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Oppenheimer and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Paul Jay and Peter Kuznick challenge the claims that the bombing ended WWII
Two weeks before Hiroshima and Nagasaki Day 2023 Paul Jay and Peter Kuznick had a conversation about the just released film Oppenheimer by Christopher Nolan. They acknowledged the importance of the film at a time when the risk of a nuclear war is the highest since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. But they also raised the question why it is still possible to claim that the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima saved lives by ending WWII.
Thanks to Paul Jay, host and co-founder of The Analysis, for inviting Peter Kuznick, professor of history and director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University and co-author with [ . . . ]

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Norman Solomon: War Made Invisible

How America hides the human toll of its Military Machine
Kirkus Reviews called this book “a powerful, necessary indictment of efforts to disguise the human toll of American foreign policy” and “a provocative overview of the consequences of the media’s appalling failures in making important truths known.”
Norman Solomon is an American journalist, media critic, author and activist. He is the founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy and co-founder and national director of the online organization RootsAction.org, which now has upwards of 1.3 million online supporters. He is the author of 13 books, among them Made Love, Got War; War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death; and Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You.
Massachusetts [ . . . ]

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Historic Heat of the Summer 2023 – Passing the Threshold

Join Dr. Peter Carter, Paul Beckwith and Regina Valdez in a discussion of the recent temperature records set in the first truly global heatwave on land and in the ocean
This recording was made on July 12th when the World Meteorological Organization confirmed one record hottest day after another. Dr. Peter Carter, is expert reviewer for the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and the director of the Climate Emergency Institute. Paul Beckwith is a physicist, engineer, and now a part-time professor at the University of Ottawa. And Regina Valdez is Climate Reality Project Director, NYC. They met by Zoom on July 12th, 2023.
And as I am recording this on Tuesday, July 18, AXIOS news reports that again – [ . . . ]

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In Memory of Bertolt Brecht (Archive)

For Brecht’s 100ds birthday in 1998 the Royal National Theatre from London gave a performance in his honor at Theater Artaud in San Francisco
Bertolt Brecht and many other artists in post WWI Germany were courageously and proudly democrats, socialists or communists. They had experienced the horror of the first World War and were determined to prevent a second one. So when Hitler and the Nazi party actually assumed state power in 1933 they were all marked and most of them left the country immediately. Their exodus destroyed much of the cultural/political rebellion of the 1920s.
Even though Brecht, the playwright, poet, director and theoretician of the stage, was persecuted by the Nazi’s, he was forced to leave his home in [ . . . ]

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The Pentagon, Climate Change and War

Neta Crawford, Professor in international relations at the University of Oxford
Neta Crawford co-founded the Costs of War Project at Brown University in 2010 and currently serves as a project co-director.
She is the author of “The Pentagon, Climate Change, and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of U.S. Military Emissions” (MIT Press). She spoke at a book release event on September 29, 2022, at Harvard University.
The military has for years (unlike many politicians) acknowledged that climate change is real, creating conditions so extreme that some military officials fear future climate wars. At the same time, the U.S. Department of Defense—military forces and DOD agencies—is the largest single energy consumer in the United States and the world’s largest institutional greenhouse gas emitter. [ . . . ]

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Seniors for Peace – A celebration of 20 years of Peace Work (TUC Archives)

Redwoods Retirement Center in Mill Valley, CA
When I joined Seniors for Peace at their second ever rally for peace in Iraq on February 7, 2003, I did not dream that 20 years later they would still be coming out every Friday from 4 to 5 pm to the busy intersection near their home. Undaunted – even by hostility – they have called for peace in all the subsequent wars since then.
Among those who I met in 2003 was a survivor of the firebombing of Dresden and a Red Cross worker in London who saw the young men dead on both sides and still mourned their loss of life.
I’m honoring them now – 20 years later – for the [ . . . ]

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John Pilger on Depleted Uranium in Ukraine

First the United Kingdom, now the Biden Administration, are planning on sending Depleted Uranium tank shells to Ukraine
When the UK Ministry of Defense (MOD) made the announcement on March 20, 2023, peace groups and investigative reporters raised the alarm. Toxic and radioactive uranium dust, that appears when these DU shells are detonated, pose a danger to the health of anyone who inhales it. And they contaminate the soil and water.
The investigative reporter and documentary filmmaker John Pilger remembers the devastating effects the DU shells had when they were used in Iraq. In conversation with John Pilger is Phil Miller, chief reporter for Declassified UK. Miller was the first to expose Britain’s plan to send Depleted Uranium ammunition to Ukraine. Miller [ . . . ]

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Prof. Jeffrey Sachs on: How we can make peace with Russia by learning from JFK’s example

The Community Church of Boston celebrated the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s speech on World Peace on June 10, 2023
They invited Professor Jeffrey Sachs to speak to the congregation. Sachs wrote a book on the American University speech entitled: To Move the World – JFK’s Quest for Peace.
Jeffrey Sachs is an economist, academic, and public policy analyst. He is Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and President of the UN Sustainable Solutions Network, and an SDG advocate for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.
Sachs has credentials for Eastern Europe and Russia as former advisor to the economic team of Presidents Michael Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. He also spent time in Ukraine as advisor to the President of independent [ . . . ]

