This is a wonderful podcast on Megaliths, including Stonehenge:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001jkzg?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

JT

What is the Peacehenge update on the state of peace in the world?   We are moving backwards, with more war, and autocracies in the world growing. 

The Economist magazine ranks countries on a scale of how democratic they are, and the US is in the “flawed democracies” category, ranked at 30th in terms of democratic qualities compared with other countries. 

Norway and New Zealand are 1st and 2nd in terms of the qualities of their democracies. 

With Putin’s war against Ukraine – an attempt using brute force to bring Ukraine back into the Russian Empire – we see a barbaric use of military power by both sides with a massive number of civilian and military casualties. 

Peacemaking in this situation currently seems futile.  In many ways it has turned into a proxy war between the US and its Western allies against Russia. 

The military industrial complex in the US is benefiting enormously from a massive injection of US government funding to manufacture military hardware for this war.   The same is the case for Western allies, like the UK, who have ramped up military production to support Ukraine. If Ukraine attempts to take back Crimea from Russia, I would not be surprised to see Putin use tactical nuclear weapons to protect Crimea. 

Indeed, if Ukraine seriously tries to take back the parts of Eastern Ukraine now occupied by Russian forces, it is quite foreseeable that Putin, in an act of desperation to retain the territory his forces have invaded, would also use tactical nuclear weapons. 

We did a lot of complaining about the COVID pandemic.  Now we have a cost of living crisis across the world, with food and energy costs increasing by absurdly high percentages.  Agricultural costs, such as for fertilizer, have gone through the roof. Putin must be glad to see how his war is wreaking havoc with the world economy. He must also be glad that McDonalds is no longer in Russia, instead they have opened up their own version of McDonalds called Tasty and That’s It! Coke is gone too. The Russian outposts of American economic imperialism have closed down, and in their place have arisen Russian equivalents.

The United Nations appears impotent to intervene in the Ukraine war, with China and India backing Russia, making the UN Security Council more of a UN Insecurity Council.

We are facing very difficult times ahead, with China threatening to invade Taiwan, and Israel more hawkish than ever, and moving in the direction of immobilizing key parts of its own judicial branch. 

This year, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward, largely because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine. The Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.

In the middle of this Apple, Amazon, the major oil companies, and other transnational corporations continue to make enormous quarterly profits, and the juggernaut of capitalism, or state-directed economies, chugs forward, creating an increasingly greater gap between the rich and the poor. 

Climate change continues to destroy the ice that polar bears need to survive, and destroys the coast of eastern England leading to parts of villages collapsing into the ever rising ocean.

If Jesus or Buddha  were here they would probably say we are screwed. 

JT

If I had been sitting in my apartment in the capital of Ukraine, Kiev, a month before Putin’s military invaded, I would have left Ukraine, probably by car or van, so I could take as much of my stuff with me as possible. The tea leaves in my cup all pointed to a full-scale very violent invasion. And that is what happened at the end of February.

If you want peace, sometimes you have to leave what will become the battlefield.

Putin’s methods are brutal and without any signs of compassion. He is following in the footsteps of Stalin. What would you do if you had been living in Ukraine as Russia encircled a large part of the border with the machinery of warfare?

What is the message of Peacehenge? It is that Putin’s war is following the tradition of many empire builders, from the Romans (whose legions were totally brutal as they gained more and more territory) to Hitler.

At some point, Ukraine will be back as a place run by Ukrainians. Who knows how many years from now that will be. As a student of war and peace, I am impressed by the role of non-violent resistance, and its effectiveness versus violent resistance. Here is a short video by an academic, Erica Chenoweth, who is one of the most famous American writers on whether you should tackle a brutal dictator with guns or roses. Here is a primer by Erica, on how and why non-violence is the best approach:

In terms of a “just war”, I am glad the Ukrainians are holding onto territory around Kiev, and pushing the mighty Russian war machine backwards. But when I see the total devastation using missiles and bombs of Mariupol, and the countless deaths there, talk about successfully taking on a dictator with non-violent resistance doesn’t fit. Putin could have been pushed out of power years ago had the Russians been strong enough to do that, but they didn’t act when they could, and now it’s too late. Timing is everything.

