids. This is what Zionism is. This is the only Zionism in existence. What you see is what you get. And what you see is quantifiably one of the most evil things happening on our planet.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Hasbara is so gross because it’s just Zionists throwing walls of language at you to convince you you’re not seeing what you’re seeing.
You see raw video footage of the most horrifying thing imaginable in Gaza, and then you see them in the replies going “This is actually fine and normal because words words words words words words words.”
You see a news report about Israel doing something astonishingly evil in Lebanon, and there they are underneath it going “There’s actually a lot more to the story because words words words words words words words.”
You see some far right Israeli minister spouting nakedly genocidal rhetoric, and they’re swarming all over it saying “Well this isn’t actually what it looks like because words words words words words words words.”
You see every major human rights group on earth saying Israel is guilty of genocide and apartheid, and they’re running around frantically telling you it’s a giant conspiracy to frame Israel and the truth is that words words words words words words words.
You see more and more mainstream news institutions reporting on the mountains of evidence of widespread rape and torture in Israeli prisons, and they saturate the airwaves claiming it’s an antisemitic blood libel because words words words words words words words.
You see some far right Israeli minister spouting nakedly genocidal rhetoric, and they’re swarming all over it saying “Well this isn’t actually what it looks like because words words words words words words words.”
You see every major human rights group on earth saying Israel is guilty of genocide and apartheid, and they’re running around frantically telling you it’s a giant conspiracy to frame Israel and the truth is that words words words words words words words.
Musk had become this unfortunate planet’s first trillionaire due to a tax system that offered a shield for the ultra-wealthy while requiring the toiling workers to “pay taxes on every paycheck.”
Social responsibility tended to be hard to find in the cultic coverage of Musk’s attainments. Here was indulgence and market distortion aplenty, which should bother anyone whose fund managers wish to ride the wave. Musk is not just a threat to such simple notions as civic duty but an arid, unforgivable bore who tries so hard to be, well, liked.
The fourth estate has taken leave of its senses again, not that much is left for the exercise of those frail faculties. But commentary on Elon Musk’s transformation from multibillionaire tech prat into a trillionaire tosser because of magical accounting and the bubble of company valuation was reverenced rather than critiqued. Starry-eyed commentary from financial analysts swooned over the prospect of further investments after SpaceX made its public offering on June 12; the rhetoric of intergalactic travel and extra-terrestrial based data centres was lapped up. (Easy to revel in what is yet to be created.)
Publications such as Forbes“declared” – as if they have such priestly authority to do so – the change of financial status of the cocksure mogul. Better reporting would at least have pointed out that these assessments lie in the world of the fictive, a trillionaire status tied up in stockholdings in Tesla and the monster that is now SpaceX. The stock in SpaceX will be unsellable for at least a year. But let us see how that supposed scrutineer of wealth described it: “Forbes estimates that the IPO has boosted Musk’s fortune to $1.1 trillion, as of Friday morning. His net worth rose by $188 billion to an estimated $982 billion on Thursday evening, when SpaceX priced the IPO at $135 per share.” Matt Durott, Deputy Editor of the Wealth section of Forbes valiantly bored readers with the observation that Musk’s “ascent to a $1 trillion fortune represents a milestone once considered unimaginable, highlighting how rapidly wealth can be created in an increasingly interconnected and technology-driven world.”
Renaissance Capital’s Matthew Kennedy was appropriately banal to observe that such public offerings do tend to involve fluff, bluster and show. “No question that there is a ton of hype about it. Nothing captures the imagination like space.” Such expansive imagination becomes borderless with the realisation that SpaceX is a loss-making exercise, a warning that is being beaten back by the financial tribes. In 2025 and 2026, it lost $9 billion, according to the company’s own financial filings. Much of that bleeding has taken place in the artificial intelligence portfolio, where artificial means what it says. Nancy Tengler of Laffer Tengler Investments, a firm that has put in an order to net SpaceX shares, had to admit that the AI arm of the company was proving to be a “cash incinerator.” Proving to be a gambler, as many in this bubble industry are proving to be, Tengler is focusing on an “investment horizon” lasting anywhere from three to ten years.
Unless you subscribe to Cult Musk, another facet of this monstrous growth of counterfeit wealth lies in its origins, which are very much of a government and administrative making. The tech brat complex has tended to draw a generous share of public monies through government subsidies and research propped by the public sector. Government contracts have sought to fill the coffers of SpaceX, dispelling notions of rugged, self-sufficient innovation.
Even as Musk went about his vigilante task of trimming US federal spending through his DOGE (Department for Government Efficiency) team, it was hard to ignore the looming shadow that his business empire had received, according to an estimate arrived at by the Washington Post, $38 billion in government padding and stretching, be it through contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits. “Nearly a tenth of government money that has benefited Musk’s companies comes from agencies in eight states, including California. Since 2007, state and local governments have given Musk companies at least $1.5 billion in tax credits, grants and reimbursements, while various government agencies at multiple levels contributed another $2.1 billion, much of it to drive the development of Tesla and the batteries it relies upon
Those sufficiently alert can at least make the obvious point that a risibly generous tax system, which should be described as a system that negates tax for the wealthy, has turned the clownishly well-heeled into caricatures of gilded wealth, a bird species ornamented beyond conscience and saved from any hunting season. Igor Volsky, director of the Tax the Greedy Billionaires Campaign, offered few surprises in expressing the view that Musk had become this unfortunate planet’s first trillionaire due to a tax system that offered a shield for the ultra-wealthy while requiring the toiling workers to “pay taxes on every paycheck.” Volsky then mourns the horse long bolted from the stable. “Unless we plan to cede control and agency over our future to a handful of ultra-wealthy individuals, lawmakers must pursue bold tax policies that actually meet this moment – not just slowing the accumulation of extreme wealth, but reversing it.” Volsky then mourns the horse long bolted from the stable. “Unless we plan to cede control and agency over our future to a handful of ultra-wealthy individuals, lawmakers must pursue bold tax policies that actually meet this moment – not just slowing the accumulation of extreme wealth, but reversing it.”
