Articles by Robert C. Koehler

We found 125 results.

The Tears of War Belong to All of Us
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 11 Mar 2024

6 Mar 2024 – First you call them terrorists. Then you say you’re defending yourself. Moral problem solved! Now you can kill as many of them as you want.

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Changing the World with Fire and Love
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 Mar 2024

28 Feb 2024 – The easiest way to cope with the news is to shrivel it into an us-vs.-them abstraction and, thus, to extract as much humanity from it as possible.

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The War on Gaza: Public Relations vs. Reality
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 19 Feb 2024

14 Feb 2024 – For its victims, war is . . . yes, hell. For the rest of us, war is an abstraction embedded in ignorance, a.k.a., public relations, served up for public consumption. At least that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

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Poetry Bleeds from the Shattered Normal
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 25 Dec 2023

20 Dec 2023 – It seems more relevant than ever, as innocent blood flows in the wars being waged by military-political bureaucracies across the planet. How many more stunned facial expressions will I see on YouTube, of parents who have just lost their children, their spouse, their siblings?

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Takes One to Know One
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 18 Dec 2023

13 Dec 2023 – There are a number of blatant ways for terrorist organizations – by which I mean national governments – to justify committing mass murder.

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Humanity’s Bombs Are Aimed at Evolution
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 11 Dec 2023

6 Dec 2023 – In most media coverage of war, the unexamined assumption is that we, the readers, are spectators, looking on as the missiles fly (mostly in one direction) and Good dukes it out with Evil yet again, Paradoxically, Good and Evil are in complete agreement about one thing: The only way to deal with conflict is through violence.

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Thankfulness Buried in the Rubble
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 27 Nov 2023

22 Nov 2023 – Much as I love Thanksgiving, I find myself struggling to let a sense of thankfulness flow, because when I do–and doing so has always been a crucial part of the holiday–my gratitude for my blessings starts to feel more like luck and, even worse, privilege. Yeah, how nice.

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Militarism vs. Our Shared Humanity
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 13 Nov 2023

8 Nov 2023 – If you don’t care about the victims, the dehumanization process kicks in and, if you’re reading about it on the Internet or watching it on TV, it starts morphing into a video game. Crash, boom, hooray! This is war and we’ve got no choice but to win, no matter the cost.

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Let’s Stop Dehumanizing the Future
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 6 Nov 2023

1 Nov 2023 – We — by which I mean most of humanity — are still playing with the so-called “just war theory,” the intellectual justification for war dating back to St. Augustine and the early centuries of the Common Era.

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Igniting a Peace Fire, Even as War Rages
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 30 Oct 2023

25 Oct 2023 – Here’s some advice about parenting: Write your child’s name on his or her leg or stomach, so that when your building is bombed, the child can be identified from the rubble. Mothers in southern Gaza are doing this now.

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Hell Is Not Predestined
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 16 Oct 2023

11 Oct 2023 – Humanity’s cancer in Israel and Palestine: Missiles fly, hell makes global headlines, thousands die, many of them (oh God, of course) children. Israeli Defense Minister declares: “We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly. . . . We are imposing a complete siege on Gaza; no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything will be closed.”

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Depleted Uranium Won’t Bring Peace to Ukraine
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 11 Sep 2023

6 Sep 2023 – Militarism is obsolete, for God’s sake. Its technology is out of control. The latest news left me stunned and terror-stricken: “The Biden administration will send munitions containing depleted uranium to Ukraine, despite the dangers such weapons pose to civilians.”

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The Nuclear Apple
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 21 Aug 2023

9 Aug 2023 – How do we turn 26 Sep — declared by the UN to be (I kid you not) the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons — into a reality? Or does the human future have nothing to do with “us”? Are we just spectators of our own lives, stuck in the world our leaders continue to bequeath us?

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Facing Climate Change as One World
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 24 Jul 2023

19 Jul 2023 – When it comes to climate change, one word has me totally perplexed: “we.” A transcendent “we” grabbing control over the planet’s rising temperature.

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Listening to Oppenheimer, Seven Decades Later
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 17 Jul 2023

12 Jul 2023 – A mere 55 years after his death, the U.S. government has restored J. Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, which the Atomic Energy Commission had taken away from him in 1954, declaring him to be not simply a communist but, in all likelihood, a Soviet spy.

