In an attempt to awaken fellow citizens, a group called Citizens for Universal Abolition of Nuclear Weapons is holding a march and rally on Sept. 24, meeting at Cal Anderson Park in Seattle at noon and marching to the Henry M. Jackson Federal Building (abolishnuclearweapons.org).
Our members of Congress as well as our president will not act to rid the world of these immoral weapons if we don’t make our voices loud and clear and demand such action.
Antiwar Groups Protest Defense Industry Profiteering in Ukraine, Tyler Walicek, Truthout, 3 May 22,
”……………………………………………….. In the meantime, large-scale real-world protests against the war have erupted on numerous fronts — both within Russia and Ukraine and across the globe. Progressive, pacifist and anti-imperialist groups in the U.S. are no exception, having mobilized their considerable institutional resources to voice their own opposition. Given the unlikelihood of influencing the actions of the Russian government, they’ve targeted the realm in which they are mostly likely to have an impact — namely, U.S. policy. Because of its deep entanglements in the war, the U.S. response could easily be a critical determining factor on the outcome: either negotiation, drawdown and eventual peace, or escalation and sustained bloodshed.
Though the U.S. antiwar movement has never reattained the scale of its Vietnam-era heyday, plenty of groups with antiwar missions are active in the modern day. Many date to the resistance against the U.S.’s imperial expeditions in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s — for example, CODEPINK, the sizeable progressive and feminist antiwar organization, was founded in 2002. The group has been one of the more visible in mounting a response to the Ukraine issue, voicing dissent with the provision of weapons and directing public attention to the geopolitical context of NATO’s aggressive posture in the preceding years.
Truthout reached CODEPINK cofounder and activist Medea Benjamin, a Green Party member and former California Senate candidate, to learn more about the group’s agitational efforts and how antiwar elements in the U.S. might conceivably affect policy. As Benjamin sees it, the effort begins with education and informing the public: counteracting a media apparatus that insistently seeks to justify opening the floodgates of advanced weaponry — sometimes very directly.
“[The idea that weapons and sanctions are necessary] is being pushed by people in the White House and most members of Congress. It’s certainly being pushed by the corporate media,” Benjamin said. (Take The New York Times, for instance, which conceded sanctions may be “harsh,” but deemed they were ultimately “appropriate.” We are left to wonder why the Times didn’t insist the U.S. be so “harshly” sanctioned in the wake of the invasion of Iraq.)
Benjamin underscored the structural incentives: “The weapons companies [are] concerned about the drawing down of U.S. wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq. [The state] sees this as an opportunity to really debilitate Russia.… The ability to bleed the Russian economy and to curtail its reach also means that the U.S. is strengthening its position globally.”
CODEPINK and its allies, galvanized by the war, have busied themselves in a flurry of activity. CODEPINK had in fact already rallied a number of times in protest of rising tensions, before the crisis’s late-February outbreak. Immediately after Russian troops made their first incursion into Ukraine, the organization, along with U.K.-based groups like the Stop the War Coalition, the No to NATO Network and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, held an emergency online panel and rally, bringing together figures like Jeremy Corbyn and historian and writer Vijay Prashad to denounce the war (Corbyn called it “abominable, appalling and unnecessary”), and to call for peace.
CODEPINK’s series of webinars drew thousands — including, as Benjamin described, “representatives from members of parliaments from many governments, including the British, Irish, German, French and Spanish, [and] well-known academics and activists.” In April, Benjamin also hosted another “Stop the War in Ukraine” online rally featuring Noam Chomsky, another appearance from Vijay Prashad, Greek leftist politician Yanis Varoufakis, New Left Review editor Tariq Ali, and other notable voices.
These online events occurred in tandem with real-world rallies — “days of action,” which, Benjamin said, brought together “about 125 different groups around the world.” CODEPINK has long worked beside organizations like the ANSWER Coalition (another large antiwar group in the United States, which has also hosted online conversations). Together with the Black Alliance for Peace, Peace Action, and others, the coalition put together a rally in Washington, D.C.’s Lafayette Square as tensions rose. Further CODEPINK protests took place across various U.S. locales, where volunteers demonstrated, put up flyers and gathered signatures on petitions.
As Benjamin framed it, the core message in conducting this public outreach amounted to posing the questions, “Do you want the war in Ukraine to end? Do you want to save the lives of Ukrainian people? Well, then let’s call for a ceasefire and for serious negotiations.” She feels that this approach is a convincing one: “Once we have a chance to talk to people about it, we do get them to our side.”