Social responsibility tended to be hard to find in the cultic coverage of Musk’s attainments. Here was indulgence and market distortion aplenty, which should bother anyone whose fund managers wish to ride the wave. Musk is not just a threat to such simple notions as civic duty but an arid, unforgivable bore who tries so hard to be, well, liked. Were a novelist to ever try to do justice to his repulsive case, not much would present itself. At least Evelyn Waugh, when trying to elevate the nobs he worshipped in Brideshead Revisited, proved lush in his representation of a dying era he should have left to the tombs. No amount of cash, or space, will do it for Musk on that score.
Pete Hegseth is The American Secretary of War. His job title was formerly Secretary Of Defence, before the idea of defending yourself was deemed too ‘woke’ and America decided it was best to give the impression it was happy to throw the first punch in case people on social media thought the entire country was gay.
At a Normandy D-Day commemoration, Pete Hegseth, the American Secretary of War, noted that beaches were stormed in 1944 and are being stormed by ideologies now. The two events share precisely one feature, and that is sand
Pete Hegseth is The American Secretary of War. His job title was formerly Secretary Of Defence, before the idea of defending yourself was deemed too ‘woke’ and America decided it was best to give the impression it was happy to throw the first punch in case people on social media thought the entire country was gay.
Last week Hegseth stood with his actual Christian nationalist tattoos concealed beneath his actual clothes on an actual Normandy beach to commemorate the start of the liberation of Europe from the Nazis on D Day in 1944. And he stated “sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different dangerous ideologies.”
Whatever comparison Hegseth was trying to make, it was a bit creaky. The Normandy beaches were stormed by the allies, which was a good thing, yes? But Hegseth is saying that today some different things are storming some different beaches, which is bad. Ideally at least one thing in the comparison should be the same as at least one thing in the original example, otherwise it isn’t really a point of comparison. It’s just a whole new idea.
Oh hang on! It’s beaches, isn’t it. There are beaches in both examples. It sort of works. But Hegseth dislikes so many ideologies – including feminism, environmentalism, secularism, gay rights and general ‘wokeness’ – as well as Islam, it was difficult to be certain at first which ideologies he was concerned about. If all the ideologies Hegseth fears arrive on the metaphorical beach at the same time it’s going to get very crowded. Hopefully the Germans will have staked out a few sun-loungers with their towels before breakfast in case feminism and environmentalism try to get all the best spots.
Then Hegseth clarifies it. “Boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late? I pray not, and I believe not.” Well UK net migration is at its lowest level for five years, but clearly it wasn’t appropriate for Hegseth to break off from his Christian Nationalist trajectory to congratulate the Starmer government on making basketcase UK a less attractive destination for the world’s hopeful.
Some of the crosses scribbled on Hegseth’s body look dangerously like the ones you’re still not allowed to display in Germany. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence
Uncharacteristically, Hegseth, who relishes the idea that his failed operation in Islamic Iran is a ‘Holy War’, stops short of explicitly saying it is Islam that is the ideology that is arriving. The whole thing is such a mess. If he wanted to tie his comments into the beaches thing it would have been better if he just said “Whenever I am on a beach I like to lie on a sun-lounger and think about how much I hate European liberal democracies.”
Ironically, Hegseth’s ideology isn’t that different to the one we fought back at on the beaches, on the landing grounds, in the fields and in the streets, and in the hills, eighty-two years ago. And some of the crosses scribbled on Hegseth’s body look dangerously like the ones you’re still not allowed to display in Germany since those other Nazis got ousted. But I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. It’s all so confusing.
Meanwhile, the vice president JD Vance claimed the young white British boy Henry Nowak’s death was caused by the “mass invasion of migrants” and that our “only response” should be “righteous anger”, which presumably is the high-minded American Christian manifestation of Nigel Farage’s rather more brutal “pure cold rage.”
I think the ideal version of what we are supposed to feel would have been a combination of both men’s ideas, perhaps a “pure cold righteous anger.” Maybe in future Hegseth and Farage need to coordinate their speeches so people aren’t confused about what feelings they are supposed to have. After all, you don’t want to be exorcising yourself feeling exhausting “pure cold rage” when you should be exhibiting the steely calm of “righteous anger.” Life’s too short.
The only surprising thing about the American government’s attempts to exploit the tragedy of Nowak’s death, against the express wishes of his grieving parents, is that anyone is still naive enough to be surprised by it. Since retaking office the Trump administration has explicitly stated it intends to destabilise Western European liberal governments and work towards replacing them with systems more amenable to its essentially white supremacist vision. And the helpful social media algorithms of the loyal tech lords who support it, either out of ideological belief or self-interested avarice or both, push its propaganda perfectly. Yet people still act like Trump’s stated positions are just postures designed to provoke, instead of statements of actual policy. He has told European Liberal Democracies he wants them gone. And yet we still talk about a special relationship, like a whipped dog that comes back daily for its usual kicking.