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It’s Time to Stop the ‘Insect Apocalypse’
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 3 Jul 2023

28 Jun 2023 – I was reading about the looming demise of bumble bees thanks to human greed and ignorance and started thinking about the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. We ‘should’ have eaten from it!

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USA: Disconnecting War from Its Consequences
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 5 Jun 2023

31 May 2023 – Twenty-two years ago, Congress put sanity up for a vote. It lost in the House, 420-1 and in the Senate, 98-0. Barbara Lee’s was the lone vote against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force resolution. Militarism keeps expanding. If there’s a problem out there, option one is to kill it quickly. Problem solved!

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Stepping over the Border, onto Planet Earth
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 22 May 2023

17 May 2023 – “. . . we belong to the Earth rather than to a nation . . .” These words stick in my heart like a wedding ring. At the same time, I feel surrounded by a cynical “realism”: Don’t be a fool. A marriage like that isn’t possible. Be grateful you’re a US citizen. Arm yourself! We’re being invaded.

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Killing Our Way to the Truth
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service, 8 May 2023

War is minimally questioned — taken for granted — in the mainstream consciousness, or what I would call the consensus groupthink, which is quietly structured into mainstream reporting. Conflict between nations instantly summons the possibility of war; that’s just the way it is, no matter the certainty of “collateral damage.”

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AI Robots Invade the Classroom — So What?
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 20 Mar 2023

8 Mar 2023 – As long as the system of artificial education focuses on “teaching to the test” by insisting on reducing individual intelligence to a number and belittling the potential of each student, we have a problem. AI isn’t the cause; it helps expose it.

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How Safe Can We Really Be?
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 16 Jan 2023

11 Jan 2023 – What is freedom–the freedom to be armed and able to defend yourself? Does one man’s freedom force the rest of us to watch their country turn into a John Wayne movie?… And the strongman may kill his enemies, but he can’t kill the paradox.

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The Racists Return to Kindergarten
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 5 Dec 2022

30 Nov 2022 – Damn those Marxists! You know their game, right? No doubt they’re in favor of dropping charges against Julian Assange, who (as all real Americans know) deserves 175 years in prison for exposing — with the help of the New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País — embarrassing realities about U.S. foreign policy.

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Shatter Alley
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 21 Nov 2022

I snuggle behind the wheel
and see
shards of glass
scattered across
the seat of my car.

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Death by Nationalism?
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 17 Oct 2022

12 Oct 2022 – The irresolvable dilemma facing Western leaders is that this is a no-win situation. How can they militarily defeat Russia, when it possesses 6,000 nuclear warheads and its military doctrine explicitly states that it will use them before it will accept an existential military defeat? If a nuclear war happens, everyone on the planet is no more than a deportee.

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Staring into the Eyes of the Wolf
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 5 Sep 2022

31 Aug 2022 – Close your eyes and try to envision the two wolves. The wise grandfather explains to the child that the two wolves are inside all of us. One of the wolves is an arrogant narcissist — a jerk, an egocentric idiot. You know, evil. The other is the embodiment of joy and empathy, kindness and love. The trembling child asks in alarm: “Which one wins?”

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Surrendering Power to Reverence
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 8 Aug 2022

3 Aug 2022 – “I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous Peoples.” So said Pope Francis last week, at a powwow in Alberta, at the start of his “apology tour” across Canada — for the participation of the Catholic Church in the multi-century horror of Native American “residential schools.”

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Embracing the Complexity of Peace
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 20 Jun 2022

15 Jun 2022 – Just imagine for once if we led the world in funding peace and not wars. One can also quickly, unavoidably imagine the cynicism that rushes in whenever someone tosses out the word “peace.” Just imagine for once if we led the world in funding peace and not wars.

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USA: The Collateral Damage Comes Home
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 13 Jun 2022

8 Jun 2022 – 13 gun massacres this past weekend, at strip malls, nightclubs, graduation parties — with 16 people dying, many more injured — and the total number of such shootings so far in 2022 is 246. The country is on pace to match or surpass last year’s total, which is the worst on record.

