Concerned Families of Westchester Newsletter
January 22, 2023
Hello All – This week we celebrate the 2nd anniversary of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The existence of this Treaty is mostly due to the work of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. The Treaty was negotiated at the UN in 2017 by 135 nations. So far the Treaty has been ratified by 68 states and signed by 24 more. It is a permanent Treaty and will be legally binding on all the nations that join it.
Sadly, the United States and other nuclear powers refused to participate in the UN negotiations and have not signed it. The war in Ukraine now raises the danger of a nuclear war involving the USA and Russia. We are reminded that the world is not safe from destruction until nuclear weapons are abolished.
In 2017 the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) won the Nobel Peace Prize for their work that led to the UN Treaty. In accepting the prize, ICAN's director Beatrice Fihn said:
It is insanity to allow ourselves to be ruled by these weapons. Many critics of this movement suggest that we are the irrational ones, the idealists with no grounding in reality that nuclear-armed states will never give up their weapons. But we represent the only rational choice. We represent those who refuse to accept nuclear weapons as a fixture in our world, those who refuse to have their fates bound up in a few lines of launch code.
Ours is the only reality that is possible. The alternative is unthinkable. The story of nuclear weapons will have an ending, and it is up to us what that ending will be. Nuclear weapons, like chemical weapons, biological weapons, cluster munitions and land mines before them, are now illegal. Their existence is immoral. Their abolishment is in our hands. The end is inevitable. But will that end be the end of nuclear weapons or the end of us? We must choose one.
There is little chance that the United States will agree to abolish nuclear weapons soon. But there are things that we can demand of our government right now:
· Declare that the USA would not use nuclear weapons first. ("First use" is our policy now.)
· Take US nuclear weapons off hair-trigger alert.
· Cancel plans to spend $1 trillion to replace the US nuclear arsenal with "enhanced" weapons.
· End the sole, unchecked authority of any US President to launch a nuclear attack.
Let's work for a nuclear-weapons-free world and end the shadow of death that hangs over all of us.
Some interesting/useful reading on the Treaty to Ban Nuclear Weapons
How to Avoid Nuclear Stand-Offs That Threaten the Entire World
By Frida Berrigan, In These Times [January 17, 2023]
---- The tit-for-tat coded rhetorical threats would sound fantastical and John le Carré-esque if they weren't so real. In September 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin cited U.S. "precedent" in using nuclear weapons in Japan and said Russia would "use all the means" at its disposal to "defend" itself in its war against Ukraine. About two weeks later, President Joe Biden said on CNN that the Pentagon did not need to be directed to prepare for a nuclear confrontation and warned that even accidental nuclear war could "end in Armageddon." The U.S. military also took the unusual step, in October, of publicly disclosing the locations of its Ohio class submarines in the Arabian Sea and the Atlantic — within range of Russia. Each can unleash 192 nuclear missiles in one minute. … If the world can make it back from this brink, then perhaps a silver lining to this devastating, 21st-century war might be a new urgency behind the work for nuclear disarmament. The public has been reminded of the vast U.S. and Russian stockpiles of more than 4,000 nuclear warheads each, of which a total of more than 3,000 are actively deployed. To avoid finding ourselves here again, we need nuclear disarmament. [Read More]
Also interesting/important – "Six Reasons Why Biden Must Sign The Nuclear Ban Treaty," from Code Pink [Link]; "Nuclear Notebook: United States nuclear weapons, 2023," from The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists [January 16, 2023] [Link]; and "Gambling With Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette From Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis," by Lawrence Wittner, reviewing a new book by Martin J. Sherwin [Link].
Beauty as Fuel for Change
A new project for CFOW is "Beauty as Fuel for Change." This is an arts project that brings together creators in many media around the theme of Beauty as an essential part of enabling work for positive social change. Several dozen artists are represented, including many Masters School art students. We had our Grand Opening last Sunday; and the exhibit will continue until February 17 at the Wenberg Family Art Gallery, Fonseca Center, Masters School, 49 Clinton Ave. in Dobbs Ferry. The exhibit is open Mondays through Fridays from 8:30 am to 4 pm.