Benjamin and CODEPINK plan to sustain their current rates of activity. In June, the group is joining the Mass Poor People’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington, D.C. — an effort spearheaded by the Poor People’s Campaign to speak out against militarism and the bloated defense budget, among other systemic issues. Benjamin also highlighted future plans to send activists to protest an upcoming NATO strategic summit in Madrid, along with an international antiwar coalition of considerable size. Their hope is to apply pressure at a critical time: “With the upcoming election in November, I think that we can be part of talking about why this is happening, not allowing Biden to get away with blaming everything on Russia, but instead putting the blame on militarism and the inability to really seriously push for a negotiated solution,” Benjamin told Truthout.
Resolute Nonviolence
Joining CODEPINK at the Madrid NATO summit and elsewhere will be World Beyond War (WBW), a U.S.-based pacifist organization that maintains international chapters, including in Ukraine. David Swanson is WBW’s executive director. In a conversation with Truthout, he described the group’s assiduous organizing efforts. Like CODEPINK, WBW’s current strategy is to inform the public, presenting pacifist arguments for abolishing war, nuclear weaponry and arms dealing. WBW’s output has included innumerable articles, books, interviews, op-eds, videos, podcasts, and other media. In addition, said Swanson, “We’ve done tons of webinars, online and offline educational events. We have lots of speakers, we go and talk to classrooms, go and talk to peace groups that organize events and do tons of the same online.”
To augment the media push, WBW has also directed substantial real-world actions. “The past week, we’ve been doing protests all over the world,” said Swanson. The immediate future will see WBW participate in widespread protests on a global day of action, planned for May 7.“We’ve done these days before, usually in coalition with other groups, sometimes globally, sometimes nationally, trying to do days of events where we have at least small and sometimes large demonstrations or rallies or protests everywhere.”
WBW is also engaging in some more pointed confrontations. In one instance, a WBW advisory board member disrupted an event in Canada by confronting the deputy prime minister with an antiwar, anti-NATO diatribe. Another arm of WBW’s strategy, ongoing for years, is to protest at the physical offices of weapons manufacturers — major beneficiaries of wars that are incentivized to ensure they remain as drawn-out and destructive as possible. WBW will be demonstrating at the next annual meeting of aviation and defense corporation Northrop Grumman. Members aim to draw attention to the key role that the corporation and other arms manufacturers like Lockheed Martin play in “the war on Ukraine from which [they are] proudly profiting,” Swanson said. “There are Congress members proudly profiting from stock ownership in Lockheed Martin.”
Swanson sees the attention that the war on Ukraine has received as an opportunity to buttress opposition to militarism in general — and to flag certain contradictory narratives from U.S. empire and its mouthpieces. “After decades of demanding that war victims be treated with some sympathy and respect,” he said, “to have that finally happen in one place is an opportunity to say ‘Yes! Right on! What about all the other war victims?’ To have the U.S. government want war treated as a crime and prosecuted in a court — wonderful! Now how about all the other wars?”
That sort of hypocrisy around foreign policy is one of the state’s (and dominant media’s) most reliable features. Again, the tragedy of Ukraine has been especially amplified because it serves a convenient ideological function in contesting Russia’s geopolitical position. (And, as many have pointed, or blurted, out: Sympathy towards this conflict has also had particular purchase because Ukraine is considered a “civilized” European country with a large white population. A number of media figures have told on themselves on this front.)
Key to WBW’s ideology is an unswerving commitment to pacifism. As Swanson described it, “We are opposed to all war, all militarism, all war thinking, all support for military funding, always, without exception.… We think that’s actually the moral thing to do.” Nonviolence, for WBW, is non-negotiable — as evidenced by a recent article of his, which criticized the Poor People’s Campaign for an email that seemed to condone arming Ukraine. As Swanson continued: “To drag this on, to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian as we have their backs with the money rolling in — I don’t think this is a moral position. This is the point we struggle to educate people on: that the United States and Ukraine, as well as Russia, should be trying to end the war. It’s almost considered treasonous. The ‘proper’ position is to want to continue the war to weaken Russia.”