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The Heart Is Mightier Than the Sword
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 23 May 2022

Sounds like a horror movie on permanent rewind through the brain, through the soul. Catch your breath, buy a gun. What other choice do you have?… The heart is mightier than the sword. I’m allowing myself to imagine a world where most people believe this.

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The Global Suicide Budget
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 2 May 2022

In 2021, the human race, in order to keep itself safe, invested $2.1 trillion in the ability to make war — to kill one another, even to end life altogether. We live counter to our deepest values in order to, as Obama put it, “upheld our highest traditions.” Or something like that. The bullets fly in all directions. Sometimes they hit the soul.

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Humanity: Evolving in Spite of Itself
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 25 Apr 2022

As wars rage, cruelty shatters lives across the planet, nuclear Armageddon remains a viable option for all of us — I think that the human race is evolving in spite of itself — evolving beyond war, empire, dominance and conquest, and toward an uncertain future. Most of us already know this, but at a level so deep, so vague, it feels like mere “hope.”

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Nuclear Weapons and Cranial Winter
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 18 Apr 2022

13 Apr 2022 – “The defense industry mobilized a small army of at least 718 lobbyists and doled out more than $67 million dollars pressuring Congress for increased weapons spending generally.”

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Save the Planet, Behead the Military Budget
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 Apr 2022

30 Mar 2022 – Why, why, why, as our ecosystem collapses, as millions flee the horrors of war and poverty, as the pandemic continues, as WWIII and a nuclear Armageddon rears its evil head, does ever-expanding, global militarism remain our primary national purpose? This question stabs me as President Whoever announces his proposed military budget, as Congress increases it, as the media shrugs.

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Transcending the Certainties of War
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 21 Mar 2022

Can we stare into hell and refuse to see . . . an enemy?

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Life Goes on, Right?
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 14 Mar 2022

9 Mar 2022 – I had a breakthrough yesterday — and I don’t mean metaphorically. Wars rage, countless humans suffer, the rich get richer, life goes on. I still have my morning coffee. But not yesterday.

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The Frailty of Peace in the Midst of War
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 7 Mar 2022

2 Mar 2022 – Prior to any analysis of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, prior to the casting of blame and outrage — at Putin’s hubris, at NATO’s pernicious eastward expansion over the last three decades — there’s this:

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Creating Peace Means Changing the World
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 28 Feb 2022

23 Feb 2022 – Only threat, pain and inflicted hell preserve peace, right? Regarding Ukraine: Both sides in the matter are flawed, and both sides need to listen.

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Afghanistan on the Brink of Disaster
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 21 Feb 2022

16 Feb 2022 – Gay rights, women’s rights — in reality, these are a nuisance to many U.S. conservatives, but purporting to protect these rights on the other side of the world is a great excuse to play war.

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Ukraine and the Nuclear Paradox
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 7 Feb 2022

2 Feb 2022 – There is a paradox here the size of the whole planet. The essential point here, as far as I can tell, is that the signatories are confessing that, yes, we possess the weapons that could destroy all life, and yes, we think using them would be wrong, but we have no idea how to make them go away and so we’ll just use them to scare each other, a.k.a., serve defensive purposes.

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A Citizen of the World (Still) Speaks
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 24 Jan 2022

19 Jan 2022 – I decided to honor Martin Luther King Day this year by reading — and trying to absorb, more fully than ever before — the entirety (nearly 7,000 words) of the iconic speech he gave at Riverside Church a year to the day before his assassination.

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Untangling Ourselves from the Dark Side
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 17 Jan 2022

12 Jan 2022 – “You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.” The words are those of Albert Einstein. He adds, pointing out a truth: “The very prevention of war requires more faith, courage and resolution than are needed to prepare for war.”

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The Myth of the Good War
Robert C. Koehler | Common Dreams - TRANSCEND Media Service, 10 Jan 2022

5 Jan 2022 – The myth of the good war may well be the most destructive certainty misleading the crumbling empire known as “USA! USA!” Here’s the problem, though. Building global and environmental peace — listening to and understanding one another — is a slow, extraordinarily complex process. It’s so much easier to keep waging war against the bad guy of the moment, who will never go away.

