by Marc Chesney*
(11 June 2022) (Edit.) Marc Chesney is professor of finance at the University of Zurich. He has long urged major banks and other financial corporations to stop giving money to companies that produce nuclear and other heavy weapons but to help promote the good of our planet through sustainable credits.
(30 May 2022) (Edit.) If you consume the usual media – Anne Will to Günther Jauch, FAZ to NZZ, TAZ to Spiegel – you could get the impression that “the whole world” is in favour of supplying heavy weapons to Ukraine.
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.