CFOW Nuts & Bolts
Please consider getting involved with Concerned Families of Westchester. Weather permitting, we meet for a protest/rally each Saturday in Hastings, at 12 noon at the VFW Plaza (Warburton and Spring St.) A "Black Lives Matter/Say Their Names" vigil is held (winter schedule) on the first Monday of each month; the next vigil will be February 4th, from 5:30 to 6:00 pm in Yonkers at the intersection of Warburton Ave. and Odell. Our newsletter is archived at https://cfow.blogspot.com/; and news of interest and coming events is posted on our CFOW Facebook page. Another Facebook page focuses on the climate crisis. If you would like to join one of our Zoom meetings, each Tuesday and Thursday at noon, please send a return email for the link. If you would like to support our work by making a contribution, please send your check to CFOW, PO Box 364, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY 10706. Thanks!
Rewards!
This week's Rewards for stalwart readers come from the music of David Crosby. With first The Byrds and then with Crosby, Stills, Nash, (and Young), his music reflected the joys and upheavals of the 1960s. Here are "Guinevere," "Déjà Vu," and "Ohio." Rest in power, David Crosby.
Best wishes,
Frank Brodhead
For CFOW
CFOW Weekly Reader
Featured Essays
Older Voters Know Exactly What's at Stake, and They'll Be Here for Quite a While
By Bill McKibben and Akaya Windwood, Third Act [January 22, 2023]
---- Is it time to call the next election "the most important in American history"? Probably. It seems like it may involve a judgment on democracy itself. Americans with a lot of history will play a key role in determining its outcome. And judging in part by November's midterms, they may not play the role that older voters are usually assigned. We at Third Act, the group we helped form in 2021, think older Americans are beginning a turn in the progressive direction, a turn that will accelerate as time goes on. … When the Supreme Court tossed out Roe v. Wade in early summer, most of the pictures were of young women protesting, appropriately, since it's their lives that will be turned upside down. But people we know in their 60s and 70s felt a real psychic upheaval: A woman's right to choose had been part of their mental furniture for five decades. And they've lived their entire lives in what they had imagined was a stable and working democracy. The top concern to voters 65 and over, especially women, was "threats to democracy," according to AARP. And exit polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that among women 50 and older, the court's decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion had a major impact on which candidate they supported. [Read More]
Barbara Kingsolver – Making the invisible, visible
By Dave Kellaway, Anticapital Resistance [UK] [January 2023]
[FB – This is a review of Barbara Kingsolver's latest novel, Demon Copperhead, reflecting also on Kingsolver's other writings.]
---- Barbara Kingsolver is one of the best living writers of the socially engaged novel. She is a feminist, an ecologist, and very critical of big business and the military-industrial complex. Unlike many novelists writing today, she tells the lives of working people in an empathetic and political way. … Inspired by a visit to Bleak House, a house where Dickens lived near Broadstairs, Kent, and had written David Copperfield, she decided to "outsource" her plot and many characters to Dickens' masterpiece. … Kingsolver has lived in the areas where her books are situated, and her training as a biologist and her ecological commitment lead her to be stunningly precise and beautifully vivid about the local natural environment. In the head of Demon this is contrasted sharply with the numbness and concrete ugliness of the city. His dream in the book is to see the ocean. [Read More]
Turkey's Next Elections Could Be the Country's Last Real Democratic Vote
By Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept [
---- Politicians all over the world tell voters that the next election in their country will be "the most important one of their lives"; it's a favored, and well-trodden, get-out-the-vote tactic in the United States and beyond. In 2023, though, there is one country where a claim about an election's existential importance might really be true: Turkey. This week, the country's leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan moved up the date of the forthcoming Turkish presidential and parliamentary votes to May 14, a month earlier than expected, even as the country reels from a spiraling economic crisis and increasing social polarization. Erdogan has now been in power for two decades, a period during which he has gone from being perceived in the West as a pragmatic economic reformer into an authoritarian who has replaced Turkish institutions with strongman rule centered around himself and his close associates. Time may be running out to stop this country of 84 million people — and a NATO ally that Western powers have an obligation to defend — from turning into a permanent one-man show. [Read More]