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Do We Dare Stop Being Afraid of Ourselves?
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 27 Dec 2021

22 Dec 2021 – We’re stuck, right now, in the myth of collective suicide, more generally known as the myth of the conquest of good over evil. And since history is told by the winners of humanity’s wars, those currently in power are always — always! — the good guys. David Suzuki puts it this way: “As dictators have shown throughout history, collective narratives are often successful when they have a bad guy, someone or something that is ‘other.’”

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Poisoning Ourselves with War
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 20 Dec 2021

15 Dec 2021 – War spews hell in all directions. Just ask the guys at Talon Anvil, a secret U.S. “strike cell” recently exposed by the New York Times as a unit with a reputation for ignoring the rules of engagement and killing lots and lots of civilians with drone strikes as it plays war with ISIS.

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The Myth of Redemptive Violence
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 1 Nov 2021

27 Oct 2021 – Several million dollars’ worth of fiction exploded the other day, leaving cinematographer Halyna Hutchins — age 42, a wife, a mom — dead, and plunging Alec Baldwin, who accidentally shot her, into a state of unimaginable hell.

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Assange: A Threat to War Itself
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 25 Oct 2021

20 Oct 2021 – The Pentagon’s offer of “condolence money” to the relatives of the ten people (seven of them children) who were killed in the final U.S. drone strike in Afghanistan — originally declared righteous and necessary — bears a troubling connection to the government’s ongoing efforts to get its hands on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and punish him for exposing the inconvenient truth of war.

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A Zen Koan on Columbus Day
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 18 Oct 2021

13 Oct 2021 – It’s too easy, right? Too simple — shoving Christopher Columbus off the historical honor roll, pulling down his statues, yanking his “day” away from him and renaming it in honor of the people he murdered, kidnapped, turned into property?

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War, Herbicides and Moral Disengagement
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 16 Aug 2021

On 10 Aug 1961 the U.S. started poisoning the forests and crops of Vietnam with herbicides to deprive the commies of Ho Chi Minh of food and ground cover. Agent Orange Awareness Day was on 10 Aug. I think we should spend the rest of the year honoring War and Dehumanization Awareness Day.

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Democracy: Enemy of the Powerful
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 2 Aug 2021

28 Jul 2021 – Perhaps the best possible thing we could acknowledge being is a “divided nation.” Failing to do so justifies — or at least avoids noticing — all manner of violent cruelty and repression in the name of so-called democracy, from the jailing of whistleblowers who reveal U.S. war crimes…

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Civilizing the Savage
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 26 Jul 2021

21 Jul 2021 – We crossed the Atlantic, encountered a bunch of savages, defeated them, claimed the continent. We won! This is the history I remember learning, as satisfying and stupid as a John Wayne movie.

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Moral Intelligence or Nuclear War
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 19 Jul 2021

14 Jul 2021 – Let’s dance at the border! One of these days, something will give — the rich, the powerful will suddenly look around cluelessly. What’s happening? Awareness will sweep across the planet: We are one, and life is sacred. This consciousness will even invade political life and what I call moral intelligence will find political traction.

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Transcending War: Everyone Wins
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 28 Jun 2021

23 Jun 2021 – When will we as a nation admit it? Barbara Lee was right. She was the only member of Congress to vote against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force back in 2001, following the 9/11 disaster, which allowed George W. Bush to invade Afghanistan. A year later she voted against a second AUMF that launched the invasion of Iraq and Bush’s alleged Global War on Terror, a.k.a., our endless war to pummel evil into dust and sweep it out of the universe.

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Nukes, Lies and Invisible Murder
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 7 Jun 2021

2 Jun 2021 – “The employment or threat of employment of nuclear weapons could have a significant influence on ground operations. . . . Integration of nuclear weapons into a theater of operations requires the consideration of multiple variables. Using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability. Specifically, the use of a nuclear weapon will fundamentally change the scope of a battle and create conditions that affect how commanders will prevail in conflict.” – ‘Nuclear Operations’ Report by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

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A Permanent Structure of Peace
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 31 May 2021

26 May 2021 – Wars are too easily seen as necessary until they blow up in our faces. We’re at a point where something has to change, where human effort has to be put into planetary survival, which requires creating “a permanent structure of peace.” Is it asking too much that the media bring values, at least as deep as the U.N. Charter, to its reporting, when it comes to matters of war and peace?

