Religion and ethics « nuclear-news

Canada’s Honoring of Nazi Vet Exposes Ottawa’s Longstanding Ukraine Policy

Following the war, Canada’s Liberal government classified thousands of Jewish refugees as “enemy aliens” and held them alongside former Nazis in a network of internment camps enclosed with barbed wire, fearing that they would infect their new country with communism. At the same time, Ottawa placed thousands of Ukrainian veterans of Hitler’s army on the fast-track to citizenship.

By celebrating a Waffen-SS volunteer as a “hero,” Canada’s Liberal Party highlighted a longstanding policy that has seen Ottawa train fascist militants in Ukraine while welcoming in thousands of post-war Nazi SS veterans. Canada’s second most powerful official, Chrystia Freeland, is the granddaughter of one of Nazi Germany’s top Ukrainian propagandists.

SCHEERPOST, By Max Blumenthal / The Grayzone 1 Oct 23

In the Spring of 1943, Yaroslav Hunka was a fresh-faced soldier in the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS Galicia when his division received a visit from the architect of Nazi Germany’s genocidal policies, Heinrich Himmler. Having presided over the battalion’s formation, Himmler was visibly proud of the Ukrainians who had volunteered to support the Third Reich’s efforts.

80 years later, the Speaker of Canada’s parliament, Anthony Rota, also beamed with pride after inviting Hunka to a reception for Volodymyr Zelensky, where the Ukrainian president lobbied for more arms and financial assistance for his country’s war against Russia.

“We have in the chamber today Ukrainian war veteran from the Second World War who fought for Ukrainian independence against the Russians and continues to support the troops today even at his age of 98,” Rota declared during the September 22 parliamentary event in Ottawa.

“His name is Yaroslav Hunka but I am very proud to say he is from North Bay and from my riding of Nipissing-Timiskaming. He is a Ukrainian hero, a Canadian hero, and we thank him for all his service,” Rota continued.

Gales of applause erupted through the crowd, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Zelensky, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, Canadian Chief of Defense Staff Gen. Wayne Eyre and leaders of all Canadian parties rose from their seats to applaud Hunka’s wartime service.

Since the exposure of Hunka’s record as a Nazi collaborator – which should have been obvious as soon as the Speaker announced him – Canadian leaders (with the notable exception of Eyre) have rushed to issue superficial, face-saving apologies as withering condemnations poured in from Canadian Jewish organizations.

The incident is now a major national scandal, occupying space on the cover of Canadian papers like the Toronto Sun, which quipped, “Did Nazi that coming.” Meanwhile, Poland’s Education Minister has announced plans to seek Hunka’s criminal extradition.

The Liberal Party has attempted to downplay the affair as an accidental blunder, with one Liberal MP urging her colleagues to “avoid politicizing this incident.” Melanie Joly, Canada’s Foreign Minister, has forced Rota’s resignation, seeking to turn the the Speaker into a scapegoat for her party’s collective actions.

Trudeau, meanwhile, pointed to the “deeply embarrassing” event as a reason to “push back against Russian propaganda,” as though the Kremlin somehow smuggled an nonagenarian Nazi collaborator into parliament, then hypnotized the Prime Minister and his colleagues, Manchurian Candidate-style, into celebrating him as a hero.

To be sure, the incident was no gaffe. Before Canada’s government and military brass celebrated Hunka in parliament, they had provided diplomatic support to fascist hooligans fighting to install a nationalist government in Kiev, and oversaw the training of contemporary Ukrainian military formations openly committed to the furtherance of Nazi ideology.

Ottawa’s celebration of Hunka has also lifted the cover on the country’s post-World War Two policy of naturalizing known Ukrainian Nazi collaborators and weaponizing them as domestic anti-communist shock troops. The post-war immigration wave included the grandfather of Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, who functioned as one of Hitler’s top Ukrainain propagandists inside Nazi-occupied Poland.

Though Canadian officialdom has worked to suppress this sordid record, it has resurfaced in dramatic fashion through Hunka’s appearance in parliament and the unsettling contents of his online diaries.

“WE WELCOMED GERMAN SOLDIERS WITH JOY”

The March 2011 edition of the journal of the Association of Ukrainian Ex-Combatants in the US contains an unsettling diary entry which had gone unnoticed until recently.

Authored by Yaroslav Hunka, the journal consisted of proud reflections on volunteering for the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS Galicia. Hunka decribed the Nazi Wehrmacht as “mystical German knights” when they first arrived in his hometown of Berezhany, and recalled his own service in the Waffen-SS as the happiest time in his life.

“In my sixth grade,” he wrote, “out of forty students, there were six Ukrainians, two Poles, and the rest were Jewish children of refugees from Poland. We wondered why they were running away from such a civilized Western nation as the Germans.”

The Jewish Virtual Library details the extermination of Berezhany’s Jewish population at the hands of the “civilized” Germans: “In 1941 at the end of Soviet occupation 12,000 Jews were living in Berezhany, most of them refugees fleeing the horrors of the Nazi war machine in Europe. During the Holocaust, on Oct. 1, 1941, 500–700 Jews were executed by the Germans in the nearby quarries. On Dec. 18, another 1,200, listed as poor by the Judenrat, were shot in the forest. On Yom Kippur 1942 (Sept. 21), 1,000–1,500 were deported to Belzec and hundreds murdered in the streets and in their homes. On Hanukkah (Dec. 4–5) hundreds more were sent to Belzec and on June 12, 1943, the last 1,700 Jews of the ghetto and labor camp were liquidated, with only a few individuals escaping. Less than 100 Berezhany Jews survived the war.”

When Soviet forces held control of Berezhany, Hunka said he and his neighbors longed for the arrival of Nazi Germany. “Every day,” he recalled, “we looked impatiently in the direction of the Pomoryany (Lvov) with the hope that those mystical German knights, who give bullets to the hated Lyakhs are about to appear.” (Lyakh is a derogatory Ukrainian term for Poles).

In July 1941, when the Nazi German army entered Berezhany, Hunka breathed a sigh of relief. “We welcomed the German soldiers with joy,” he wrote. “People felt a thaw, knowing that there would no longer be that dreaded knocking on the door in the middle of the night, and at least it would be possible to sleep peacefully now.”

Two years later, Hunka joined the First Division of the Galician SS 14th Grenadier Brigade – a unit formed under the personal orders of Heinrich Himmler. When Himmler inspected the Ukrainian volunteers in May 1943 (below), he was accompanied by Otto Von Wachter, the Nazi-appointed governor of Galicia who established the Jewish ghetto in Krakow.