People Can Still Stop Wars
Countless organizers are just as aghast as Swanson at the grotesqueries of this war as well at its ideological utility for other powerful warmongering interests, their rank hypocrisy on display. Despite its distance from the conflict and a lack of leverage over Russia’s actions, the U.S. antiwar movement does, conceivably, have the potential to impact its own government. A U.S. pivot to pursuing a diplomatic resolution might help avoid a prolonged and grueling war of attrition. Yet if present conditions continue to accelerate — continued Russian aggression (as well as their significant battlefield setbacks) as the West increasingly arms Ukraine — the war may develop into the latter.
There are challenging moral questions to be weighed by the war’s opponents: questions of pacifism and self-defense, of how best to show solidarity with a beleaguered Ukraine, of how a war of aggression might be mitigated without worsening violence. Even understanding the conflict requires triangulating between the relentless propaganda of two powerful and deceptive nations. It would be easy for antiwar activists to give into the long odds and a sense of impotence or apathy, in a struggle that can seem quixotic. Yet the U.S. military and government, while an imposing edifice of power and profit, is not invulnerable, and mass protest and dissent have swayed the course of its history in the past. Despite their differences, antiwar organizers are collectively buoyed by a faith in what history has demonstrated: that people, when organized, can still stop wars. https://truthout.org/articles/antiwar-groups-protest-defense-industry-profiteering-in-ukraine/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=77e07376-4f26-4746-9b6e-12d42fb0f129
Danger of nuclear war is rising. International tensions are growing, and Congress plans to spend billions to “modernize” our nuclear arsenal, including paying for weapons that will increase the chance of nuclear war–so-called “usable nukes” and vulnerable land-based missiles.
A nuclear exchange, begun by war, accident or cyber attack, would be devastating. Even a “small” nuclear war, using 3% of world nuclear arsenals, would kill over a quarter of the world’s population as clouds of debris block sunlight from food crops. War between the United States and Russia could extinguish life on Earth.
We can reduce our danger. We can contact Members of Congress and also support “Back from the Brink,” a national grassroots campaign working toward abolition of nuclear weapons and basic changes in U.S. nuclear weapons policy, such as seeking an agreement among nuclear powers to eliminate their nuclear arsenals, taking our weapons off hair-trigger alert and canceling the plan to “modernize” our nuclear arsenal.
Over 50 municipalities, four states, dozens of faith groups and many other organizations have passed resolutions endorsing this campaign. Such resolutions helped the Nuclear Freeze Movement of the 1980s to succeed. We can build strength to turn the tide of nuclear danger.
New nuclear power plants will cause irreparable loss to biodiversity and harm and destroy wild places and the creatures who live there. Existing nuclear power plants, uranium mines and proposed and actual radioactive waste sites do similar damage. Wildlife protection helped defeat the proposed new nuclear power plant in Wales. Can the same tactic work to stop other new reactor projects and nuclear waste dumps that threaten similar damage? And are renewables any less harmful? We’ll be asking these questions and more at our webinar– New Nuclear: What’s At Stake For Wildlife?
Join us on Thursday, October 7, 7pm-8:30pm UK time, 2pm-3:30pm US Eastern time. Our guests include Craig Bennett, CEO of The Wildlife Trusts; Juliet Davenport, founder of Good Energy; Jonathon Porritt, former directorof Friends of the Earth UK, and Diana Quick, actor and Stop Sizewell activist.
The discussion will be moderated by Beyond Nuclear’s Linda Pentz Gunter followed by questions from the audience. The event is co-hosted by Beyond Nuclear, Greater Manchester & District CND, Nuclear Free Local Authorities and Chernobyl Children’s Project UK. Register at the link below.
Peace activists to gather outside Ramstein Air Base for weeklong protest starting July 4 BY MARCUS KLOECKNER• STARS AND STRIPES • JUNE 30, 2021 KAISERSLAUTERN, Germany — An annual peace protest outside Ramstein Air Base will start for about a week beginning Sunday, following last year’s cancellation due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The activists from the Stopp Air Base Ramstein Campaign will set up a “peace camp” near the base through July 11, the group said in a statement.
On July 10, about 150 people are expected to gather in Kaiserslautern at the main train station around 11 a.m., said Andreas Wildberger, a Landstuhl police spokesman. When the protest was last held in 2019, thousands were expected to participate, police said at the time.