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Our Own Wisdom Is Telling Us to Evolve
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 26 Apr 2021

21 Apr 2021 – Let’s use up the planet and bless the future with its corpse. Those words could well be the core slogan of mainstream politicians and their media cohorts, with the purpose of the election process (you know, democracy) being, simply, to choose the specific ways in which we continue exploiting the planet and ignoring the consequences.

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Trapped at the Border: Their Fate Is Our Fate
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 12 Apr 2021

7 Apr 2021 – You’d think that the “border crisis” begins and ends as a problem for the USA… Something else becomes possible when we begin to realize that unless we change the world, their fate is our fate.

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Ending the Endless War
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 5 Apr 2021

31 Mar 2021 – The refusal — the inability? — of most leaders at the national level to approach humanity’s biggest problems holistically, rather than simply blame them on “the other,” says to me it’s time to begin loosening the certainty that borders are real, that nation states are real. “We’ve defeated freedom’s enemies before, and we will defeat them again.” How could any sane human being imagine that actions built on this kind of thinking could solve, or heal, a complex issue?

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National vs. Human Security
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 8 Feb 2021

3 Feb 2021 – The sea change — awareness — begins with the realization that security isn’t a linear, one-way process: Round up the bad guys, the troublemakers, the illegals, lock ’em up, get them out of our way and, voila, problem solved, security attained, the good Americans are safe. Trouble’s in a cage! The remarkable, bureaucratic ignorance of this policy transcends the racism that drives it.

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The Parallel Universe of Peace
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 9 Nov 2020

28 Oct 2020 – Nuclear weapons are now (or soon will be) . . . good Lord, illegal. Armageddon is against the law! Well, sort of. Indeed, no nuke-armed nation has, as far as I can tell, anything but contempt for this infringement on its right to blow up the world. War and peace, it seems, exist in parallel universes.

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Learning from the Hibakushas
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders - TRANSCEND Media Service, 17 Aug 2020

12 Aug 2020 – “They were covered with blood and burned and blackened and swollen, and the flesh was hanging from the bones. Parts of their bodies were missing, and some were carrying their own eyeballs in their hands. And as they collapsed, their stomach burst open.” But war is necessary, right?

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Can We Achieve Nuclear Adulthood?
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 11 May 2020

6 May 2020 – What we urgently need now is a rethinking of the entire concept of security. All we’ve been hearing is talk about weapons, missiles and airstrikes. Is it not clear by now that wars and the arms race cannot solve today’s global problems? War is a sign of defeat, a failure of politics.

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Creative Empathy in a Pandemic
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 30 Mar 2020

18 Mar 2020 – Of all the disruption, paradox and chaos that have been unleashed by the coronavirus, this is the most stunning: It has something to teach us that we could never learn on our own. My God, we are one planet — one people. This isn’t idealism; it’s the most pragmatic social organizing principle possible. Just as all of us are, of necessity, isolated from each other, we are all participants, via our creative empathy, in this shift in human consciousness. What examples of this empathy have you noticed? Let’s share.

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War, Profit and the Coronavirus
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 16 Mar 2020

11 Mar 2020 – If you want expertise, don’t bother reading any further here. I know as much about coronavirus as any stunned disbeliever with a sudden, irresistible urge to touch his face.

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Maneuvering Hell for Our Advantage
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 3 Feb 2020

29 Jan 2020 – When the mainstream media writes about war, even critically, the image that often comes to mind for me is an infant wrapped in plastic. That infant is naked reality, a.k.a., the present moment, suffocating and screaming for its life; the plastic smothering it are the journalistic euphemisms by which murder and terrorism turn into abstract acts of national necessity.

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Will We Always Be This Way?
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 20 Jan 2020

8 Jan 2020 – “The people do not want war!” Perhaps this sanguinary legacy is why, in survey after international survey, the United States is perennially voted the world’s greatest threat to peace in most of the world’s nations. After Soleimani’s assassination, Trump boasted that ‘his bloody rampage is forever gone.’ If only the same were true of Trump. . .

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Militarism: The Delusion Lives
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 23 Dec 2019

18 Dec 2019 – The annual defense budget, passed recently by both the House (377-48) and Senate (82-8), came in at $738 billion for 2020, up from last year a sweet $22 billion. War hits the motherlode every year.