“Your homeland has become so much more beautiful since you have lost – on our initiative, I must say – those residents who were so often a dirty blemish on Galicia’s good name, namely the Jews…” Himmler reportedly told the Ukrainian troops. “I know that if I ordered you to liquidate the Poles … I would be giving you permission to do what you are eager to do anyway.”

“HITLER’S ELITE TORTURERS AND MURDERERS HAVE BEEN PASSED ON RMCP ORDERS”

The Ukrainian Canadian newsletter lamented on April 1, 1948, “some [of the new citizens] are outright Nazis who served in the German army and police. It is reported that individuals tattoooed with the dread[ed] SS, Hitler’s elite torturers and murderers have been passed on RCMP orders and after being turned down by screening agencies in Europe.”

The journal described the unreformed Nazis as anticommunist shock troops whose “‘ideological leaders’ are already busy fomenting WWIII, propagating a new world holocaust in which Canada will perish.”

In 1997, the Canadian branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Center charged the Canadian government with having admitted over 2000 veterans of the 14th Volunteer Waffen-SS Grenadier Division.

That same year, 60 Minutes released a special, “Canada’s Dark Secret,” revealing that some 1000 Nazi SS veterans from Baltic states had been granted citizenship by Canada after the war. Irving Abella, a Canadian historian, told 60 Minutes that the easiest way to get into the country “was by showing the SS tattoo. This proved that you were an anti-Communist.”

Abella also alleged that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (Justin’s father) explained to him that his government kept silent about the Nazi immigrants “because they were afraid of exacerbating relationships between Jews and Eastern European ethnic communities.”

Yaroslav Hunka was among the post-war wave of Ukrainian Nazi veterans welcomed by Canada. According to the city council website of Berezhany, he arrived in Ontario in 1954 and promptly “became a member of the fraternity of soldiers of the 1st Division of the UNA, affiliated to the World Congress of Free Ukrainians.”

Also among the new generation of Ukrainian Canadians was Michael Chomiak, the grandfather of Canada’s second-most-powerful official, Chrystia Freeland. Throughout her career as a journalist and Canadian diplomat, Freeland has advanced her grandfather’s legacy of anti-Russian agitation, while repeatedly exalting wartime Nazi collaborators during public events.

CANADA WELCOMES HITLER’S TOP UKRAINIAN PROPAGANDISTS……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. more https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/01/canadas-honoring-of-nazi-vet-exposes-ottawas-longstanding-ukraine-policy/

October 2, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, politics, Reference, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Vatican at U.N. : Risk of nuclear war is ‘at its highest in generations’

September 27, 2023, By Justin McLellan, Catholic News Service, https://catholicreview.org/vatican-at-u-n-risk-of-nuclear-war-is-at-its-highest-in-generations/

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — The international community must cooperate to advance disarmament rather than embrace the “false security” offered by nuclear weapons, the Vatican’s foreign minister said.

Speaking Sept. 26 during a high-level meeting on the elimination of nuclear weapons at the U.N. General Assembly in New York, Archbishop Paul R. Gallagher, the Vatican foreign minister, called eliminating nuclear weapons a “moral imperative.”

“Regrettably, the risk of nuclear war is at its highest in generations, featuring unconscionable threats of nuclear use, while an arms race runs unabated,” he said.

The archbishop lamented how countries “squander resources needed for pressing development concerns on nuclear weapons,” and said countries have “abandoned much of the arms control and disarmament structure that underpins international security.”

“In this context, it is clear that nuclear-weapons states are increasing reliance on nuclear deterrence” rather than disarmament, he said.

Archbishop Gallagher called for states to adopt disarmament measures including no-first-use policies, treaties managing materials that can undergo fission and assurances that nuclear-weapon states will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against states that do not possess them.

The same day, he also spoke during general debate at the opening of the U.N. General Assembly session, criticizing the “crumbling trust among nations” in recent years and how at the United Nations and other international bodies, “richer, more powerful countries attempt to impose their own worldview on poorer countries, promoting alien, cultural values they do not share.”

“The international community must maintain the universality of global multilateral forums and not turn them into clubs reserved for a few elites who think alike, and where some are simply tolerated as long as they do not bother anyone,” he said.

Archbishop Gallagher also called for legal instruments to regulate artificial intelligence, particularly AI-powered lethal autonomous weapons systems, and for religious freedom to be upheld worldwide.

“The true litmus test to see if human rights are being protected is the degree to which people have freedom of religion or belief in a country,” he said. “Religious freedom is one of the absolute minimum requirements necessary to live in dignity.”

September 28, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Pope says world on brink of nuclear war like 1962 Cuban missile crisis

‘A world free of nuclear arms is possible and necessary,’ pontiff says

Beyza Binnur Donmez |20.09.2023 https://www.aa.com.tr/en/politics/pope-says-world-on-brink-of-nuclear-war-like-1962-cuban-missile-crisis/2996411

GENEVA

Pope Francis warned Tuesday that the world is on the brink of a nuclear war like the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

Francis conveyed the message at an international conference in Oslo commemorating the 60th anniversary of Pope John XXIII’s influential encyclical Pacem in Terris.

In his message, according to Vatican News, he said the conference is taking place “as our world continues to be in the grip of a third world war fought piecemeal, and, in the tragic case of the conflict in Ukraine, not without the threat of recourse to nuclear weapons.”

He drew a comparison between the present moment and the time that preceded the publication of Pacem in Terris, where the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 brought the world perilously close to nuclear destruction.

Urging the conference to focus on the sections of Pacem in Terris that address disarmament and the ways to achieve long-lasting peace, the pontiff said that “a world free of nuclear arms is possible and necessary.”

He also recalled his statement from the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in 2019, when he said that “the use of atomic energy for purposes of war is immoral, just as the possessing of nuclear weapons is immoral.”

Regarding conventional arms, he said that they “should be used for defensive purposes only and not directed to civilian targets.”

September 21, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

On The Idiotic Notion That It’s Brave To Support Nuclear Brinkmanship In Ukraine

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE. SEP 20, 2023 https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/on-the-idiotic-notion-that-its-brave?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=137202849&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&utm_medium=email

During a Sunday appearance on Face the Nation to plug his new Zelensky movie, actor Sean Penn decried the “cowardice” of the US government in its caution around provoking a nuclear exchange with its proxy warfare in Ukraine.

