Departments

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war

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    4/18/2022

    Is International Cooperation Possible?

    by Tiziana Stella and Campbell Craig

    The United Nations system, based on the sovereignty of nations, is increasingly inadequate to the global problems facing humanity. There are other international traditions that can guide a better world order. 

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    4/5/2022

    Ukraine's Next Enemy: Disease

    by Max Brooks, Lionel Beehner and John Spencer

    "If we want to help the Ukrainian resistance, we shouldn’t be sending them only Javelins and body armor. They need emergency supplies — bulk sanitation items such as alcohol-based hand sanitizer, ammonium nitrate to counter food-borne illness, and rat traps and poisons."

  • 4/3/2022

    More War Crimes Will Follow in Ukraine

    by Fred Zilian

    To those who believed that war and war crimes in Europe in the 21st century had become unthinkable, Thucydides offers us a simple yet powerful statement: “War is a violent teacher.”

  • SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
    3/31/2022

    Over a River Strangely Rosy: Reading Poetry in Wartime

    by Joan Neuberger

    "It’s my job to explain things about Russia and its various incarnations of empire. I know how to do that — I’ve been doing it for a long time. But, in this moment, analysis seems to me to be somehow incomprehensible and profoundly unsatisfying."

  • SOURCE: Foreign Policy
    3/20/2022

    Why is the News Media so Hawkish?

    by Mark Hannah

    Editorial choices made by influential news organizations can push policy in the direction of more aggressive intervention. A media scholar asks why those organizations have consistently chosen to boost the voices of advocates for war.

  • SOURCE: Washington Post
    3/18/2022

    Nuclear Power Plants Aren't Made to Survive War

    by Kate Brown and Susan Solomon

    "It is difficult to believe, but in all the decades of imagining nuclear-emergency scenarios, engineers did not design for an event so human and inevitable as war."

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    3/10/2022

    The Geopolitics of the Russia-Ukraine War

    by Alfred McCoy

    Since the Versailles conference in 1919, geopolitical theorists have discussed the potential of anl alliance connecting eastern Europe and central Asia as a potential seat of world domination. Are recent developments in Russian-Chinese relations moving in that direction? 

  • SOURCE: New Left Review
    3/7/2022

    Thanatos Triumphant

    by Mike Davis

    Russian's invasion of Ukraine has revealed the nihilism of the world's leaders from Moscow to Washington, and the failure of the American left to develop a meaningful alternative to a global death-wish led by oligarchs.

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    3/3/2022

    War Torn: Confronting the Problems of the Nationless

    by Nick Turse

    Those displaced by war, persecution, and economic desperation constitute more than a billion people. The "nationless" are the third-largest nation on Earth, and their ranks will only grow.

  • SOURCE: CNN
    2/25/2022

    War as a Spectator Event

    by Nicole Hemmer

    It's necessary to consider the ethics and morality of consuming warfare as a spectator event, and to temper emotional reactions spurred by images of suffering with understanding of their context. 

  • SOURCE: TomDispatch
    1/23/2022

    A Very Long War: From Vietnam to Afghanistan

    by Andrew Bacevich

    The interpretive frameworks – from the "domino theory" to the war on terror –  guiding the political decision to wage war are usually rendered incoherent by facts on the ground in combat. This cluelessness survived the end of the cold war intact and suggests a longer campaign of American empire. 

  • SOURCE: The New Republic
    1/11/2022

    Why Smedley Butler Turned Against US Empire

    by Patrick Iber

    After leading Marines to secure the American empire in the wake of the Spanish-American War, Major Smedley Butler by 1935 repented and called himself "a racketeer for capitalism." 

  • SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
    12/7/2021

    History Helps Discern Putin's Ukraine Agenda

    by Kathryn David

    Russia today uses the ideological work of Soviet-era historians that claims a fundamental unity between Russian and Ukrainian people to justify its expansionist aims.