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A Tight Grip on Our Nuclear Toys
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 11 Nov 2019

6 Nov 2019 – The interests of the planet as a whole could easily disappear as anything but idealistic, ignorable abstractions. Disarmament? Give me a break. Not when regional powers are “challenging American hegemony.” Add to this the transnational, corporate interest in militarism. There’s no money in peace, a black hole, the lull between wars. Money doesn’t start to flow until the bullets and the bombs start to fly.

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Climate Change and Consciousness Shift
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 30 Sep 2019

25 Sep 2019 – Climate change: It feels like the approaching End Times. But it’s the secular version thereof, which means that humanity is responsible for both its cause and — if possible — its transcendence. All we need to do is change everything about the way the high-tech, global society functions in the next dozen years.

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We Are All Indigenous
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 9 Sep 2019

Can we flip the faux-humanity of Bolsonaro on its head and declare: We want to integrate ourselves into an indigenous global understanding. Doing so involves more than just scientific expertise; it involves transforming our way of life — beyond television, beyond the Internet, beyond domination and exploitation — to an ever-present awareness of the planet we inhabit. Can we set aside our technology and start learning to listen to it?

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Participatory Evolution
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 26 Aug 2019

The core paradox of nonviolent protest against such legally sanctioned immoralities is that, if you block a driveway with your body or simply cross a bridge, you’re depending on the humanity of those you confront, who are armed with the weapons they hold or the vehicles they are driving, to keep them from acting on their anger and harming or killing you. Is this not the essence of courage? You are bringing nothing but yourself, empowered solely by the force of moral compassion — the way the world should be — to a confrontational demand for change.

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Fighting Climate Change Means Ending War
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 22 Jul 2019

17 Jul 2019 – The “world’s greatest democracy” has morphed, over the course of my lifetime, into a money-driven military-industrial monstrosity, waging pointless wars, selling arms to the world, expanding its prison archipelago and generating endless wealth for the powerful — all the while insulated from public scrutiny by the mainstream propaganda industry, which shrugs and calls it all self-defense and situation normal as it serves up endless distractions to Spectator Nation.

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American Concentration Camps
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 1 Jul 2019

26 Jun 2019 – Asylum seekers once had legal rights, but not anymore. As their numbers increased, due primarily to worsening conditions in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras (countries the United States helped ravage politically), virtually all the refugees started getting treated as “illegals.” These are American concentration camps. They’re not death camps, but they’re evolving, I fear, in much the same moral and political void.

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What’s Next: War with Venezuela?
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 13 May 2019

8 May 2019 – Mix a little socialism in with the oil and war may be unavoidable. With our trillion dollar military budget, threatening (and waging) war is pretty much the only thing we know how to do as a nation, and by “we” I mean the ones in control, publicly and/or secretly — the ones whose egos have expanded to the size of the nation, who mean themselves when they say “that’s what the United States will do.”

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Nonviolence or Nonexistence
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 6 May 2019

2 May 2019 – The day before he died, Martin Luther King said these words at a packed church in Memphis: “Men for years now have been talking about war and peace. Now no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world, it is nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.”That’s where we are today . . . half a century later!

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Our Wounded Planet
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 1 Apr 2019

27 Mar 2019 – Should we save the planet or kill the enemy?… I am because you are!

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Re-Inhabiting Planet Earth
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 11 Mar 2019

6 Mar 2019 – The atmosphere didn’t catch fire at 5:30 that morning, but Segre’s words remain relevant, sort of like radioactive fallout. They encapsulate what may be history’s ultimate moment of human arrogance: the belief in a sense of separateness from and superiority to nature so thorough that we have, with our monstrous intelligence, the ability and therefore the right to play Bad God and make the whole planet go poof.

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Disarmament, Not Low-Yield Nukes
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 Feb 2019

30 Jan 2019 – Seven-plus decades ago, as humanity was ensnarled in a monstrous world war, its instinct to win — to dominate others above all else — achieved ultimate manifestation: the capacity to annihilate all life on Planet Earth. Nuclear weapons are, you might say, the logical outcome of the 10,000-year journey of civilization.

