RIVERA SUN – Beyond these stories, check out the rest of this week’s collection in the Nonviolence News Research Archive. There are some great pieces, including a modern resistance song playlist, two fascinating articles on solidarity infrastructure and community care systems, and three essays about fiction and social change.
AI: Where is it taking us?
BOB TOPPER – In the last century people marveled at the Wright brothers’ success. Just 66 years later, an awestruck world watched American astronauts walk on the moon. Technical advances became prosaic. But we should be paying more attention to Artificial Intelligence. For this revolution we will not be casual observers. It will change our lives in fundamental ways. We are not prepared and our government is sleeping.
Daniel Ellsberg Speaks to Us as the War on Iran Continues
NORMAN SOLOMON – The war on Iran is enabled by remaining silent and just following orders. Ellsbarg wrote in his journal at the time of the Gulf War, “There is a time when silence is a lie, when silence is complicity, and when silence betrays our troops, our country, and ourselves. We owe it to our troops, as well as to other potential victims of this war, to speak the truth about ourselves: what we believe, what we reject, and what we want.”
No rationale for presidential war on Iran
By John LaForge The president says Iran must not be allowed to possess nuclear weapons. In his February 24 speech to Congress, he said of Iran’s leaders, “They want to make a deal, but we haven’t heard those secret words: ‘We will…
Will Mamdani Abolish Police, or Simply Make Them Obsolete?
SONALI KOLHATKAR – What sets Mamdani apart from other progressive mayors who promised to be tough on police is a democratic socialist vision of a society that meets people’s needs.
Nonviolence vs. the Hydra of authoritarian violence
ANDREW MOSS – The myth of the Hydra offers a vivid image of how different forms of violence can be traced to a single, lethal source. But its utility ends there. No Heracles will come to slay this beast. A single “heroic” figure, or figures, isn’t even desirable. A complex history must first be accounted for: how the current authoritarian regime emerged from decades of festering inequalities of wealth and power, from long-standing precedents of scapegoating, racism, and xenophobia..