American Barbarism by Larry Kerschner Earlier this year news reports presented the burning alive of a Jordanian pilot and the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christians as the work of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS).  These are clearly monstrous acts carried out by religious and political fanatics.  However, I was struck by the morally self-righteous tone of many of the newscasts. Unstated was the idea that these are acts so evil that we Americans could never commit them. Once again, Americans either don’t know or won’t acknowledge our history.   American history is replete with similar instances of barbarity. African Americans have been raped, lynched and burned to death throughout the history of this country. Nearly 4,000 African Americans…

Making Connections to End the New Nuclear Arms Race by Mona Lee On August 8, 1945 when atomic bombs were falling on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I was six years old and living on Chambers Road in Ferguson, Mo. which at the time was a working class suburb of a predominantly poor black city. To this day, I vividly recall a photograph on the St. Louis Post Dispatch front page of Japanese faces distorted into hideous masks of terror. In school we learned this had been done to end the War. Thus began the old nuclear arms race. From then on, that race escalated as later we were told the US nuclear arsenal was to prevent “the communists” from taking over…

Reconciliation with Cuba by John M Repp On December 17, 2014 Barack Obama announced that he wanted to re-establish normal diplomatic relations with Cuba and on that very day there was an exchange of prisoners. He admitted that U.S. policy toward Cuba since 1962 had been a failure. This announcement raised the expectations of citizens of both countries. Then on March 9, 2015, Obama issued an Executive Order declaring that Venezuela was “an unusual and extraordinary threat to U.S. national security and foreign policy.” In April before attending the Summit of the Americas in Panama, Obama walked back that statement. Venezuela is Cuba’s closest ally and provides Cuba with the oil to keep their electricity grid functioning. In exchange, Cuba…

U. S.’s Endless Wars by Glen Anderson (360) 491-9093 glen@olywa.net   This essay includes these sections: Page Topic 1 70 years of endless wars 2 “Do something” means:  Do something violent – and militarize our “Homeland” 3 Deceive the American people and normalize violence 4 Militarism backfires:  Military “solutions” are really the problem 6 A nonviolent foreign policy 6 TRUE security The U.S.’s Endless Wars and Frequent Attacks on Other Nations Have “Normalized” the Use of Violence Abroad and at Home by Glen Anderson 70 years of endless wars: While the U.S. had a Department of War from 1789 to 1947, our nation fought only a few foreign wars during that century and a half, but – in an Orwellian…

War Is Not the Answer By Tom Ewell Despite the fact that our nation is weary after 13 years of post-9/11 wars, we are becoming again embroiled in yet another war, this time with the so-called Islamic State. Our bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan produced neither peace nor stability but rather unleashed a firestorm of tribal and sectarian violence and a flood of arms to the area. And now we are being led into doing it all over again. War has become a national addiction. Our homeland was not bombed nor pillaged; thousands of our citizens were not killed or wounded or scattered in refugee camps; we have not had our country endure years of violence, hunger, shortage of water…

CLICK HERE and see the 2015 Spring Assembly Save the Date flyer https://wwfor.org/wp-content/uploads/2015-Spring-Assembly-Flyer.pdf

The 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer By John M Repp Our departed friend, Mike Yarrow, once an organizer for WWFOR and a founder of the Peace Activist Trainee program, was a volunteer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. His six letters to family and friends during that fateful summer have been put up on a website dedicated to Civil Rights Movement Veterans. http://www.crmvet.org/  This site is a library of source materials for use by students and activists learning about the civil rights movement. To see Mike’s letters, click on Site Search on the left side of the Home page and type in “Yarrow” At the time, Mike wrote to a friend who typed them up on a typewriter and forwarded…

Pacific Pivot: U.S. Foreign Policy Is Still Making Provocative Moves By Larry Kershner In November 2014, I visited  Jeju Island, South Korea. I went with a group, organized by Fr. Bill Bichsel of the Tacoma Catholic Worker, to stand in solidarity with villagers of Gangjeong Village who are opposing the construction of a naval base in their village.  The base is supposedly a Korean Navy base but a look at the plans clearly shows that wharfs and docks are fitted to the size of US naval vessels. The longest submarine in the Korean Navy is 53 meters but the sub pen being built is in the 200 meter range of the US Trident submarine. At fifty hectares, this base will…

Inequality Kills by Stephen Bezruchka For nearly two hundred years America was one of the healthiest and longest-lived countries, but today, over thirty countries have better health by many measures. What happened? In answering this question, the distinction between health and health care is a critical one, but something that seems not to be well understood by the lay public, health care professionals, or policy makers. Every time we hear the word health, we should ask ourselves whether that term refers to health itself, or to the much more limited concept of health care. If the culprit of the decline in health is not health care, are individual health-related behaviors, often blamed for the high death rates in some groups,…

By Mary Anne Mercer, senior lecturer, University of Washington Department of Global Health Obstetrician Dr. Muhsin Al Sabbak of Basrah, Iraq, accompanied by an environmental toxicologist, Dr. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, recently spoke in Seattle on increases in birth defects since the US-sponsored wars in Iraq.  The presentations were sponsored by the University of Washington and various community groups. Dr. Al Sabbak is chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the Basrah Maternity and Children’s Hospital in southern Iraq and has served on the faculty of the Basrah Medical School for nearly three decades. After the first US-Iraq war in 1991, he began to track birth defects among the infants he delivered. The rates began to rise in the late…