“It is my absolute feeling that the caution with which the United States has pledged support, which seemed, in my reading of February 2022 was a, like a lean on in the fear of nuclear conflict, something I think all of us should look very carefully at and understand that, of course, is possible,” Penn said. “And that’s to be concerning. The likelihood is extremely low. And as one of our witnesses in the film says, you know, are we going to let a gangster with nuclear weapons dictate the way we live?”

Penn emotionally lamented the fact that the Biden administration did not pour F-16 warplanes into Ukraine from the very beginning of the conflict, initially fearing the move to be too escalatory. Describing this hesitation, Penn said that “at some point, caution becomes cowardice.”

As you might expect, the interviewer refrained from challenging Penn on his claim that the likelihood of nuclear war is “extremely low” in spite of his acknowledgement that it’s a real possibility, or on his claim that resisting increasing the likelihood of nuclear war is an act of cowardice.

Sean Penn has been one of Hollywood’s most egregious empire apologists for some time now (in 2020 he told CNN that “there is no greater humanitarian force on the planet than the United States military”), but even by his standards these comments about nuclear brinkmanship are remarkably odious.

There’s this obnoxious idea that comes up in mainstream political discourse about Ukraine that an aversion to nuclear brinkmanship is somehow cowardly, and that being willing to risk the life of every terrestrial organism advancing US strategic objectives is somehow an act of courage.

We saw this back in July from Paul Massaro, an advisor to the US government’s Helsinki Commission and a minor celebrity in online Zelenskyite circles. During this year’s “Captive Nations Summit” with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, Massaro mocked westerners for being “fearful” of proxy warfare in Ukraine leading to nuclear warfare.

“I think the biggest thing is fear, I think we’re fearful,” Massaro said. “It’s very funny to me, because you meet Ukrainians, not a single Ukrainian is fearful. You talk to Ukrainians it’s like ‘What if the Russians use nuclear weapons?’, they’re like ‘We’ll keep fighting, we’ll win.’ You know it’s only the westerners that are like ‘Oh my god, I’m over here in California and what if the Russians use nuclear weapons?’ You know, it’s almost pathetic.”

It’s a common theme. Any time you talk publicly about the risk of the continually escalating war in Ukraine leading to nuclear catastrophe you’ll get empire apologists calling you a coward and saying we all need to be brave and stand up to the big bully Putin. And it’s just such a disgusting perversion of what courage actually is and what it looks like.

Empire loyalists often talk about nuclear brinkmanship like it’s something courageous that they personally are doing, as though gambling every terrestrial life on strategic grand chessboard maneuverings is a brave risk that could only hurt them. If you think you are brave for risking the life of everyone on earth to advance your personal geopolitical agendas, you might be a malignant narcissist, because you think the world revolves around you, and other lives exist only as props to support your main character adventures.

Hardly any human on this planet gives a shit who governs Crimea or the Donbass — and exactly zero of the plants and animals do — but people like Sean Penn and Paul Massaro think they have every right to not only gamble all their lives on a bid to control that outcome, but to call themselves courageous for doing so. Imagine being so self-absorbed you think you’re a brave hero for putting the lives of Africans, Asians, and South Americans on the betting table who’ve never even heard of Donetsk or Luhansk and don’t care who governs them, as well as every non-human life on earth.

I mean, the absolute arrogance. The fucking gall. It’s as emotionally stunted and infantile a perspective as you could possibly come up with, but these are the people whose worldview is shaping outcomes on this planet. These are the sort of people who are setting the trajectory of our species as a collective.

The mainstream western political consensus is a sickness of the mind. Its existence should make us all want to fall to our knees and beg the forgiveness of every life on this earth that it imperils.

September 21, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics, USA | Leave a comment

Kiev orders closure of Christian churches

https://www.rt.com/russia/583031-kiev-orthodox-church-crackdown/ 17 Sept 23

Ukrainian Orthodox Church property is being seized over “ties to Moscow”

Kiev Mayor Vitaly Klitschko on Friday ordered the closure of 74 churches belonging to the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), citing its alleged “direct ties” to the Moscow Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Klitschko’s decree is similar to that used to seize the Kiev Pechersk Lavra, or Monastery of the Caves, which Ukrainian police stormed last month. The world-famous holy site, which is nearly 1,000 years old, was handed over to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, a rival organization set up by the government in 2018.

The Lavra is technically state property but the church administered it under a 2013 agreement, which Kiev declared null and void earlier this year, claiming that the UOC violated it by having ties to “enemy nation” Russia. Ukrainian courts rejected the UOC’s appeals.

The newly sequestered sites may be handed over to the OCU or the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which is in communion with Rome, or could even be demolished as “illegal objects” given the government’s annulment of lease and use contracts.

Back in March, President Vladimir Zelensky called the seizure of the Lavra “a move to strengthen our spiritual independence” and accused the UOC of being a tool of Russia. A third of Ukraine’s regions have outrightly banned the UOC so far.

Moscow has accused Kiev of persecuting the canonical Orthodox church and Washington for tacitly approving Ukraine’s actions. The US State Department, which produces an annual “religious freedom” report, has never commented on Kiev’s campaign against the UOC. The reports published so far contain references only to meetings with representatives of the government-backed OCU.

September 20, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics, Ukraine | Leave a comment

The US Air Force Is Clearing Out Jungles In The Pacific To Prepare For War With China

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, SEP 14, 2023 https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-us-air-force-is-clearing-out?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=137027034&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&utm_medium=email

The US Air Force is clearing out jungles in the Pacific and replacing them with airfields for its coming war with China,
because there exist people on this earth who look at a jungle and think, “This should be replaced with an airfield to prepare for a war with China.”

There are people on this earth who say, “You know the world would be a much better place if all these trees and exotic insects and birds were replaced with long stretches of concrete lined with nuclear bombers on high alert.”

There are people on this earth who see bulldozing rainforests to make way for war planes as much simpler and easier than just making peace.

There are people on this earth who would rather stare down the barrel of nuclear armageddon than turn and stare at themselves.

There are people on this earth who would light the skies on fire before they’d take even a minute to just be here now.

There are people on this earth who would rather destroy everything than make peace with anything.

There are people on this earth who look at the staggering beauty of the natural world and think how wonderful it would be if they could tear it all down and funnel it into a factory to make Tomahawk missiles.