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The New Abnormal
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 19 Nov 2018

“Mass shootings and mass burnings. Welcome to the new America.” Gunfire and wildfire. This is a country at war with itself in multiple ways.

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Reopening the Doors of Perception
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 Dec 2017

“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” These words from a William Blake’s poem gave Aldous Huxley the title of his book The Doors of Perception. Then they gave Jim Morrison the name of his rock band–Doors. And eventually they gave millions of young people a glimpse at a world beyond the cruel and small-minded order that ruled the day.

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Praying for the Moths and Beetles
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 30 Oct 2017

25 Oct 2017 – “. . . insects as a group are in terrible trouble and the remorselessly expanding human enterprise has become too much, even for them.” And instantly I’m beyond the realm of anything I know, as I consider the gradual disappearance not of whales but of . . . beetles, moths and hoverflies, thanks to the human enterprise we call civilization.

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Reclaiming the Truth about Vietnam
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 25 Sep 2017

The first set of words sickened a vast segment of the American public and caused the horror of “Vietnam Syndrome” to cripple and emasculate the military-industrial complex for a decade and a half. Slowly, the powers that be regrouped, redefined how we fought our wars: without widespread national sacrifice or a universal draft; and with smart bombs and even smarter public relations, ensuring that most of the American public could watch our clean, efficient wars in the comfort of their living rooms. What was also necessary was to marginalize the anti-war voices that shut down the Vietnam War.

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The Man Who Stood Up to Armageddon
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 Sep 2017

30 Aug 2017 – Suddenly it’s possible — indeed, all too easy — to imagine one man starting a nuclear war. What’s a little harder to imagine is one human being stopping such a war. For all time. The person who came closest to this may have been Tony de Brum, former foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, who died last week of cancer at age 72.

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Why Does North Korea Hate Us?
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 21 Aug 2017

The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless. Dean Rusk said the USA bombed ‘everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.’ After running low on urban targets, U.S. bombers destroyed hydroelectric and irrigation dams in the later stages of the war, flooding farmland and destroying crops. And so we remain caged in military thinking and the need to win, rather than understand.

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Terrorism for Profit
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 14 Aug 2017

9 Aug 2017 – And suddenly there it was, the American paradox in full splendor: Oh yeah, we’re fighting terrorists. We have to keep killing people, keep pouring trillions of dollars into our wars, because bad people are out there threatening us because they hate our freedoms. And the guy reminding us of this is the founder of Blackwater, private contractor in Iraq, whose mercenaries were responsible for one of the most shocking acts of lethal aggression — a.k.a., terrorism — of the early years of that war.

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Dead Civilians and the Language of War
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 24 Jul 2017

19 Jul 2017 – Finally it comes down to this: Some people are expendable. They come in two categories: terrorists (good riddance!) and civilians, whose deaths often elicit official apologies (if there’s no way to deny it was our fault). The language of war is what keeps it alive. This is the language of strategy and domination: words without grief, words without compassion. Speaking truth to power — the true work of the media — cannot be done if reporters write in the language of power, this alien tongue in which some human beings are expendable.

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Nukes and the Global Schism
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 17 Jul 2017

12 Jul 2017 – The United States boycotted the U.N. negotiations to ban — everywhere across Planet Earth — nuclear weapons. So did a few other countries. Guess which ones? Armed equals scared. (And scared equals profitable.)

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A Public Plan for Peace
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 1 May 2017

26 Apr 2017 – The American will to wage war — endless war, pointless war, total war — is, I fear, impervious to public opinion and even political action. I fear something is dangerously loose at the American core: a need for endless war combined with a nuclear recklessness uncontained by public scrutiny. The resistance has to go deeper than Trump. At its center we need a public plan for peace.

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How Many Civilians Can We Kill?
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 3 Apr 2017

As Barbara Ehrenreich writes in her book, Blood Rites, “War has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions, rather than to just a handful of craftsmen and professional soldiers. It has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures.”

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The Mosque That Disappeared
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 27 Mar 2017

22 Mar 2017 – We committed a quiet little war crime the other day. Forty-plus people are dead, taken out with Hellfire missiles while they were praying. Or maybe not. Maybe they were just insurgents. The women and children, if there were any, were . . . come on, you know the lingo, collateral damage. The Pentagon is going to “look into” allegations that what happened last March 16 in Syria was something more serious than a terrorist takeout operation, which, if you read the official commentary, seems like the geopolitical equivalent of rodent control.