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The Land Back Symposium 2023, Corrina Gould on Indigenous Land Trusts and LANDBACK in the S.F. Bay Area

The Land Back Symposium was a day-long event at Cal Poly Humboldt, Arcata, held on March 24, 2023
The event focused on the indigenous peoples of Northern California and how a growing LandBack movement can protect former tribal land from mining, logging and climate change.
Corrina Gould is the co-founder and Co-Director of the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. She is the Spokeswoman and Tribal Chair of the Confederated Villages of Lisjan, now known as the San Francisco Bay Area.
Five of the eight Ohlone Tribes lived on that land and their sacred sites are now buried under cement slabs and their rivers turned into toxic storm drains and their food trees were cut down. Today nobody even wonders why there is [ . . . ]

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Daniel Ellsberg: How many will die in a Nuclear War launched by the U.S.?

From Ellsberg’s 2017 book “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner” Daniel Ellsberg is best known for having made public the Pentagon Papers in 1971. They showed the world that the U.S. government had lied about planning war on Vietnam and using a lie to start it.
At the same time Ellsberg had copied and taken 7,000 pages from the nuclear command and control system in the US – that also contained the targeting for a first strike launch against the Soviet Union and China. Ellsberg always said that this was information even more vital for the world to have than the Pentagon Papers. And in part one of this program he described how these records [ . . . ]

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Daniel Ellsberg: The Doomsday Machine – Secret Launch Plans for US Nuclear Weapons

From Ellsberg’s 2017 book “The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner”
In 1971, the young defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg had taken on the Nixon administration, risking his career and freedom to leak the Pentagon Papers. He showed the world that the U.S. government had lied repeatedly about beginning and winning the war on Vietnam.
Now, over 40 years later, Ellsberg is sharing the research from his most ambitious project yet, The Doomsday Machine — a stunning insider’s tale of the American nuclear procedures.
Ellsberg was a nuclear war planner during the 1950s and ’60s. In The Doomsday Machine Ellsberg offers an expose about “the nuclear war planners, of which I was one, who have written plans to kill billions [ . . . ]

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The Northern California Land Back Symposium 2023, Panel on Land-Grab Universities

How the Morrill Act of 1862 gave nearly 11 million acres of land, taken from more than 250 tribal nations, to finance 52 land grant colleges
Land Grant Universities got their money through land confiscations, often through violence and threats. The Land Back Symposium was a day-long event at Cal Poly Humboldt, Arcata, CA, held on March 24 of 2023. A powerful movement of land return is spreading across the world and has even reached some support from state governments.
The Land Grab Universities session was led by Dr. Brittani Orona, Hoopa Valley Tribe (Assistant Professor of American Indian Studies, San Diego State University)
The panelist were: He-Lo Ramirez, Menchoopda Indian Tribe, (Council Member & Director of Environmental Planning and Protection [ . . . ]

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The Northern California Land Back Symposium 2023, Welcome Session

Panels discussed Public & Private Land Return, Land Grant Universities, Indigenous Land Trusts, and Legal Recommendations
The Land Back Symposium was a day-long event at Cal Poly Humboldt, Arcata, held on March 24. The meeting broke many taboos and told the story how a powerful movement of land return is spreading across the world and – at least in California – has even reached some support by state government.
The opening session began with a welcome from Chairman Ted Hernandez of the Wiyot Tribe, followed by Geneva Thompson, the Assistant Secretary for Tribal Affairs at the California Natural Resources Agency; and ended with a talk by Dr. Cutcha Risling Baldy on “Land Histories & Decolonial Land Futures”. She is Cal Poly Humboldt’s [ . . . ]

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Forgotten History of the US War on Korea

Told by veteran Utah Phillips, journalists and historians, with a 3 min. update from Democracy Now On Wednesday, April 26, 2023, Joe Biden pledged to deploy nuclear armed submarines to South Korea for the first time in 40 years. The US would involve officials from South Korea in nuclear planning operations targeting North Korea.
How has it come to this, what is the experience of people on the ground in North and South Korea. And why do we know so little about the US War on Korea, that began 70 years ago, and never ended in a peace agreement.
I had the moving experience to record one of the few living veterans of that war. The great [ . . . ]

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Daniel Ellsberg on Freedom of the Press, Julian Assange, and the Risk of Nuclear War

Of course Ellsberg is best known for the release of the Pentagon Papers, a top secret study of the decision-making of the U.S. government in relation to the war in Vietnam, how long it had been planned for, and how – like in the bombing of Iraq – lies were used to actually begin the war in Vietnam. Less known is his support of whistle-blowers and his anti-nuclear work.
Daniel Ellsberg has used his experience to defend Julian Assange and other whistleblowers – even up to current days – when it has become known that he received a cancer diagnosis that gives him only a few more months to live.
Frank Barat spoke with Daniel Ellsberg on Jan 19, 2023. He is [ . . . ]

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