The War in Ukraine
'NATO's mission' leaves Ukraine destroyed
By Aaron Maté [January 11, 2023]
---- Unveiling its latest military assistance package to Ukraine – at $3.75 billion, the largest to date -- the White House declared that US weapons are intended "to help the Ukrainians resist Russian aggression." For their part, Ukrainians on the receiving end see it differently. "We are carrying out NATO's mission," Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov said in an interview. "They aren't shedding their blood. We're shedding ours. That's why they're required to supply us with weapons." Repeating a rationale offered by his US sponsors in previous wars, including the invasion of Iraq, Reznikov added that Ukraine "is defending the entire civilized world." Receiving an endless supply of weapons from NATO countries that shed no blood of their own -- all to fulfill their "mission" -- is an apt description of Ukraine's role in the US-led proxy war against Russia. And as one of its staunchest champions, Sen. Lindsey Graham, cheerfully predicted in July, that mission is using Ukraine to "fight to the last person." [Read More]
Also of interest by Aaron Maté are "By using Ukraine to fight Russia, the US provoked Putin's war [March 5, 2022] [Link] and "Siding with Ukraine's far-right, US sabotaged Zelensky's mandate for peace" [April 10, 2022] [Link].
What Are Germany's War Aims?
By
[FB – This is an interview with Erich Vad, an ex-brigadier general. From 2006 to 2013, he was the military policy advisor to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. In light of the recent Germany refusal to send its tanks to Ukraine, and in light of strong divisions within Germany over the Ukraine war, I think this interview is interesting and important.]]
---- If the goal is an independent Ukraine, one must also ask oneself what the perspective of a European order involving Russia should look like. Russia will not simply disappear from the map. We must avoid driving the Russians into the arms of the Chinese and thus shifting the multipolar order to our disadvantage. We also need Russia, as the leading power of a multi-ethnic state, to avoid flare-ups of fighting and wars. And frankly, I don't see Ukraine becoming a member of the EU, let alone NATO. In Ukraine, as in Russia, we have high corruption and the rule of oligarchs. What we in Turkey – rightly – denounce in terms of the rule of law, we also have that problem in Ukraine. … A broader front for peace must build up in Washington. And this senseless actionism in German politics must finally come to an end. Otherwise we will wake up one morning and find ourselves in the middle of the Third World War. [Read More]
Also of interest/importance – "U.S. Extends Troop Deployment in Romania, at Ukraine War's Doorstep," b [Link]; "NYT: US Considering Helping Ukraine Strike Crimea," b[Link]; "Congress Approved $113 Billion of Aid to Ukraine in 2022," from The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget [January 5, 2023] [Link]; and "How Ukraine became a testbed for Western weapons and battlefield innovation," by and , CNN [January 16, 2023] [Link].:
War & Peace
What Price "Defense"? - America's Costly, Dysfunctional Approach to Security Is Making Us Ever Less Safe
By
---- Late last month, President Biden signed a bill that clears the way for $858 billion in Pentagon spending and nuclear weapons work at the Department of Energy in 2023. That's far more than Washington anted up for military purposes at the height of the Korean or Vietnam wars or even during the peak years of the Cold War. In fact, the $80 billion increase from the 2022 Pentagon budget is in itself more than the military budgets of any country other than China. Meanwhile, a full accounting of all spending justified in the name of national security, including for homeland security, veterans' care, and more, will certainly exceed $1.4 trillion. And mind you, those figures don't even include the more than $50 billion in military aid Washington has already dispatched to Ukraine, as well as to frontline NATO allies, in response to the Russian invasion of that country. [Read More] Also of interest is "Fastest Growing Weapons Manufacturers in the World," by Angelo Young, 247WallSt.com [January 16, 2023] [Link].
