Browsing: Opinions

     These words, spoken by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson at the opening of the Nuremberg Military Tribunal of Nazi war criminals, might give pause to White House and Pentagon strategists who appear anxious to launch a U.S. war on Venezuela, if only they had a fear of violating international law.

     Growing up surrounded by World War II veterans, most of whom refused to discuss their service fighting the horrid fascist enemies, as kids we turned to the movies to learn about war. The WWII Vets I knew did not brag about their “lethality,” or their “warrior ethos.” Most of them refused to talk about it at all, apparently regarding their service as at best a necessary evil, not something to celebrate. That was the difference between America’s great citizen soldiers and Nazi Germany’s warrior culture that elevated war to be the highest achievement.

   President Donald Trump’s Achilles Heel initially  wounded by the explosive Epstein files —never healed. Long before the latest disclosures emerged, flight logs, photographs, victim testimonies, and now-public emails had already punctured the myth of invincibility he built around himself. These newly uncovered emails — referencing “private evenings,” coordinated travel, and access to Epstein’s network of trafficked young girls — may not alone prove criminal guilt, but they obliterate the illusion of distance Trump once claimed existed between them.

     On March 16, 1968, Thompson, a young Army helicopter pilot in the 123rd Aviation Battalion of the 23rd Infantry Division, flew over the South Vietnamese village of Sơn Mỹ and witnessed something unimaginable. American soldiers were systematically killing unarmed civilians—women, children, and the elderly. There were no enemy combatants. This was not war. This was a massacre.

     When Dr. Martin Luther King was jailed in Birmingham in 1963 for protesting racial segregation in that city, he declared that such protests were needed to create a “constructive nonviolent tension” that would lift individuals out of the “dark depths of prejudice and racism.” As he explained, “the purpose of the direct action was to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”

     Although President Donald Trump has claimed that “every policy” of his administration was “designed to lift up the American worker,” he has acted consistently, since returning to office in January 2025, to undermine workers’ chosen representatives, America’s labor unions.