I’m going to leave you with this chilling video of the destruction of Mariupol by the Russians using artillery. If we are to believe Erica Chenoweth, 4 percent of the Russian population in a concerted movement five or ten years ago could have brought Putin down. Now it is too late.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2022/mar/24/drone-footage-shows-scale-of-devastation-in-mariupol-ukraine-video

JT

Thanks to the Guardian for this piece. I have reproduced it in full without any editorial, except to ask, once you have read this, how do you think the US can become a safer and more peaceful country? JT

The US has experienced its largest-ever recorded annual increase in murders, according to new statistics from the FBI, with the national murder rate rising nearly 30% in 2020 – the biggest jump in six decades.

Nearly 5,000 more Americans were murdered across the country last year than the year before, even as rape, robbery, and other property crimes fell, according to FBI figures.

Murder increased in every geographic region, and in small towns and suburban areas as well as large cities. At least 77% of the murders were committed with firearms, according to the new government estimates.

The sharp one-year increase, to a total of at least 21,570 murders, does not erase the nation’s safety gains since the early 1990s. The US murder rate had dropped more than 50% since 1991. Even after last year’s increase, it is still 34% lower.

But the single-year jump in murders, the largest since current record keeping began in 1960, has fueled debate about the broader social effects of the coronavirus pandemic. National statistics show that no other crime category surged to the same extent that murder did: the nation’s overall violent crime rate increased just 5%, according to the data.

While homicides have continued to rise in big cities through the first half of 2021, the rate of increase has slowed, according to the criminologist Richard Rosenfeld, who has been tracking changes in crime throughout the pandemic. A study looking at a subset of 29 US cities through the end of June showed homicide up 16% this year, he said.

Experts who study violence point to multiple factors that might have played a role in the murder increase, from the emotional trauma and economic instability of the pandemic, which fell hardest on communities that were already struggling, to an increase in gun-carrying in public.

Conversations about American crime and violence often focus on victims of color in big cities, but “the FBI data is showing an increase everywhere”, said Shani Buggs, an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis, who studies community violence prevention.

“It’s urban. It’s rural. It’s Democratic. It’s Republican.”

Law enforcement agencies have reported increases in illegal firearm possession, and there have been anecdotal reports from cities across the country of more guns on the streets, Buggs said.

“What I’m hearing on the ground, from folks in New York, Chicago, Oakland, Louisville, St Louis, is that you have mundane issues that are turning lethal because there is so much anger, and rage, and guns available,” she said.

While handguns remained the most common murder weapon in the US, much about the surge in gun violence in 2020 remains unclear. The circumstances for most of the nation’s more than 21,000 murders are not recorded in the national data released on Monday. More than 4,000 were attributed to arguments, at least 900 to gang killings, and more than 1,900 were committed in the context of other crimes, including robberies and drug crimes. But the largest category is simply “unknown”.

Republicans have responded to the increase in gun violence by leaning into “soft on crime” rhetoric and pushing for more punitive responses, while Joe Biden and other Democrats have focused on Americans’ widespread and easy access to guns. Biden has also proposed a $5bn investment over eight years in scaling up community gun violence prevention strategies, including funding outreach workers and other programs that focus on the small number of people most likely to shoot or be shot, strategies that have shown a strong track record of reducing killings.

The murder increase has also become a key data point in debates over the role of police departments in preventing community violence, particularly after last year’s protests against police killings of Black Americans.

Some advocates said it was important to focus on the fact that 2020’s murder spike was building on a level of violence across the country that was already far from normal.

“It took one pandemic to unveil another pandemic, a more silent pandemic,” said Malik Russell, the director of communications for the Health Alliance for Violence Intervention. “It’s important that the nation as a whole doesn’t miss the forest for the trees, the fact that every year, thousands and thousands of people, disproportionately Black and brown, are being killed on the streets.”

Stark racial disparities in who is most at risk of being murdered continued into 2020: Black Americans, who make up about 14% of the population, represented more than half of the 2020 victims whose race was known. But the number of murders also increased sharply across racial groups. Compared with 2019, the number of white males murdered rose 27%, while the number of Black males murdered rose 31%, according to data on the victims whose race was recorded.