The US Government Is Involved in Secret Wars in 15 Countries
By Samuel Stebbins, 247wallst.com [December 21, 2022]
---- In the ongoing War on Terror, Congress has authorized the Department of Defense to train and equip military forces anywhere in the world and to provide backing to foreign forces supporting counterterrorism operations. These provisions, known as Section 333 and Section 127e, are now being used for American involvement in over a dozen shadow wars around the world. Unlike America's military campaigns of the latter half of the previous century, these are generally small-scale operations that target diffuse militant groups that operate across broad regions rather than nations with clearly defined borders. Using data from the 2022 Brennan Center for Justice report, "Secret War: How the U.S. Uses Partnerships and Proxy Forces to Wage War Under the Radar," 24/7 Wall St. identified the 15 countries where the U.S. government is engaging in secret wars. [Read More]
Free Julian Assange!
The Belmarsh Tribunal on Julian Assange, Press Freedom & More
---- On Jan. 20, Democracy Now! livestreamed the Belmarsh Tribunal from Washington, D.C. The event featured expert testimony from journalists, whistleblowers, lawyers, publishers and parliamentarians on assaults to press freedom and the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman and Srecko Horvat, the co-founder of DiEM25, co-chaired the tribunal, which was organized by Progressive International and the Wau Holland Foundation. Members of the tribunal included Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Noam Chomsky, Jeremy Corbyn, and many more. [See the program - speaking starts at 12 minutes]. Also of interest is (Video) "Julian Assange and the war on whistleblowers," with Chris Hedges interviewing Kevin Gosztola, author of a new book: Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange [ [See the Program]
The State of the Union
"We're Going to Where the Fight Is": Abortion Rights Movement Sets Its Sights on Key States
By Jordan Smith, The Intercept [
---- In the wake of the Supreme Court's June decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade and decimated nearly 50 years of abortion rights, Carmona anticipates another strong showing for this year's march. It is slated for January 22, the anniversary of the court's 1973 ruling in Roe. But instead of Washington, D.C., this year, the main event will be held in Madison, Wisconsin. "We wanted to send a clear message to elected leaders, to our base, to the people that we're going to where the fight is," Carmona said. "And that's at the state level." The fight to protect reproductive rights has largely shifted to the states. While the Supreme Court has determined that the U.S. Constitution provides no guarantee of reproductive freedom, that document is hardly the final say. The U.S. Constitution is the floor, not the ceiling — a baseline guarantee of rights afforded to the people — and many state constitutions provide much broader protections. [Read More] Also of interest is (Video) "Roe v. Wade at 50 (Almost): What Abortion Access Looks Like After Constitutional Right Overturned," from Democracy Now!, with The Nation's Amy Littlefield.
Israel/Palestine
What Israel's New Kahanist Government Really Wants
By Michael Omer-Man, DAWN ["Democracy for the Arab World Now"] [January 19, 2023]
---- For spectators of Israeli politics, particularly those following from afar, one of the most shocking aspects of the new Israeli government was the inclusion of Itamar Ben Gvir, a lifelong disciple and now political successor of the radical American-Israeli rabbi and militant Meir Kahane, as a senior minister. …. Precisely because of that savviness, which has led Ben Gvir and his Jewish Power party (Otzmah Yehudit in Hebrew) to unprecedented political heights, it is important to understand the ideology that drives him. Together with Religious Zionism, a kindred political party with which Jewish Power ran on a joint slate in the last Israeli elections, the far-right party received over half a million votes, making it the third-largest in Israel's parliament, the Knesset. Their sudden rise to power is particularly destabilizing for many progressive or liberal Zionists in Israel and the United States, who may have trouble reconciling the ideas of Ben Gvir's Jewish Power with the vision of most mainstream Zionist parties, particularly when boiled down to its creed of "maximum land with minimum Arabs." Netanyahu, though, certainly did not have to make any ideological compromises to include Jewish Power in his latest coalition. [Read More] Also of interest are "The Biden administration's dangerous move to deepen military ties with Israel," byJanuary 14, 2023][Link]; and "More than 90 countries slam Israel over 'punitive measures' against Palestine," from Middle East Eye [January 17, 2023] [Link].