It may as well be Trump, Hegseth and Vance rioting on the Southampton streets and throwing punches at the police, as their views, funnelled and amplified by social media like Elon Musk’s Twitter (currently X), are deliberately driving destabilising unrest. Politicians prevaricate about whether the government should have a presence on Musk’s network when in fact they should be working out how to stop it even having access to our citizens. If people want to see pictures of a female Labour MP being chloroformed before being raped can’t they draw their own, instead of getting Musk’s app to do it for them? At the very least Musk is killing creativity.
The final word goes to Chantal Richard, a member of the Langrune en Commun Association, in the area of Normandy Hegseth visited last week. “This individual promotes values that go against democracy, human rights and peace. The fact that Pete Hegseth is challenging all the international organisations that emerged from the second world war isn’t business as usual. He must be called out for who he is, for the values he represents: colonial, warmongering, racist, far-right values. Silence seems to us to be the worst thing we can do on these issues.”
David Lammy, on the other hand, remains ‘friends’ with JD Vance. Idiot.
Walt Zlotow West Suburban Peace Coalition Glen Ellyn IL, 29 May 26
Donald Trump is the classic schoolyard bully. Alas, instead of hurting, indeed terrorizing weaker school mates, he’s terrorizing the weaker on a global scale, both at home and abroad.
On the domestic front he’s demonizing the ‘other’ by abusing, sometimes killing decent, hardworking undocumented. He uses the Bully Pulpit, not in the rhetorical sense to uplift society promoting wise polices, but to dismantle most sensible domestic policies and institutions, and demonize anyone who crosses him. Nearly every critic of Trump within the Republican Party has been bullied from public office. Every Democrat is slimed as a terrible, horrible person. Classic bullying.
But it’s on the world stage where his bullying is relentlessly murderous. Over 60 bombings of imagined bad guys in Somalia without a hint of justification, much less even a mention. Swooping down into pitifully powerless Venezuela to snatch its president on trumped up charges, slaughtering hundreds in the process. Blowing up small, unarmed boats in the Caribbean then bragging his sick, murderous rampage saved a million US lives.
But on February 28th bully Trump met match. He attacked large, powerful Iran believing the lies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and own war cabinet that Iran would collapse within days once Netanyahu assassinated Iran’s ruler. A few days turned into 39 days of bombing before Trump realized that Iran was not only surviving but winning. How? By unleashing a massive missile barrage on every US Gulf States base, Gulf States oil infrastructure, Israel, and closing the Strait of Hormuz to a fifth of the world’s oil supply.
What to do? After 91 days of humiliating defeat, bully Trump turned his bullying on tiny Oman which shares the Strait of Hormuz with Iran. Oman will be Iran’s partner in controlling traffic thru the Strait which consists of Iran and Oman territorial waters.
When asked if he’d accept a short-term deal that involved Iran and Oman jointly controlling the Strait of Hormuz, bully Trump unloaded on Oman. “No, the Strait’s got to be opened to everybody. It’s international waters. Nobody’s going to control it. We’ll watch over it, but nobody’s going to control it. Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we’ll have to blow them up. They understand that they’ll be fine,
Sorry bully Trump. Knowing Trump can no longer ‘blow up’ anybody in the region after squandering much US firepower on his lost Iran war, Oman will stand up to bully Trump just like Strait partner Iran.
Now that bully Trump has been exposed as the powerless bully he is, it’s all over for him to strut the world stage like he owns it. He’s alienated friend and foe alike with his murderous bullying, duplicitous negotiating and utter lack of credibility.
Trump’s bullying served him well in both his business career and his takeover of the r Republican Party for two presidential terms. But Karma eventually comes to bullies who believe they can bully their way thru life. It’s going to take months, years, possibly a decade to undo the damage of Trump’s bullying at home and abroad. But as Bob Dylan sang long ago…”Even the President of the United States must sometimes have to stand naked.”
Razan al‑Najjar’s life and death expose something the world is still struggling to confront: in Palestine, even the act of saving a life is treated as a crime. A young woman in a white medic’s vest, running toward the wounded with her hands raised, was met with a sniper’s bullet — and then a smear campaign designed to kill her a second time in the public imagination.
“They called her dangerous because she carried no weapon at all — only a medical vest, courage, and the belief that Palestinian lives mattered.”
In a world drowning in propaganda, war crimes, and the routine dehumanization of Palestinians, the story of Rozan al-Najjar cuts through the noise with devastating clarity. She wasn’t armed. She wasn’t a politician. She was a 21-year-old volunteer medic running toward gunfire to save the wounded during Gaza’s Great March of Return — and for that, she was killed by an Israeli sniper.
Ahmed Abu Artema’s powerful piece is more than a memorial. It’s an indictment of a world that watches medics, journalists, and children become targets while calling it “security.” Rozan’s haunting words — “Without weapons, we can do anything” — remain a direct challenge to systems built on violence, occupation, and fear.
Her bloodstained medic vest became evidence of a deeper truth: even compassion itself is treated as a threat under apartheid and siege.
At a time when governments spend billions fueling war while criminalizing solidarity and silencing dissent, Rozan’s story reminds us that humanity can still exist inside unimaginable brutality. That may be exactly why her memory remains so dangerous.
Read and share this extraordinary piece by Ahmed Abu Artema.
“Without weapons, we can do anything”: The story of Rozan al-Najjar
Through her courage, sacrifice, and deep humanity, this special Palestinian woman showed that even without weapons, one person can resist oppression and defend life.