The protest will move to a rally near the air base around 1 p.m., Wildberger said. Afterward, the demonstrators are planning to ride bicycles around the perimeter of the base………
Under their slogan “We are back again!” the group will protest what they say are illegal wars. They are demanding an end to what they say is the use of the air base to relay telemetry to drones that collect information on terrorist groups and attack designated targets. The attacks on suspected terrorists and militants are extrajudicial and have killed civilians, the group has said.//
Air Force officials have denied for years that any data is relayed through Ramstein for drone operations.
The 10th International Uranium Film Festival Rio de Janeiro remembers the still unsolved nuclear accident in Fukushima 10 years ago and the UN treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, which has been in force since January of this year. Due to the ongoing Covid-19 restrictions It will be the festival’s first online edition with support by the Cinematheque(link is external) of Rio de Janeiro’s prestigious Modern Art Museum (MAM Rio)(link is external).
The festival has selected 34 documentaries and movies by 26 filmmakers from 15 countries. The films will be screened for free online from May 20 to 30 at the MAM Rio platform. Two live online events complete the program.
On May 20 (7 pm Rio time)(link is external) the festival opening features three atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima, who live in Brazil, and Akira Kawasaki, coordinator of the Peace Boat Foundation. And on May 24th (4 pm Rio time)(link is external) the festival’s live online guests will be former Brazilian Ambassador Sérgio de Queiroz Duarte who has dedicated his life as a diplomat to end the nuclear threat and Cristian Ricardo Wittmann, member of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).
The video greetings (link is external)for the opening of the online film festival come from Biologist and parliamentarian Klaus Mindrup(link is external), member of the German Bundestag of the Committee for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety, and from Manfred Mohr(link is external), Professor of International Public Law, spokesman for the International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons (ICBUW), founding member of the International Association of Lawyers against Nuclear Weapons (IALANA) and ICAN-member.
The United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) will hold a two-day virtual conference on May 25-26, 2021 on “Nuclear Risk: Across Technologies and Domains.” The meeting is 14:00-16:20 Central European Summer Time each day (8:00-10:40 am EDT).
The second session on May 25 is a panel discussion on “Space and Nuclear Weapons Systems.” No time is specified but about halfway through is a logical estimate, so about 9:00 am EDT.
Participants are:
Raji Rajagopalan, Director, Centre for Security, Strategy & Technology (CSST), Observer Research Foundation (ORF), New Delhi (moderator)
Paul Meyer, Adjunct Professor of International Studies, Simon Fraser University and member Outer Space Institute
Victoria Samson, Washington Office Director, Secure World Foundation
FUKUSHIMA 2021, International Uranium Film Festival
March 11, 2021. Ten Years Fukushima Nuclear Disaster: Rio de Janeiro International Uranium Film Festival Free Online Screening and Debate.
The first International Uranium Film Festival event 2021 is scheduled for Thursday, March 11, to remember the ongoing Fukushima nuclear disaster. A free seven day online screening in cooperation with the Cinematheque of Rio de Janeiro’s Modern Art Museum (MAM Rio)(link is external). We will show two awarded documentary movies about the Fukushima nuclear accident: a poetic short film by photographer Alessandro Tesei and a feature documentary by science journalist Ranga Yogeshwar. The films can be watched online from March 11 to March 17.
After the screening the audience can chat with Fukushima expert, Professor Dr. Alphonse Kelecom from the Laboratory of Radiobiology and Radiometry of the Institute of Biology at Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro. Since March 2011, Kelecom visited several times Fukushima. Of course non portuguese speakers are also invited. Prof. Alphonse Kelecom speaks Portuguese, English and French as well. Moderator is Márcia Gomes de Oliveira, director of the International Uranium Film Festival who visited Fukushima in 2015 by invitation of Peace Boat Foundation.
The National 16th Jan 2021, HELENSBURGH CND’s Beyond Nuclear conference was postponed twice last year due to the pandemic. But the event will now be taking place virtually on January 31, from 11am to 4.30pm. To be staged by virtual event group
Cameron, Beyond Nuclear is designed to answer the question: “Why would we in Scotland want or need to have nuclear power stations when we have almost
unlimited potential for clean, renewable energy production?” The
conference will be in two parts; the first an examination of the negatives
involved in nuclear power production, contrasting with the positives of
clean renewable energy in the second.
Celebrations in Aotearoa New Zealand to mark the entry into force of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) will begin on Thursday 21 January with ICAN Aotearoa New Zealand’s Wellington and online event, and continue on Friday 22 January. Continue reading →
January 10, 2021 by Source of the Spring Staff, The City of Takoma Park is commemorating its status as a Nuclear-Free Zone by hosting a virtual screening of the documentary film ‘The Nuns, The Priests, and The Bombs’ on January 25th.