The biosphere is dying,
and we are hurtling toward nuclear war,
and it is so very, very heartbreaking,
and yet even in the midst of that heartbreak
nature shines as majestically as ever,
and some moments all you can do is take in the beauty
and take it as your solemn, sacred duty to appreciate it while it lasts,
and look at the trees and the bugs and the birds and the critters
who never had anything to do with this madness,
and bow as deeply as your body can bow,
and say I’m sorry.
I’m so sorry.

September 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

If The US Really Were What It Pretends To Be

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, SEP 12, 2023 https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/if-the-us-really-was-what-it-pretends?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=136958632&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&utm_medium=email

It’s wild to consider how many of the world’s problems would not exist if the US really was the thing it advertises itself as.

Ukraine would not be at war right now, because the US empire would not have provoked that war, since the US really would be an upholder of peace and international order.

The world would not be staring down the barrel of nuclear armageddon, because the US really would be a normal country that respects the sovereignty of other nations instead of the hub of a globe-spanning undeclared empire which keeps ramping up aggression against nuclear-armed states who refuse to consent to its planetary rule.

China would not be preparing for war, because the US military really would be used for the defense of the United States instead of rapidly encircling the US empire’s top geopolitical rival with massive amounts of war machinery.

The middle east would not have spent the 21st century being ripped to pieces by western aggression, because the US really would care about the lives of the people who live there and not just pretend to in order to promote regime change interventionism.

Mountains of human corpses would not have been amassed in Yemen by violence, starvation and disease, because the US really would oppose tyrannical dictatorships like Saudi Arabia instead of enthusiastically facilitating their war crimes.

The information ecosystem of the western world would not be strangled by empire propaganda, internet censorship and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, because the US really would value free speech and free thought instead of churning out a continual barrage of mass-scale psychological operations designed to dominate the way people think, speak, work, act and vote.

Julian Assange would not be languishing in prison, because the US really would support press freedoms instead of working to set a legal precedent normalizing the persecution of journalists for reporting inconvenient facts.

The people of the United States would not be floundering in poverty and broken infrastructure, because they really would live in a democracy that allows them to influence government policy instead of an oligarchy rigged to benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of normal human beings.

The US would not be a tyrannical police state with the largest incarceration rate on the planet, because the US government really would care about civil rights and liberty instead of only caring about the profits that can be harvested via prison slavery and private prisons from those citizens who don’t make good cogs in the capitalist machine.

Developing nations would be thriving a lot more, because the US really would support their national sovereignty and independence instead of doing whatever’s necessary to facilitate the imperialist extraction of their wealth.

Human civilization would be far more just and equitable than it currently is, because the US really would value every nation’s right to forge its own path, and therefore would not have spent generations aggressively stomping out every attempt to move toward socialism everywhere in the world.

The planet would not be circled by hundreds of foreign US military bases and continually terrorized by US wars of aggression, proxy conflicts, CIA coups and starvation sanctions, because all the US government secrecy which makes this malfeasance possible wouldn’t exist, since the US really would value truth and transparency instead of power and domination.

The world would be a much more healthy and harmonious place if the US really was the peace-loving, tyranny-opposing democracy that it and all its propaganda systems frame it as. But because the US government is actually the most tyrannical regime on earth and values nothing apart from its own ability to dominate as many members of the human species as possible, we live in a world of far greater peril and abuse than we otherwise would.

I write so much about the US empire because that’s just what you find yourself doing when you set out to describe the problems of our world with an open mind; trace those problems back to their origins, and many of them revolve around this strange and profoundly abusive power structure which manages to evade much criticism and scrutiny because it has the most sophisticated soft power narrative control systems ever devised.

The US empire depends on keeping the world asleep to its abusiveness. And the world depends on everyone waking up to it.

September 13, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics, USA | Leave a comment

Japan’s Insane Immoral, Illegal Radioactive Dumping

CounterPunch, BY ROBERT HUNZIKER 8 Sept 23

Japan cannot possibly outlive the atrocity of dumping radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. In fact, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) is an example of how nuclear meltdowns negatively impact the entire world, as its toxic wastewater travels across the world in ocean currents. The dumping of stored toxic wastewater from the meltdown in 2011 officially started on August 24^th, 2023. Meanwhile, the country restarts some of the nuclear plants that were shut down when the Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Power Plant exploded.

Fukushima’s broken reactors are an example of why nuclear energy is a trap that can’t handle global warming or extreme natural disasters. Nuclear is an accident waiting to happen, for several reasons, including victimization by forces of global warming.

According to Dr. Paul Dorfman, chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group, former secretary to the UK Scientific Advisory Committee on Internal Radiation, and Visiting Fellow, University of Sussex: “It’s important to understand that nuclear is very likely to be a significant climate casualty. For cooling purposes nuclear reactors need to be situated by large bodies of water, etc. …” Essentially, global warming is nuclear energy’s Waterloo; it has already seriously endangered France’s 56 nuclear reactors with partial shutdowns because of extreme global warming. Nuclear reactors cannot survive global warming. See “the nuclear energy trap” link at the end of this article.

TEPCO’s treacherous act of dumping radioactive water into a wide-open ocean is a deliberate violation of human decency, as it clearly violates essential provisions of the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) General Safety Guide No. 8 (GSG-8).

Japan should be forced to stop its diabolical exercise of potentially destroying precious life. Shame on the IAEA and shame on the member countries of the G7 for endorsing this travesty. They’ve christened the ocean an “open sewer.” Hark! Come one, come all, dump your trash, open toxic spigots, bring chemicals, bring fertilizers, bring plastic, bring radioactive waste that’s impossible to dispose… the oceans are open sewers. It’s free! Yes, it’s free but only weak-minded people would allow a broken-down crippled nuclear power plant to dump radioactive waste into the world’s ocean. It is a testament to human frailty, weakness, insipience, not courage.

According to Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D. Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, TEPCO’s ALPS-treated Radioactive Water Dumping Plan Violates Essential Provisions of IAEA’s General Safety Guide No. 8 (GSG-8) and Corresponding Requirements in Other IAEA Documents, June 28, 2023: “The IAEA is an important United Nations institution. Like the rest of the Expert Panel, the author of this paper has been reluctant to criticize the IAEA. Yet, its outright refusal to apply its own guidance documents in full measure is stark. Its constricted view of the dumping plan has allowed it to evade its responsibilities to many countries. Its eagerness to assure the public that harm will be “negligible” has been carried to the point of grossly overstating well-known facts about tritium. The serious lapses of the IAEA in the Fukushima radioactive water matter have made criticism unavoidable.”………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

“At high doses, ionizing radiation can cause immediate damage to a person’s body, including, at very high doses, radiation sickness and death. At lower doses, ionizing radiation can cause health effects such as cardiovascular disease and cataracts, as well as cancer. It causes cancer primarily because it damages DNA, which can lead to cancer-causing gene mutations.” (Source: National Cancer Institute)

How is it possible to justify dumping any amount of radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean? Is the world’s consciousness so low, so lacking a moral compass, that it’s okay to dump the most toxic material on the planet into the oceans?