In some research about this remarkable young women Honoring Razan al‑Najjar: When Truth Itself Becomes a Battlefield
According to witness accounts and reporting from human rights and medical organizations, 21-year-old Palestinian paramedic Razan al-Najjar was killed by Israeli sniper fire on June 1, 2018, while volunteering as a medic during Gaza’s Great March of Return protests. Witnesses said Razan was wearing a clearly marked white medical vest and had her arms raised while attempting to assist wounded demonstrators when she was shot. No Israeli official has been criminally held accountable in connection with her killing.
Razan was one of three medical workers reported killed by Israeli forces while treating injured protesters during the first year of the Great March of Return. Medical Aid for Palestinians reported that between March and August 2018, more than 400 Palestinian medical personnel were injured during the demonstrations, while 61 medical vehicles and two health clinics were damaged. Human rights groups and medical organizations have repeatedly criticized the lack of accountability surrounding those incidents.
On June 1, 2018, 21‑year‑old paramedic Razan al‑Najjar walked toward Gaza’s perimeter fence wearing a white medical vest, hands raised, responding to the wounded. Moments later, she was shot in the chest by an Israeli sniper. As one article notes, she was killed “while working as a volunteer paramedic… providing care and assistance to people injured during protests” and “had her arms raised above her head when she was killed.”
Here was a young Palestinian woman risking her life to treat the wounded in the middle of what many around the world have described as a continuing genocide, and her life was taken doing exactly that. We must remember the healthcare heroes of Palestine, who deserve far more than our gratitude.
Her death was not an aberration. It was part of a pattern.
Between March and August 2018 alone, over 400 Palestinian medical workers were injured, three were killed, and 61 ambulances and two clinics were damaged by Israeli fire. No one has been held accountable.
The Times undermine their own reporting with a misleading headline. If you actually read the article (which many obviously won’t), it’s clear that there’s no such ambiguity:“The bullet that killed her, The Times found, was fired by an Israeli sniper into a crowd that included white-coated medics in plain view. A detailed reconstruction, stitched together from hundreds of crowd-sourced videos and photographs, shows that neither the medics nor anyone around them posed any apparent threat of violence to Israeli personnel. Though Israel later admitted her killing was unintentional, the shooting appears to have been reckless at best, and possibly a war crime, for which no one has yet been punished.”
A Smear Campaign Against a Medic
The killing of a young woman in a white vest was a public‑relations disaster for Israel. The response was swift: a coordinated attempt to tarnish her image.
As The Intercept reported, the Israeli army released a “deceptively edited video” designed to portray Razan as a rioter and “no angel.” The clip spliced unrelated footage, stripped context from her interviews, and attempted to recast a medic as a militant shield.
This was not just a smear of Razan. It was an assault on the very idea of truth — a warning that even the dead are not safe from narrative warfare.
The Broader Pattern: Attacking Health Care Under Occupation
Long before Razan’s killing, Palestinian medical workers faced systematic violence and obstruction.
One account describes how, during the 2002 Ramallah curfew, an ambulance was surrounded at gunpoint by Israeli soldiers — a routine occurrence at the time. Another recounts hospitals invaded, clinics destroyed, and patients denied care.
In Gaza today, doctors often see 40–100 patients a day, while over 40% of essential medicines are out of stock due to the blockade. Mobile clinics in the West Bank are routinely prevented from reaching isolated communities.
These are not isolated incidents. They are the infrastructure of a system that treats Palestinian health care as expendable — and sometimes as a target.
Why Razan’s Story Still Matters
Razan al‑Najjar became a symbol not because she sought it, but because her killing revealed the brutal asymmetry of power in Gaza. As one analysis put it, the protests she served were met with “Israeli bullets and Palestinian bodies,” not clashes.
Her death forces uncomfortable questions:
Why are medics shot while tending the wounded?
Why are smear campaigns deployed against the dead?
Why is there no accountability — not for Razan, not for the hundreds injured, not for the clinics destroyed?
The answer lies in the structure of occupation itself. As one article bluntly states: “It’s the occupation, stupid.”
A Call to Honor the Health Workers of Palestine
Razan al‑Najjar’s legacy is not only her death. It is the courage she embodied: a young woman running toward danger to save others, in a place where even medics are targets.
As one article urges, “We must all remember the health care heroes of Palestine… They deserve protection, accountability, and access to needed resources.”
Honoring Razan means demanding accountability. Honoring Razan means defending truth against distortion. Honoring Razan means refusing to let propaganda bury the reality of occupation.
Her story is a reminder: When power tries to rewrite the truth, telling it becomes an act of resistance.
Video released by Gaza’s Health Ministry, reportedly showing Razan al-Najjar and other medics moments before Israeli forces opened fire, appeared to show them moving forward with their hands raised as they tried to reach the wounded.
As outrage over Razan al-Najjar’s killing spread internationally, Israeli officials reportedly first claimed she had been accidentally shot by a soldier aiming at someone else. But critics and human rights observers say that explanation was quickly followed by what appeared to be a coordinated effort to discredit her publicly, with Israeli military social media accounts circulating claims suggesting the young medic had been involved in rioting or used to shield militants during the protests — accusations supporters and rights advocates strongly rejected.
One post shared widely after her death described Razan as an “angel of mercy” killed while trying to save lives at the Gaza border protests, a reflection of how many Palestinians and supporters around the world
In the end, we return to Razan’s own words. The killing of the young medic — who had spoken powerfully in interviews with international media about her mission to save lives in Gaza — sparked global outrage and intensified criticism of Israel’s actions during the Great March of Return protests.
