By Bertold Brecht
at the Congress of the Peoples for Peace,
December 1952, Vienna
Source: «Das Gedächtnis der Menschheit», aus: Bertolt Brecht, Werke.
Grosse kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Band 12: Gedichte 2.
© Bertolt-Brecht-Erben/Suhrkamp Verlag 1988.
(Translation “Swiss Standpoint”)
by William J. Astore,* USA
(22 May 2022) Thirty years ago, I co-taught a course on the making and use of the atomic bomb at the U.S. Air Force Academy. We took cadets to Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the first nuclear weapons were designed and built during World War II, and we also visited the Trinity test site, where the first atomic device exploded in a test conducted in July of 1945.
by Jakob Wehrli
(22 May 2022) How can we create peace with even more weapons? This question is currently being asked. If you look at the media, the answer is clear: the only way to force the enemy, i.e. Russia, to make peace is to deliver more weapons, more tanks and more warfare. Because this enemy is so evil that only the language of force and only a military victory will lead to peace. To put it bluntly, in these eyes anyone who even talks about or seeks negotiations is a friend of evil. Which also makes any further discussion of this futile.
by Diana Johnstone,* France
(21 May 2022) After years of neoliberalism, French politics that venture outside the conformist center’s unshakable loyalty to the Atlantic Alliance are now dangerously “extreme.”
On Sunday, Emmanuel Macron was re-elected for a second five-year term as president of the French Republic with 58.54 percent of the vote. Just as in 2017, the candidate he defeated was Marine Le Pen, who got 41.46 percent. Sounds like déjà vu all over again.
(15 May 2022) “As editor-in-chief of Wikileaks and through the publication of whistleblower information on serious war crimes, Julian Assange has the greatest peace policy significance. Already in 2019, Northern Ireland's Mairead Corrigan nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. This year, further nominations have been added.
by Professor Roland Wiesendanger
(14 April 2022) The current pandemic has taught us what devastating effects it can have when pathogens become extremely easily transmissible from person to person, even if the mortality rate due to the virus is only in the range of one percent or less.