Stop destroying the oceans!

And please contemplate the dire ramifications of the nuclear energy trap. more https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/09/08/japans-insane-immoral-illegal-radioactive-dumping/?fbclid=IwAR0IaIETBoTgZeDUmJ3caeJAlFFWGPrdCtsqt5oR0A7XP8NEl1fKqLJwu54

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.

September 12, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, oceans, Religion and ethics, wastes | Leave a comment

“A world free from nuclear weapons is possible”

World Council 0f Churches, 11 Sept 23

Peter Prove, director of the World Council of Churches Commission of the Churches on International Affairs, spoke on a nuclear weapons-free world during “The Audacity of Peace” gathering in Berlin.

Prove, part of a panel discussion, noted that a world free from nuclear weapons is not just possible—but necessary, and he endorsed the comprehensive approach of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as a legal means to achieve this goal.

“Nuclear weapons are the most indiscriminately and catastrophically destructive category of weapons ever created by human beings,” Prove said. “They are designed to destroy entire cities, along with everyone and everything in them, and their use poisons the environment for thousands upon thousands of years.”

Prove also noted that the World Council of Churches has also adopted a position of categorical opposition to nuclear weapons since its founding in 1948.

“The WCC has continued to call for the complete elimination of nuclear weapons since that time, through its governing bodies, functional commissions, and member churches,” he said. “While the absolute number of nuclear weapons has declined since its height during the Cold War, it only amounts to a reduction in the number of times that the world’s population centres could be destroyed.”…………………………more https://www.oikoumene.org/news/a-world-free-from-nuclear-weapons-is-possible

September 12, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

If Everyone Understood That The US Deliberately Provoked This War

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, SEP 7, 2023 https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/if-everyone-understood-that-the-us?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=136816741&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&utm_medium=email

War is the single worst thing humans do. The most insane. The most cruel. The most destructive. The most traumatic. The least sustainable. Those who knowingly choose to steer humanity into more war when it could be avoided are the worst people in the world, without exception.

And there are mountains of extensively documented evidence that that’s exactly what the drivers of the US-centralized empire did in Ukraine. That’s why so many western analysts and experts spent years warning that the actions of western powers were going to lead Ukraine into disaster, and it’s why US empire managers keep openly boasting about how much their proxy warfare in Ukraine advances US interests. They knowingly steered Ukraine into war to advance their own geostrategic interests while being fully aware that no powerful nation would ever permit the kinds of foreign threats the west was amassing on its borders, and then they intervened in the early days of the war to prevent the outbreak of peace.

If there was widespread awareness of these facts, the US war machine would lose support around the world — not just for its actions in this one war, but for all future wars as well. Which is why so much energy goes into making sure this does not become a widespread understanding.

The official mainstream narrative throughout the western world is that Putin invaded Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom. That’s the actual, literal belief about this war that the western political/media class works to instill in the western public. Anyone who counters this self-evidently ridiculous assessment with facts and evidence gets branded a Russian agent and swarmed with pro-US trolls on social media, and loses all hope of securing a major platform in any mass media.

And it’s important to notice that shutting down all mature adult analysis of the events which led to the war in this way does not actually save a single Ukrainian life. It doesn’t make Russia any more likely to stop fighting and withdraw its troops. All it does is prevent people from seeing the US empire for what it really is. It isn’t being done to protect Ukrainians, it’s done to protect the empire.

The worst thing that could possibly happen to the information interests of the US empire would be for a critical mass of people to become aware that all this death and destruction in Ukraine could have been avoided by the US-centralized empire behaving less aggressively on Russia’s doorstep, and that those aggressions were instead increased with the goal of advancing US strategic interests on the world stage. If everyone really, deeply understood that all this suffering, all these mountains of human corpses could simply not have happened if the US hadn’t been feverishly focused on securing planetary domination at all cost, the US would no longer be able to manufacture consent for its agendas. It would no longer be able to whip up international support for its actions against its enemies. It would no longer be able to persuade the world to help prop up the hegemony of the dollar.

But because the US empire has the most advanced soft power apparatus that has ever existed, hardly anyone understands this. Not even the people who understand that the west provoked this war have deeply grappled with exactly what that means on a visceral emotional level, for the most part. It’s more of a superficial intellectual understanding for most, without really grokking into the horror of it all, really letting the enraging nature of what the US empire did wash over them.

The west was deceived into supporting yet another evil American war, this time with the added dimension of nuclear brinkmanship threatening the life of every terrestrial organism. All to suck Moscow into another draining military quagmire so war plans can be safely drawn up against China while advancing US energy interests in Europe and building support for US military alliances. It’s almost too evil to take in. There aren’t really words for it.

And that’s one of the reasons it’s hard to get people to take in exactly what happened with Ukraine: people have a hard time wrapping their minds around the idea that anyone could be that evil, much less the government we’ve been trained by Hollywood to think of as sane and humanitarian.

It’s about as monstrous a thing as you could possibly come up with. Yet here it is, still unfolding in all its blood-spattered glory.

Our task then is to help people see this and understand it, not just intellectually but emotionally. Help people really grasp deep down the horrors the US empire unleashed upon our world with the war in Ukraine; the suffering; the death; the existential danger. We can’t fight the empire on our own, but we can each do what we can to help weaken the consent manufacturing machine it uses to rule and terrorize the world.

September 10, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics, USA, weapons and war | 2 Comments

The Four Billionaires Who Want to Control the Universe

SCHEERPOST, September 8, 2023

In Jonathan Taplin’s new book, “The End of Reality: How Four Billionaires are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto,” the internet innovation expert delves into activities of the gang-of-four powerful oligarchs: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg and Marc Andreesen, breaking down their increasing profits and infinite ambitions to control and influence domestic and global affairs while sending our technology innovation in a profit-driven, dystopian direction, corrupting both sides of the political aisle. Host Robert Scheer’s question: “Wait a minute, what else is new” in capitalism?”