Razan al‑Najjar’s life and death expose something the world is still struggling to confront: in Palestine, even the act of saving a life is treated as a crime. A young woman in a white medic’s vest, running toward the wounded with her hands raised, was met with a sniper’s bullet — and then a smear campaign designed to kill her a second time in the public imagination. That sequence alone tells us everything about the power imbalance, the impunity, and the machinery of dehumanization that defines life under occupation.
But Razan’s story endures precisely because it refuses to be buried. It forces us to look directly at the violence inflicted on Palestinian health workers, the systematic targeting of those who heal, and the global silence that allows it to continue. It reminds us that truth itself becomes a battlefield when states attempt to rewrite reality and erase the humanity of the people they oppress.
To honor Razan is not simply to mourn her. It is to insist on accountability where none has been allowed. It is to defend the right of medics, journalists, and civilians to exist without being shot, smeared, or silenced. And it is to recognize that her courage — the belief that “without weapons, we can do anything” — remains a radical act of resistance in a world that punishes compassion.
Razan al‑Najjar should have lived. Her patients should have lived. The medics who followed her should not have to choose between saving lives and losing their own. Remembering her is not an act of sentiment; it is a demand for justice, for truth, and for a future in which Palestinian life is no longer treated as expendable.
Rudyard Kipling, a modern classic of the Western literary canon, was both a champion of British imperialism and too honest not to know its very sordid underpinnings of greed, lies, and sheer selfishness.
That’s why the same man who extolled the “white man’s burden” also wrote ‘The Man Who Would Be King,’ a story of two lowlife, ambitious adventurers who manage to swindle their way to becoming kings as well as rich in a remote country on the fringes of the empire, then at its late-nineteenth-century zenith of global primacy. Until, that is, one of them makes the mistake of messing with the wrong woman, who ends up biting him in public. Seeing him bleed, his subjects realize he is a mere mortal and mercilessly dispense with the two imposters.
Ukraine’s ruler – and de facto king (of the old-fashioned, non-constitutional kind) – Vladimir Zelensky is a social climber, too. In his formative years, his native Krivoy Rog was a provincial post-Soviet rustbelt town with a lively gangster scene, a “bandit city” in his own words. Zelensky is also an expert in make-believe by profession, a cynically profane showman of the ‘give-them-whatever-they-want-as-long-as-it-pays’ variety, the cruder and smuttier the better.
Indeed, Zelensky even has a sidekick, who, as in Kipling’s dark story, has shared in the scheme of power-grabbing and plunder: Andrey Yermak, his former chief of staff and very intimate friend, making headlines (again) for being so corrupt and sinister that he stands out, even in Kiev.
And now Zelensky, the man who, it seems, would be Ukraine’s president forever, has just been bitten in public by a woman. Judging by the fierce, clearly orchestrated reaction of his media propagandists in Ukraine and the fact that the Western mainstream media are largely pretending not to have noticed, he must be bleeding, too.
The woman is his former press secretary Yulia Mendel. And she has been able to draw (metaphorical) blood because Tucker Carlson, American alternative-media heavyweight and conservative dissident from Trumpism, has interviewed her for his show.
That has made it a very public bloodletting indeed. What Mendel has had to say is one thing, her ability to reach breathtaking numbers of Americans and other inhabitants of the West is at least as important and, from Kiev’s point of view, frustrating: Across various platforms, shows of the Tucker Carlson Network (TCN) are watched by, on average, over 55 million viewers, dwarfing, for instance, Fox News (Carlson’s former employer) with its prime time rating of 3.2 million.
Recently, the Israeli-US war against Iran has further undermined public confidence in the mainstream media and boosted TCN. “Explosive growth” in the two first months of the war has produced over 1.5 billion “views across social media and podcast platforms.” Indeed, TCN is on such a roll that Carlson is now rumored to be a contender for the presidency, and he has not ruled out a run.
This is the amplifier for Mendel’s harsh memo to the US and the West. It is hard to think of a bigger one. And what a message she had to deliver.
Consider a few highlights: Speaking, she underlined, as “an insider,” from her own close experience with Zelensky and the inner circle of his regime, Mendel has told us all that she believes Zelensky personally “stands behind many schemes of money laundering” and that he has always remained an “amazing actor” whose image “on camera” is “very different” from his real self.
For instance, while he is posturing as not merely some democrat but a shining epitome of democracy as well as everything else that is good and beautiful, such as rule of law, freedom of speech, civil society, and national unity, his real view, relentlessly repeated behind closed doors, is, as we learn from Mendel, that “Ukraine is not ready for democracy” and “dictatorship is an order,” too.
So much, by the way, for those Zelensky propagandists in Ukraine and the West who habitually smear every critic of his devastating regime as diminishing Ukraine or not trusting ordinary Ukrainians with “agency.” The one really despising his compatriots as too backward to rule themselves and in need of a strong – namely, his – hand, is, it turns out, Vladimir Zelensky. And as Mendel rightly points out, that also means that he does not symbolize or provide unity; he abuses it.
Zelensky’s profound hypocrisy permeates his private life and politics. Mendel reveals, for instance, that he was still going on trips to Crimea – to have fun with friends and drugs – while it was already under Russian control. In December 2019, he privately told Russian President Vladimir Putin that Ukraine would never join NATO. While Zelensky’s public poll ratings are steadily declining, the polls produced for internal use are so bad that even some of his fixers privately admit that he is “unelectable.”