Of the nearly 5,000 additional murder victims in 2020, at least 1,200 were white, while at least 2,400 were Black.

Rosenfeld, the criminologist, said that while murder was the most serious crime, it was also the rarest, which made the continuing decline in US property crimes last year an “important story” that should not be overlooked.

The number of people victimized by property crimes had been on a downward trend for at least two decades, and the pandemic had not changed that, he said, even as homicides spiked.

“We want to address the increase in homicide with remedies that are specific to homicide,” Rosenfeld said. “These broad-based remedies, like ratcheting up years in prison for the commission of a felony – we not only don’t need them, they may do more harm than good.”

In conversations with people working on the front lines of the murder crisis across the country, Buggs said, she consistently heard “people talking about how much trauma exists in the community, and the need for healing and peacemaking”.

“As a country, as a society, we don’t have a great answer to that, but we need to be trying, and innovating, and we need to be taking it seriously,” she said.

The Black Lives Matter movement, and the response to it, have begun to shift certain cultures in the world toward more social justice, although, sadly, the brutality directed at peaceful protestors has shown quite the opposite of upholding civil rights.

Positive peace can only exist where social justice applies equally to all racial, ethnic and cultural groups; indeed, to all individuals in a society.

Many of the social and cultural underpinnings of the pre-Covid19 world have been ripped up by the “lockdowns”, “social distancing”, and restrictions that have been put in place by governments to control the spread of the coronavirus.

The effect of this is that there exists at this point a new kind of cultural, and political plasticity, where things that were thought of as solid and sacred before Covid19, are now no longer solid and sacred.

The death of George Floyd under the knee of a police officer, occurring as the world struggles to deal with the Pandemic, has been the catalyst for significant decisions and actions that seem to be moving at least the U.S. in the direction of greater social justice.

It is tragic that it took his dying to prompt cultures, especially in the West, to look at how they have continued for generations to sanctify those historical individuals involved in promoting slavery, and have continued to support institutions, such as the police, where racism has found fertile ground to thrive. 

That statues of slave traders, and slave holders have come down, since the death of George Floyd, and that the flag of the Confederacy has been banned by NASCAR, and eliminated from Mississippi’s state flag, are partly due to the movement George Floyd’s death gave rise to.  But it is also due to the new fluidity of culture, and the throwing out, or suspension, of the old rules, that has arisen in the middle of the pandemic.  The recent decision of the Supreme Court to uphold the rights of the DACA recipients or Dreamers is a welcome breath of fresh air in a world that had been becoming hyper-nationalistic.

Peace often does not come from an absence of violence.  On a grand scale, the massive death and destruction of World War II, gave rise to a new kind of peace, built ironically on the existence of mutually assured annihilation between East and West.

There have been countless deaths like the “I cannot breathe” killing of George Floyd.  But perhaps this catalyst, this tragic death, might usher in a new epoch of greater social justice in certain parts of the world.  I hasten to add that in some countries, like Brazil, Russia and China, there is a conspicuous lack of social justice, and in the U.S. there remain massive institutional and political barriers to civil rights applying equally to all citizens.

The top-to-bottom reform of police departments, and of racist sentencing practices would help usher us into this new epoch, as well as establishing ways, through education especially, for poverty to cease to be handed down through the generations like a yoke of oppression.   The city of Camden in New Jersey did totally reform its police department, letting go all the police officers in 2013 who presided over a sky-high murder rate, and a new police department, controlled by the County, came into being.   It was not an immediate fix, and teething problems had to be corrected.  But it is a great example of how police reform can be made to work to make a community safer and more peaceful.  Here is an article that describes the process:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/06/12/camden-policing-reforms-313750

Perhaps what we are seeing in the US, and in some other countries, are the green shoots of a more peaceful and equitable world – green shoots we need to nurture to become the oaks and sequoias of the future.

JT

Here is an updated design for Peacehenge by the artist, Colin Gray:

No need to travel to Britain to have a flavor of Stonehenge.   This version in Texas in not full size, but close to!  http://www.hcaf.com/stonehenge-ii/          JT