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The Deep State Hasn’t Gone Away
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 20 Mar 2017

The whole point of a democracy is to empower the public interest, which means that the public must be aware of the Deep State and hold it continually accountable. While Lofgren is adamant that there’s more to it than the military-industrial consensus and the pursuit of endless war, this to me is by far its most troubling aspect. Let’s not give it any peace.

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Costa Rica’s Peace Journey
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 27 Feb 2017

A Bold Peace, which begins by quoting Eisenhower’s “cross of iron” speech, tells the remarkable story of war avoided, or transcended, again and again and again. Yes, there is another way for the world to live. By the film’s end, this way emerges not simply as possible, not simply as a curiosity, but as the model for the future. It’s time for the rest of the world to join Costa Rica on its journey.

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The Mass Grave We Call Collateral Damage
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 13 Feb 2017

But the politics of our drone assassinations and our air strikes and our wars justify and soften the murders we commit. Even now, as consensus consigns the Iraq war to the status of “mistake,” we still refuse to take official responsibility for its consequences. The shattered country, the dead, the dislocated, the rise of terrorism — come on, cut us a little slack, OK? We were bringing democracy to Iraq.

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The Future Cries Out: ‘Water Is Life’
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 19 Sep 2016

The tribal peoples of Earth are making their voices heard in so many ways. Their mission is to reconnect the modern world with the circle of life — a circle that much of humanity left behind maybe ten millennia ago, in pursuit of the Agricultural Revolution and dominion over nature. In the process, we’ve succeeded in changing the climate and, perhaps, establishing a troubling new geological epoch. Now it’s time to rethink “progress.” Building another pipeline is its antithesis.

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The Heart of Order
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 29 Aug 2016

He’d left the water running, flooding neighbors’ apartments. He’d been running around outside naked. By the time police arrived, he was standing in the window of his fourth-floor apartment threatening to jump. He pointed his finger at the cops, pretending he had a gun. “Fuck the police,” he said. The standoff lasted four hours.

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Mass Karma
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 20 Jun 2016

On the battlefield you are supposed to try to kill a person whom you’ve never met before. You are shooting because he is wearing the enemy uniform. Under official circumstances, we glorify this sort of behavior. And this glory permeates the American social structure, creating a sort of standing permission for every troubled individual — every potential army of one — to wage war against a self-perceived wrong.

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Cowardice and Exoneration in Kunduz
Robert C. Koehler | Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 9 May 2016

“The aircrew appeared to be confused by the directions from the Americans on the ground. At one point, the crew was told it would need to hit a second target after the strike it was about to commence, and ‘we will also be doing the same thing of softening the target for partner forces.’” This is the reality: An action that wound up killing 42 hospital workers and patients –men, women and children, some of whom were burned alive in their beds – was instigated in order to “soften the target” . . .

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Creating Resilient Communities
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service, 18 Apr 2016

Real peace — positive peace, which transcends violence and turns conflict into opportunity — is and always has been part of who we are. We know a lot more about how to create peace than we think we do. We’re perfectly capable of transcending violent solutions to our troubles and building a sustainable future. The first step is to take our conflicts out of isolation.

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Recovering from Militarism
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 Apr 2016

The pols cry glory and revenge. They cry security. They cry greatness. Then they stick in the needle, or the missile or the rifle shell, or the nuclear bomb. Or at least they imagine doing so. This will fix the world. And they approve more funding for war. We talk about “the Pentagon” as though it were a rational entity, hierarchically in control of what it does.

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Beached America
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service, 22 Feb 2016

17 Feb 2016 – For at least the last four decades now I feel like I’ve been living in Beached America: a nation that has lost its values, even as it writhes in violent agitation, inflicting its military on the vulnerable regions of the planet.

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The Dynamics of Compassion
Robert C. Koehler, Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service, 7 Dec 2015

We invented written language. The human species is now in the process of inventing something just as crucial: how to love itself, how to engage with itself nonviolently. We’ve been organized for far too long in a state of only partial connection, relying on the presence of enemies to stay in solidarity with our neighbors.

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