With no respect for the truth, Zelensky’s attitude to reality itself seems broken, even deranged. From her own conversations with him, Mendel reports that Ukraine’s leader believes that “it doesn’t matter what is [actually] happening.” Things, he has argued behind closed doors, become real when they are said often enough by enough propagandists or, as she quotes him, by “thousands of talking heads.” Considering this bizarre outlook, it is revealing and revolting but also somehow, sadly consistent that Zelensky, who is Jewish, has literally demanded “Goebbels”-type “propaganda” from his communications team.
Beyond a ruthless and deliberate regime of lying and manipulation, there also is pressure and compulsion. Again, Mendel’s catalogue of Zelensky’s dictatorial strong-arm methods is depressing and plausible: from threats to perfectly illegal “sanctions” imposed via Zelensky’s personal fiat, to lawfare and process-as-punishment to long and open-ended jail terms to sending critics to the frontline as a punishment to very odd lethal accidents – Zelensky and his regime have, as Mendel puts it, “no limits.” Their rule has established a situation that is “inhuman.”
Mendel is believable. Zelensky regime propagandists, in Ukraine and the West, have, unsurprisingly, smeared her as, in effect, a Russian asset, as reproducing “Russian narratives” and, worst sin of them all, sharing Kiev’s very dirty secrets with the West. Because – this seems to be the underlying logic – the West must share hundreds of billions with Zelensky and his ultra-corrupt cronies, but no one has a right to share the truth about them with the West.
In reality, Mendel’s biography proves that she is what she claims to be: an insider who has had enough. She has had an exemplary “national” career and if she had not broken with Zelensky a few years ago, she would still be part of the eager cadre who once caused scandals for physically shoving away journalists to protect her former boss.
Even in the interview with Tucker Carlson, Mendel has made a point of carefully distinguishing between what she has seen herself and what she knows from – extremely strong – circumstantial evidence, for instance, that Zelensky has a long-standing cocaine habit.
And yet, by now Mendel – who displays no favor at all to Russia – considers Zelensky an evil and the key obstacle to peace for Ukraine. This peace, she warns, is the only alternative to what she calls being “on the verge of extinction.” She means it quite literally: There are far fewer Ukrainians left in the country than official statistics admit, perhaps 25 million, including 11 million impoverished pensioners. The only way to really support Ukraine, Mendel insists, is to “push for peace.”
Yet this is where, unfortunately, Ukraine’s would-be king is different from Kipling’s adventurers. They at least had no support from the empire on the fringe of which they ran their scheme of mass manipulation and self-enrichment. When their subjects lost their illusions, they fell.
Zelensky and his crew, however, still enjoy massive, cynical support from the West, even if it is now Germany and no longer the US that is in the lead. Perhaps Zelensky’s rule and its mistreatment of Ukraine and ordinary Ukrainians can only end when he loses his last Western backers. Until then, Mendel can make them bleed, but Ukrainians alone, it seems, will find it hard to shake them off.
It was the end of 2023 when images from Gaza began to fill our television screens. I found myself returning to them again and again: the ruins, the sirens, the unbearable stillness of small bodies wrapped in white.
The scale of destruction was immense. But what lingered were the faces of children — some gone, others injured, many too young to understand why their world had collapsed overnight. News reports spoke in numbers — casualties, statistics — but behind those numbers were stories that refused to leave the room even after the television was switched off.
This is no longer a reality confined to conflict zones. In an age of constant connectivity, children across the world are being exposed to war in real time, through screens, conversations and the ambient anxiety of the adults around them. This article argues that such exposure is quietly reshaping childhood, even for those far removed from the battlefield.
I would often sit with my wife, discussing what we had just seen, trying to process a grief that did not belong to us, yet somehow did.
And in all of this, I missed something important.
I have two daughters. My elder one is nearly 15, old enough to understand the language of conflict. My younger one, just six, still lives in a world where questions are simple, and answers are expected to reassure. They were in the room more often than I realized — watching, listening, absorbing.
At first, their reactions were subtle. A question here, a glance there. “Why are they crying?” my younger one once asked, pointing at the screen. I offered an answer that felt safe, something incomplete, something designed to protect. But children do not just hear words; they read faces, tones and silences. What I thought I had softened, they had already understood in their own way.
Then, more recently, the distance between “there” and “here” began to collapse.
As tensions involving the United States, Israel and Iran intensified, the tone of the news shifted. It was no longer just about another place. Reports mentioned the Gulf. Alerts flashed across screens. Words like “missiles” and “drones” entered everyday conversation, not as distant vocabulary, but as possibilities.
Schools closed. The rhythm of daily life paused.
And then came the moment that altered everything: the realization that Qatar, where we live, along with other Gulf countries, could itself be at risk. The headlines I had once consumed with a degree of separation were now unfolding uncomfortably close to home.
I saw the fear before it was spoken.
My elder daughter tried to remain composed, but her questions returned, faster this time, sharper. “Will it happen here?” “Are we safe?” There was no easy way to answer without confronting a truth I myself did not fully know.
My younger one did not ask. She held on.
A sudden sound made her flinch. A notification drew her attention instantly. The sky, once just an open expanse, had become something to watch carefully as if it could change without warning.
It was then I understood what I had failed to see all along.
War does not need to reach your doorstep to enter your home. It arrives quietly, through a screen, through a headline, through conversations not meant for young ears. And by the time it feels real, it has already settled into the minds of children, shaping fears they do not yet have the words to explain.
Research in child psychology has long shown that repeated exposure to violence, whether direct or mediated, can influence how children perceive safety and stability. In today’s 24-hour media environment, where graphic images and breaking alerts are constant, the boundary between distant conflict and personal reality is increasingly blurred. What was once filtered now arrives unmediated, often without the emotional tools needed to process it.