Taplin’s distinction between the oligarchs of new and old is that the modern tech billionaires are granted immunity for content published on their platforms through Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Taplin describes the control these oligarchs possess over the speech dictated on their platforms, “So here [Musk] controls this platform, Twitter, and what he wants pushed gets pushed, what he wants suppressed, gets suppressed. And nobody even doubts that that’s happening.”

Taplin also emphasizes that there is nowhere to turn within the party duopoly to crack down on these monopolies and thus — leaving it to us, the people “getting screwed” — to do something about it.

“If you tried to do a very powerful regulation and break up a Google or break up a Meta or break up one of these companies, there would be howls from both sides of the aisle because there’s so much money being spread around by these companies that, you know, the Democrats and the Republicans are both in the pocket of the big companies.

Video Transcript

Speaker 2………………………………………….there’s a lot the technology could do to save the planet and help reform our country and make us energy independent. But these guys are not interested in that. And so I’ll just take it one at a time and tell you what they’re thinking.

So we start with Musk. So Musk is a believer that the Earth is doomed and that we need to have another planet for our species to move to. And he’s chosen the planet of Mars. The trip to Mars, even with the latest rocketry, would take about 14 months. It would cost 10 trillion to move about 20 people up there to Mars. And then you’d have to build a kind of biosphere like Space Dome to live in because you couldn’t be outside because the radiation levels are so high that you would get cancer in 5 minutes. You would have to import all your oxygen since there’s no oxygen on Mars and you would live in an extraordinarily hostile environment as opposed to trying to use the $10 trillion to fix the problems here on Earth. Musk himself would make probably about 2 trillion on that deal because the deal he has with NASA, he makes about a 30% profit on every rocket flight he makes for them. And, you know, here’s a man who claims he’s a libertarian but is actually a crony capitalist. Certainly SpaceX has only one customer, and that’s NASA. The U.S. government and the taxpayers would be paying the 10 trillion to get to Mars. His other companies, such as his satellite company, which he is using to provide, for instance, communications to the Ukrainian army, as Ronan Farrow pointed out…………………………………………………………….

So let’s let’s go to Peter Thiel next. So Peter Thiel runs a company called Palantir. Palantir is the premier surveillance capitalism company in the world………………

Jonathan Taplin: And then then you’ve got Marc Andreessen. So Marc Andreessen is the most important venture capitalist in America. Lives in Silicon Valley and funded Facebook for, you know, funded, Instagram funded many of the early social media startups was the first really important guy into crypto. Solano is his company. Crypto.com is a company. Opensea is a company that he founded…………………………………………………………………………

the money that used to flow to the Democratic coffers from the unions was declining. And so they found two sources of new money. One was Wall Street and the other was Silicon Valley…………………………………………………the the laws, the digital laws that Bill Clinton and Al Gore, the champion of the information superhighway put through, were so beneficial to the Internet companies, early Internet companies that we have never been able to claw them back. So. Facebook and Twitter live under a regime called Safe Harbor. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which basically says that they are not producers of content. They are simply a platform on which individuals post content and that they should have no responsibility for any speaker on their platform. So when Elon Musk decides, once he takes over Twitter to become, as he called it, a free speech absolutist, and he says no longer were the neo-Nazis be prohibited from being on my platform, then Twitter gets flooded with neo-Nazi propaganda. ……………………nobody can sue him for the hate speech that is on Twitter, on X because he has safe harbor……………………you can’t have a libel suit against Twitter. You can’t have a libel suit against Facebook.

Robert Scheer………………………….Section 230, which said that these people are basically neutral carriers. They’re not publishers, therefore they can’t be sued. That’s how Facebook and Google get this tremendous freedom……………………………. And and now Elon Musk is taking it in a different direction. He’s presenting himself as a champion of free speech and bringing other people in. But the real problem is the money. The real problem is that the money talks. Right.

……………………..And Google has, in effect, a monopoly. And, you know, and really what we’re up against is and what the solution sounds very old fashioned, but nobody brings it up is regulation. ………………………. I have no argument with you about the book. My argument with is why only these four guys? Because I just see a whole system now of massive concentration of wealth, extreme income inequality, corruption of everything. Certainly our political system. Really? Why my thieves that are called billionaires and the Democrats and Republicans are right in there complicit and enablers.

Jonathan Taplin:………………………………………………. So what these guys have done and what they promulgated with social media and I would put Facebook and Twitter at the center of that problem is they’ve created a world in which there is no shared set of facts………………………………………..You’re getting new information from social media and from a small group of friends who send them things that come from these incredibly random sources, whether it’s Q Anon or something else. And and part of this book is what is it that draws people down the rabbit holes of conspiracies? So in that sense, I believe these people are responsible for that and they are protected from anyone calling them out because of this safe harbor. …………………………………..Elon Musk is undoubtedly the most powerful voice on the right. He has 150 million followers on Twitter. ………..And the problem is that these people, especially Thiel and Musk have a very anti-democratic point of view……………………………………………………..

Robert Scheer……………………………………………………………………. I’m just asking you to put on your bipartisan cap. And I think the lesson of not that your book doesn’t call things accurately, but we live in an incredibly corrupt society. And the enemies of democracy are bipartisan. ……………………………..

Jonathan Taplin:…………………………………… So take Musk. So here he controls this platform, Twitter, and what he wants pushed gets pushed, what he wants suppressed, gets suppressed. And nobody even doubts that that’s happening. ……………………….. The problem is not just that he has that control, but he also has the sole provider of rockets to the space station. He is the sole provider with StarLink of Satellite communication capability to many armies around the world. And he personally has made decisions that says, well, these these people shouldn’t get communications in this place…………………….

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Jonathan Taplin: But here’s the thing. The scientists that worked on the bomb were doing it regardless of the ethical implications of their work. And it was only after the bomb was dropped that Oppenheimer had doubts. He began to think, Oh, maybe that was a screw up. And when he saw the pictures coming back from Hiroshima and he realized what he had done, I believe some of these same things are happening today in AI. In other words, I believe that the implications, you know, of this are such that they won’t really know what’s going to happen until it’s too late. And that worries me.

………………………………………….. And again, the book is The End of Reality How for Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto. And that’s really the power of this book. It’s that fantasy I happen to stress. ……………………………………… https://scheerpost.com/2023/09/08/the-four-billionaires-who-want-to-control-the-universe/

September 9, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics, resources - print | Leave a comment

Act, or die: the climate and nuclear juggernaut

perhaps the most lethal human branch has become the media, which with few exceptions turned into a global propaganda machine skilful in distorting facts, promoting conflicts, manufacturing untruths, concealing avenues to peace and promoting wars in the tradition of Goebbels.