The documentary “follows a community of peace activists, including two Catholic nuns and a Jesuit priest in their eighties, who are willing to go to prison, and even risk death, because of their deeply held conviction that nuclear weapons are immoral and violate international humanitarian law,” according to the film’s website:
Since 1980 activists in lay and religious life have undertaken dramatic Plowshares protests in an effort to raise public consciousness on the growing threat posed by the world’s nuclear weapons. Through their actions the activists seeks to invoke the biblical injunction, “They Shall Beat Their Swords into Plowshares”. This film follows two federal criminal cases against the activists for their protests: the July 2012 break-in at Y-12 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, home of the largest U.S. stockpile of highly enriched uranium, and the 2009 break-in at the Kitsap Bangor U.S. naval base near Seattle. The film follows the activists’ legal efforts to justify their actions under international law and documents efforts at the United Nations to enforce the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and negotiate the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
The City of Takoma Park passed its Nuclear-Free Zone legislation in December of 1983, and later established the Nuclear-Free Takoma Park Committee: “The Act prohibits work on nuclear weapons, including transportation and storage of such weapons within the City, and prohibits the City from doing business with companies that produce nuclear weapons or their components, with very narrow exceptions.”
According to The Washington Post, in 2012 Takoma Park City Council unanimously voted to grant a waiver to purchase computers from Hewlett-Packard, the first time that a waiver was opposed by the Nuclear-Free Takoma Park Committee. “Updated research indicates that Hewlett-Packard (HP) continues to conduct business with the Department of Defense and other federal agencies for cloud services capable of the development, deployment, security, and utilization of nuclear weapons,” the committee stated in its meeting minutes.
A Q&A with filmmaker Helen Young will follow the film screening, which will start at 7 p.m. on January 25th.
Tomorrow, December 16th, at 5:00 PM, the East Bay Community Energy (EBCE) board will vote on whether or not to accept nuclear energy from PG&E, with the aim of re-selling it to a third party.
EBCE, Alameda County’s public power agency, exists to provide more renewable energy to its customers and reinvest its earnings back into the community to create local green energy jobs, local programs, and clean power projects.
Nuclear energy is not safe or clean. The Sierra Club remains unequivocally opposed to nuclear energy and encourages the decommissioning of nuclear power plants. We oppose even the buying and selling of nuclear power.
Time and time again we’ve fought to keep nuclear out of EBCE’s power content. Simply promoting nuclear in another form does not make it acceptable — even for slight financial gains.
We urge you to join us in asking the Board to reject this latest proposal. Let’s make sure EBCE stays cleaner and greener than the incumbent utility.
The meeting agenda, speaker sign up, and Zoom link will be posted and updated here. Sometimes these meetings can be long. If you would like us to text you when the agenda item is being discussed, please message Melissa Yu at melissa.yu@sierraclub.org.
Nuclear weapons and nuclear power share several common features. In fact, the UK’s first nuclear power stations were built primarily to provide fissile material for nuclear weapons during the Cold War.
The development of both the nuclear weapons and nuclear power industries is mutually beneficial. And now it appears that the government is using the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station to subsidise Trident, Britain’s nuclear weapons system.
As part of a Parliamentary investigation into the Hinkley project, it emerged that without the billions of pounds earmarked for building this new power station in Somerset, Trident would be ‘unsupportable’. Professor Andy Stirling and Dr Phil Johnstone argued that the nuclear power station will ‘maintain a large-scale national base of nuclear-specific skills’ essential for maintaining Britain’s military nuclear capability.
Join CND for an online discussion with Professor Stirling and Dr Johnstone about these connections.
DONALD TRUMP: Please Guarantee the November, 2020 Election Will Proceed
Campaign created by
Harvey Wasserman
We want Mr. Trump to guarantee that he will not attempt to cancel the November, 2020 election, and that he will guarantee that even if we are still in a pandemic, the necessary steps will be taken to make sure the nation can exercise its right to vote.
Why is this important?
Nothing is more sacred to American democracy that our right to free and fair elections. A major dialogue is under way as to how to conduct this fall’s election even if the Pandemic still rages (see http://www.solartopia.org. Please join us. Thank you.
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