We often measure war in terms of territory, power and political outcomes. But there is another cost, less visible and far more enduring. It is carried in the questions children begin to ask, in the silences they grow into and in the way they start to see the world, not as a place of possibility, but as something uncertain.
Childhood is meant to be a time of discovery — when the sky is just the sky, not something to fear. When loud sounds are moments of excitement, not signals of danger. When the world feels large, but safe.
For many children today, that sense of safety is being quietly eroded.
Some lose it in the direct shadow of conflict. Others lose parts of it from a distance, through repeated exposure, through unanswered questions, through a growing awareness that the world is not as secure as it once seemed.
This raises difficult questions for parents, educators and media institutions alike. How much exposure is necessary for awareness, and when does it become overwhelming? Are we equipping children to understand what they see, or simply expecting them to absorb it? In trying to stay informed, we may be underestimating how deeply these moments settle in young minds.
We cannot shield children from reality forever. Nor should we pretend that the world is untouched by conflict. But somewhere between awareness and exposure, there is a line we are failing to draw, a line between informing and overwhelming, between preparing and frightening.
Because when a child begins to fear the sky, something fundamental has already been lost.
The sky was never meant to be a source of anxiety. It was meant for clouds that change shape, for birds that cross without borders, for stars that arrive quietly at night.
Not for missiles. Not for drones.
And yet, for many children today, the sky is no longer a place of wonder, but a question mark, something they look at not with curiosity, but with caution.
And perhaps that is the most lasting damage of all — not what war destroys in the moment, but what it quietly rewrites for the future.
Because long after the noise fades, these children will remember one thing:
They learned to be afraid of the sky before they ever learned to fully understand the world beneath it.
On Monday night, President Donald Trump made a series of baseless and erratic accusations against his perceived political enemies, including expressing a desire to charge former President Barack Obama with sedition and treason over a conspiracy theory regarding the 2016 election.
For comparison, the average person spends about two and a half hours on social media daily. On average, brands selling products post around once per day, while news media companies make around 12 posts daily.
As president of the United States of America, Trump could make the case that his posting more often than most people is due to the importance of his position — indeed, during his first term in office, the Trump administration indicated that his posts were meant to be seen as official statements from the president.
But the subject matter of Trump’s recent posts — and his tendency to peddle outlandish, unverified claims — has sparked questions from observers on both the left and the right over whether the president is mentally fit to remain in office.
An alarming number of posts from Trump on Monday night, for example, featured attacks on Obama, including accusing the former president of plotting a coup against him by using the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election. Trump also posted half-baked and baseless conspiracy theories alleging that voting machines were altered in the 2020 presidential race, resulting in his loss that year to former President Joe Biden.
In one of his posts, Trump shared a screenshot of a post from a right-wing user. “STRAIGHT-UP SEDITION AGAINST THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT,” the writer said, alleging that Obama had spied on Trump during the 2016 presidential race and had ordered other allied countries to do so, too.
“Arrest them all. Prosecute them all. Incarcerate them all at once for treachery, treason, and seditious conspiracy to overthrow the United States government,” the post continued. “But first, Barack Obama.”
Notably, the federal punishment for treason can include the death penalty.
While Trump went on a multi-post crusade against his political opposition in the evening and into the next day, earlier on Monday, he accused his critics of having “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” making a wild claim that it is a real, diagnosable condition.
“They’ve got serious Trump Derangement, which actually is a disease. I’m hearing it is actually a disease,” Trump told reporters.
Trump’s bizarre posting spree against his opponents comes just a day after he spent a similar amount of time posting praise for himself. In several missives he made on Sunday night, Trump posted or shared content describing him as the “greatest” president of all time, including AI-created imagery suggesting that he might carve his face into the side of Mount Rushmore.
These posts, along with his public feud with Pope Leo XIV, his calls for genocide of Iranians in the US’s ongoing war with that country, and other examples of erratic behavior, have reignited the debate on the president’s mental health status. What’s different now than in the past, however, is that more Republicans (including former MAGA allies of Trump) are joining the conversation.
“Trump’s golden statue. Trump’s triumphal arch. Trump’s ‘magnificent’ ballroom. They’re all about him. His narcissism is out of control,” read an analysis at The Bulwark.
“I think we have to truly question the mental stability of any president that threatens to wipe out an entire civilization,” former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, once a staunch Trump supporter, said last month.
Earlier this week, more than 30 professional medical experts signed on to a letter calling for Trump’s immediate removal from office, describing him as “unfit” to remain president.
“It is our professional opinion that the behaviors of Donald Trump, tragically, are neither momentary lapses nor political theater…that they reflect a rapidly worsening, reality-untethered, increasingly dangerous decline,” the letter-writers said.
In a Substack post last month, Bandy X. Lee, a forensic and social psychiatrist who has called for more open questioning of Trump’s mental fitness since 2017, described the situation in more alarming terms.
“Presently, there is the emergency situation of Donald Trump continuing to raise the stakes, as he faces multiple situations spinning out of control…What would be painful but tolerable for a healthy person is catastrophic for his limited emotional capacity, and he must be stopped before, in a fit of rage, he ignites the end of the world,” Lee said.
AS people around the world paused to reflect on the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster, one local woman’s thoughts turned to the two young girls who once enjoyed a few weeks’ respite in her home.
Five years after the meltdown, a desperate appeal, made by Belarusian and Ukrainian doctors, was sent by fax and received by Cork woman Adi Roche, then a volunteer with a nuclear disarmament group, in January 1991. The message was begging someone to take the children away from the highly toxic and radioactive environment, so that their bodies had some chance of recovery.