By Andrew Glikson Sep 7, 2023 https://johnmenadue.com/act-or-die-the-climate-nuclear-juggernaut/

Under the guise of lies and cover-ups, the global powers to be have set the stage for the unthinkable, a world-wide hair-trigger human suicide system taking much of nature with it. With the exception abstract ideas or experimental attempts no actual steps are being taken to slow down, or even reverse, the inexorable rise of atmospheric greenhouse gases, now rising into Miocene-like levels of >400 parts per million CO₂within the century, the fastest rise rate identified in the geological record.

Saturating the atmosphere with toxic gases, coating the land with carbon and plastic particles and acidifying the oceans amounts to the poisoning of the biosphere.

Nor are steps undertaken to try and dismantle the global doomsday fleet of more than 12,700 nuclear warheads, where space and the oceans have become nuclear playgrounds, enough to render large parts of the Earth uninhabitable.

The criminal insanity of political, military, strategic, economic and scientific leaders, matched only by the naive blindness of billions of people, is consistent with what has been referred to as the ‘Fermi Paradox’ ─ the apparent absence of signals from technological civilisations in the Milky Way, interpreted in terms of a self-destruction of such civilisations.

Even at this stage the litany of denial and betrayal never stops. Political leaders who have vowed to adhere to the science shift to promote the mining and export fossil fuels, as if greenhouse gases do not disperse in the atmosphere world-wide, or they adopt nuclear weaponry as soon as they reach power. A suicidal element in human nature?

While the multitudes are fixated on domestic issues and regional troubles, including genocidal conflicts and in corners of the world (Ukraine, Chechnya, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Mein-Mar, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, and other), the price of maintaining an Orwellian ‘peace and stability ’, including ethnic cleansing, drowning refugees, economic hardships, misanthropic violence, football games, the tour de France, tennis rackets, relatively few are concerned with the deadly games of empire. Even symbolic gestures toward original people, like the “Voice” are being objected to.

As in the history of Athens and Sparta, the stronger force is more inclined to start a war. Like schoolboys seeking association with bully alpha males so do weaker nations look for the protection of an empire, which end up using them as cannon fodder. It is more difficult to understand why, given the scientific and empirical evidence of global heating, intelligent people are prepared to sacrifice the future of their off-springs generations to the $multi-trillion fossil fuel industry and their advocates in governments. It would appear that, once representatives acquire real or apparent power, they leave conscience behind, adopting the Faustian bargain.

“Where does responsibility lie? Where humans are caught up in the anthropogenic genome, not enough “good” angels exist. Where competition for food, shelter and reproduction are inherent, ethics, compassion and empathy may not be easy to find. Humanity may be more readily detected among small tribes than in large civilisations. A young child born in a bubble has few or no impressions impinging on its brain to respond to. By contrast children exposed to obscene violence and lies paraded on fluorescent screens are more likely to grow into distorted brain-washed multitudes.

But perhaps the most lethal human branch has become the media, which with few exceptions turned into a global propaganda machine skilful in distorting facts, promoting conflicts, manufacturing untruths, concealing avenues to peace and promoting wars in the tradition of Goebbels.

Surprisingly, the only significant resistance to the genocidal behaviour of alpha male-dominated groups has arisen from the not-yet spoiled minds of children, led by the young Greta Thunberg.

September 8, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

US Officials Keep Boasting About How Much The Ukraine War Serves US Interests

Last November the imperial war machine-funded think tank Center for European Policy Analysis published an article titled “It’s Costing Peanuts for the US to Defeat Russia,” subtitled “The cost-benefit analysis of US support for Ukraine is incontrovertible. It’s producing wins at almost every level.”

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, SEP 3, 2023

One of the most glaring plot holes in the official mainstream narrative on Ukraine is the way US officials keep openly boasting that this supposedly unprovoked war which the US is only backing out of the goodness of its heart just so happens to serve US interests tremendously.

In a recent article for the Connecticut Post, Senator Richard Blumenthal assured Americans that “we’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment.”

“For less than 3 percent of our nation’s military budget, we’ve enabled Ukraine to degrade Russia’s military strength by half,” writes Blumenthal. “We’ve united NATO and caused the Chinese to rethink their invasion plans for Taiwan. We’ve helped restore faith and confidence in American leadership — moral and military. All without a single American service woman or man injured or lost, and without any diversion or misappropriation of American aid.”

As Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp recently observed, this type of “investment” talk about Ukraine has been getting more common. Last weekend Senator Mitt Romney called the war “the best national defense spending I think we’ve ever done.”

“We’re losing no lives in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians are fighting heroically against Russia,” Romney said. “We’re diminishing and devastating the Russian military for a very small amount of money … a weakened Russia is a good thing.”

Last month Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell argued that Americans should support the US government’s proxy warfare in Ukraine because “we haven’t lost a single American in this war,” adding that the spending is helping to employ Americans in the military-industrial complex.

“Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons,” McConnell said. “So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.”

McConnell has been talking about how much this war benefits the US since last year. During a speech back in December the ailing swamp monster argued that “the most basic reasons for continuing to help Ukraine degrade and defeat the Russian invaders are cold, hard, practical American interests.”

……………. As we’ve discussed previously, US empire managers have been talking about how much this war serves US interests ever since it began.

In May of last year Congressman Dan Crenshaw said on Twitter that “investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea.”…………

“US spending of 5.6% of its defense budget to destroy nearly half of Russia’s conventional military capability seems like an absolutely incredible investment,” gushed the article’s author Timothy Ash. “If we divide out the US defense budget to the threats it faces, Russia would perhaps be of the order of $100bn-150bn in spend-to-threat. So spending just $40bn a year, erodes a threat value of $100–150bn, a two-to-three time return. Actually the return is likely to be multiples of this given that defense spending, and threat are annual recurring events.”

And of course the mass media have been all aboard the same messaging. A few weeks ago The Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote an article explaining why westerners shouldn’t “feel gloomy” about how things are going in Ukraine, writing the following about how much this war is doing to benefit US interests overseas:

“Meanwhile, for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians)…………………………..

So on one hand the western political/media class have been hammering us in the face with the message that the invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked” and that the US and its allies played no antagonistic role in paving the road to this conflict whatsoever, and on the other hand you’ve got all these empire managers enthusing about how much this war benefits US interests.