Even though time had passed, the dangers of intense radiation, mass displacement, poverty and lack of medical treatment continued to create intolerable conditions for the people of Belarus, Western Russia and the Ukraine.
Ms Roche founded Chernobyl Children International (CCI) and began a programme which brought children to Ireland for medical treatment and rest. It was a few years afterwards when similar charities were set up in Northern Ireland. The Chernobyl’s Children Appeal brought 3,400 children to Northern Ireland between 1994 and 2014.
Mairead Burke was born in Londonderry and grew up in England before moving back to Northern Ireland. She came to Antrim in 1975 to work at Muckamore Abbey Hospital and moved to Randalstown in 1992.
She was at home watching the Gerry Kelly Show on television and saw an appeal by a Newry man who was instrumental in bringing scores of children from the blighted region to Northern Ireland. He was appealing for host families. And Mairead knew she had to act. “I said to my daughter Emma, who was coming 12 at the time, that we could either have a holiday or take the children, and she didn’t hesitate and we went and put our names down.”
One host family dropped out, and with the room to spare, Mairead and her family took in two young girls, Marina, who was only ten, and the youngest of the group, and Galina, who was 15 and already frail and ill due to the radiation sickness and malnutrition she had suffered. But they did not want to sleep in the spare bedrooms – they wanted to sleep on the floor, in Emma’s room. “Everyone was so kind, and made donations and made sure that the children were taken somewhere nearly every day.” said Mairead
AS people around the world paused to reflect on the 40th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster, one local woman’s thoughts turned to the two young girls who once enjoyed a few weeks’ respite in her home. Five years after the meltdown, a desperate appeal, made by Belarusian and Ukrainian doctors, was sent by fax and received by Cork woman Adi Roche, then a volunteer with a nuclear disarmament group, in January 1991. The message was begging someone to take the children away from the highly toxic and radioactive environment, so that their bodies had some chance of recovery. Even though time had passed, the dangers of intense radiation, mass displacement, poverty and lack of medical treatment continued to create intolerable conditions for the people of Belarus, Western Russia and the Ukraine. Ms Roche founded Chernobyl Children International (CCI) and began a programme which brought children to Ireland for medical treatment and rest. It was a few years afterwards when similar charities were set up in Northern Ireland. The Chernobyl’s Children Appeal brought 3,400 children to Northern Ireland between 1994 and 2014. Mairead Burke was born in Londonderry and grew up in England before moving back to Northern Ireland. She came to Antrim in 1975 to work at Muckamore Abbey Hospital and moved to Randalstown in 1992. She was at home watching the Gerry Kelly Show on television and saw an appeal by a Newry man who was instrumental in bringing scores of children from the blighted region to Northern Ireland. He was appealing for host families. And Mairead knew she had to act. “I said to my daughter Emma, who was coming 12 at the time, that we could either have a holiday or take the children, and she didn’t hesitate and we went and put our names down.” One host family dropped out, and with the room to spare, Mairead and her family took in two young girls, Marina, who was only ten, and the youngest of the group, and Galina, who was 15 and already frail and ill due to the radiation sickness and malnutrition she had suffered. But they did not want to sleep in the spare bedrooms – they wanted to sleep on the floor, in Emma’s room. “Everyone was so kind, and made donations and made sure that the children were taken somewhere nearly every day.” said Mairead “The Mayor of Antrim Paddy Marks came and met the children at Belfast International Airport. “The Mayor of Ballymena James Currie met them too at the town hall and they got a free pass to the Seven Towers Leisure Centre and tickets to see Boyzone. “McDonalds gave them free meals, and the police organised a big sports day out in Lisburn with a police dog display. All the chemists supplied free vitamins for three weeks.”
But she admitted: “It wasn’t easy, there was a language barrier, although wee Marina learned English very quickly. “They were not used to eating good food. Back then, people were warned not to eat some of the lamb farmed in Wales because of the fallout, and where they came from, they could not even eat any vegetables in case they had been poisoned. “So we made sure they ate lots of good food. We told them all the time they were welcome to help themselves to whatever they wanted but they felt they could not.
“It was a big culture shock, they couldn’t believe seeing my husband Peter cooking or doing the dishes, because men just didn’t do that sort of thing where they came from. “People were so good, there was a big collection in the chapel and everyone’s friends and family chipped in or helped out practically.
“I watched the drama about Chernobyl and all the documentaries, it was very frightening at the time, and I keep thinking about all those poor firemen who sacrificed themselves.” Mairead said she lost touch with both girls and thinks about them often. “When I see a programme coming on, I wonder will I see Marina talking on it.” she said. “Galina was quite sick when she was here and I do not know if she survived. Then there has been the conflict over in that part of the world, I really have no idea what happened to either of them.
“Emma has very fond memories of that time, she took the girls out and introduced them to her friends, and took them outside to play in the fresh air, next door hosted a wee boy and they all palled about together and went to Belfast City Hall.” She added: “The children who came here had nothing. But they still made sure to bring a gift to their host family. “I still have what they brought us, a brown tea pot and an embroidered table runner.
“A lot of the kids were very upset to go home. “I just imagined my Emma going over there, she wanted for nothing at the same age and these poor kids had very little. “When I saw the appeal on television I though, we don’t know if these kids are going to be living next year. “I am glad that they had three weeks of fresh air, medicine, and fun, with nothing to worry about. “It is really hard to believe it is 40 years since the disaster and nearly 30 since we welcomed those girls into our home. We will never forget them.”
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