Those two narratives seem a wee bit contradictory, do they not?

A critical thinker can reconcile this contradiction in one of two ways. First, they can believe that the world’s most powerful and destructive government is just a passive, innocent witness to the violence in Ukraine, and is only benefitting immensely from the war as a complete coincidence. Second, they can believe the US intentionally provoked this war with the understanding that it would benefit from it.

From where I’m sitting, it’s not difficult to determine which of these is more likely. https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/us-officials-keep-boasting-about?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=136680185&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email

September 4, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, Religion and ethics, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Archbishop Caccia recalls harm done by nuclear energy

The Holy See’s Permanent Observer to the United Nations reiterates Pope Francis’ and Holy See’s stance on nuclear disarmament and testing, at the UN General Assembly.

By Francesca Merlo, https://www.vaticannews.va/en/vatican-city/news/2023-08/archbishop-caccia-permanent-observer-holy-see-united-nations.html 30 Aug 23

Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, the Holy See’s Permanent Observer to the United Nations, echoed Pope Francis’ message regarding nuclear disarmament during the UN’s General Assembly High-level Plenary Meeting commemorating the International Day Against Nuclear Tests (IDANT).

In his address, Archbishop Caccia urged the international community to listen to the “prophetic voices” of nuclear test victims and take decisive steps towards disarmament.

Archbishop Caccia underscored the grave historical reality, saying the Trinity site’s first nuclear-explosive test 78 years ago ignited a dangerous arms race, causing immeasurable harm.

These tests have left a trail of suffering, he said, including “displacement, multigenerational health problems, poisoned food and water” and spiritual disconnection from the Earth.

Indigenous peoples, women, and children have borne the brunt, with minimal assistance provided.

Moral and legal duties

In response, Archbishop Caccia stated that nations relying on nuclear deterrence must fulfill their moral and legal duties to remedy the damages caused by these tests.

He cautioned against the resurgence of nuclear testing, which would heighten global tensions and undermine security.

The Holy See steadfastly supports the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, the culmination of decades of international collaboration

Additionally, the Holy See advocates for reinforcing the nuclear-test ban stipulated in the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).

Pope Francis’ assertion that nuclear weapons cannot underpin an “ethics of fraternity” resonates with this stance.

September 1, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Religion and ethics, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Rocket-Launching Billionaires Promise a New Pie in the Sky

Musk and Bezos are peddling new age-y religious drama of disaster and salvation, says author Mary-Jane Rubenstein.

By Kelly Hayes , TRUTHOUT August 17, 2023

hat we’re getting from both Musk and Bezos is this classically new age-y religious drama of disaster and salvation. They preach, they tell us that the end is near, the disaster is coming, that the world is going to end, but there is another world that everybody can build together, a new world and a place that they’ve never seen and a place that seems totally impossible,” says professor Mary-Jane Rubenstein, author of Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” host Kelly Hayes and Rubenstein discuss the religiosity of “NewSpace,” and how activists can challenge the new “pie in the sky” ideology that billionaires like Musk and Bezos are crafting.

Transcript

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. MJR: So Musk and Bezos are probably the two best known actors in the contemporary corporate space race. As you probably know, Elon Musk wants us to move to Mars. He wants to colonize Mars. Jeff Bezos has a different plan. He thinks Mars is too far away. He wants to build space colonies that are closer to home that are positioned between the moon and the Earth. It would be sort of like living in a mall, a space mall, like a rotating indoor shopping center where the climate is controlled and there’s no real outside. But presumably you’d be able to grow some plants and things like that, and you’d be able to get your food and it would be totally perfect weather all year round and things like that.

So anyway, they have different views about what our lives are going to look like in outer space. Again, Musk has this sort of homesteader ideal that we’re going to terraform Mars and make it habitable for human beings. Bezos wants to keep us a little closer to Earth in these rotating shopping malls. Both of them are convinced that in order for human beings to, well, survive for Elon Musk, or to thrive for Jeff Bezos, we have to leave the Earth. And each of them is using his massive economic status and power to channel ungodly amounts of money and resources into conquering the cosmos so that human beings can have a decent future.

“KH…………………………………………….Bezos’s company Blue Origin and Musk’s SpaceX spent $2 million and $2.4 million, respectively, lobbying for government contracts in 2021. But Musk’s talk of using his vast wealth to “extend the light of consciousness” also helps spin popular mythos around extreme inequality in our times — like a new variation of the Divine Right of Kings. Instead of being chosen by God, men like Musk and Bezos are chosen by the market, and rather than representing an injustice, their absurd wealth supposedly represents our best hope for the future…………………………..

……………………………………… MJR: The environmental damage that the contemporary space race is doing is one of the most under-discussed crises of our contemporary moment.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………….. What I’m trying to say is I don’t think Elon Musk, a private entrepreneur, would have gotten NASA to offload to him so many of its contracts — I don’t think that he would’ve had the wherewithal to set up this massive Starlink Constellation without a big vision that presents itself as humanitarian, as future-oriented, as ideologically pristine, which is to say it’s a vision of the salvation of humanity that’s going to take place on Mars.

And again, once you sort of shake off the ideological patina here, you realize that Mars is terrible. It’s a terrible planet. If you get an invitation to go homestead Mars, probably don’t do it. It’s bad there. It’s really bad there. But I think he needs that vision in order to sell any of it.

KH: So, in Elon Musk, we have a man whose preposterous ideas are propped up by extreme wealth, a cult of personality, and one of the most absurd privatization gambits in U.S. history. But his current endeavors, like those of Jeff Bezos and other men who would like to rule space, are also propped up by some of the same ideas that have allowed the wealthy to loot and pillage the world we currently inhabit.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. MJR I think symbolically and politically and rhetorically, the creation of the Space Force says that we do not agree that space is supposed to be a theater of peace. Rather, it’s supposed to be a theater of war. ………………………

‘……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Capitalism relies on infinite growth. We can’t have infinite growth. We’re on a finite planet. So what we’re seeing right now [are] convulsions of late stage capitalism; it’s realizing it’s reaching limits and is therefore seeking out other planets and using this humanitarian claim as a justification for primarily economic ends. So we need to know that. This is just as much of an ideological ploy as the idea that Spain needed to conquer the Americas in order to save Indian souls or something like that. So I’m recommending some suspicion when it comes to these big grand narratives about the salvation of all of humanity…………………………………………………………… https://truthout.org/audio/rocket-launching-billionaires-promise-a-new-pie-in-the-sky/