Articles by Robert C. Koehler
We found 130 results.
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” . . .
→ read full articleCreating 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.
→ read full articleRecovering 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.
→ read full articleBeached 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.
→ read full articleThe 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.
→ read full articleSoulless Economics
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service~,
20 Jul 2015
Austerity, the tool of neoliberal capitalism, stands up to Greek democracy and stares it down. Oh well. We’re remarkably comfortable with soulless economics and have yielded to this economic model in thought, word and deed.
→ read full articleThe Collateral Damage of Austerity
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service,
13 Jul 2015
A bogus moral authority seems to accompany the accumulation of wealth — a sense that one deserves it, while those without wealth deserve servitude and hopelessness. Beyond this moral authority lies the desperate need not to recognize the common humanity of those who are struggling to survive.
→ read full articleNuclear Realism
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 Jun 2015
27 May 2015 – There’s a category of political intellectuals who proudly proclaim themselves “realists,” then proceed to defend and advance a deeply faith-based agenda that centers on the ongoing necessity to prepare for war, including nuclear war. These intellectuals, as they defend the military-industrial status quo (which often supports them financially), have made themselves the spokespersons for a deep human cancer: a soul cancer.
→ read full articleA New Dark Age of Militarism
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service,
18 May 2015
13 May 2015 – “What struck me,” journalist Christian Parenti said in a recent Truthout interview, referring to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, “was the fact that these local towns and states around the region were sending the only resources they had to New Orleans: weapons and militarized gear.
→ read full articleIdiots of the World, Unite!
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service,
4 May 2015
“Sir, you are an idiot.” Wow, an insult wrapped in such old-fashioned politeness. I let the words hover and reach, as I always do, for peace: that is to say, for clarity, connection, common humanity. Last week I raised the idea of unarmed policing [in the US], as practiced in half a dozen countries around the world.
→ read full articleThe Real Nuclear Threat
Robert C. Koehler, Common Wonders – TRANSCEND Media Service,
13 Apr 2015
Three privatized nuclear laboratories — Los Alamos, Sandia and Livermore — are behind the immense investment (as much as $1 trillion over 30 years) in upgraded, more destructive nuclear warheads. This aggressive pressure from the American business sector is a lot more frightening than any aggression emanating from Iran, and may indicate where the real push for war comes from.
→ read full articleAlive and Bleeding
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service,
23 Feb 2015
“We’re killing a lot of them, and we’re going to keep killing more of them. So are the Egyptians, so are the Jordanians — they’re in this fight with us. But we cannot win this war by killing them. We cannot kill our way out of this war. We need in the medium to longer term to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it’s a lack of opportunity for jobs, whether…”
→ read full articleWar and Perpetual Adolescence
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service,
9 Feb 2015
The urgency I feel isn’t any longer to stop a particular war but to interrupt endless war: to interrupt the narrowly focused geopolitical conversation, conveyed to us over and over by media stenographers.
→ read full articleAfghanistan: Skulking Away from a Failed War
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Jan 2015
The ceremony, commemorating the war’s shutdown, was secret because authorities feared the possibility of a Taliban attack. The USA and NATO, as everyone knows, are the losers, despite the bloated enormity of their military superiority. What a mockery the reality of war makes of the rhetoric that blesses it.
→ read full articleBeyond M.A.D.: Reviving Nuclear War
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 Dec 2014
“Some of the key technocrats and scientists of the Cold War say the nation has become overly confident about its nuclear deterrence. The nuclear enterprise, they say, ‘is rusting its way to disarmament.’” Let’s meditate on this irony — that disarmament, finally, means no more than growing old and weak and pathetic.
→ read full articlePeace as a Human Right
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service,
10 Nov 2014
In the beginning was the word. OK. This is the beginning, and these are the words, but they haven’t arrived yet — at least not officially, with full force of meaning. It’s our job, not God’s, to create the new story of who we are, and millions — billions — of people fervently wish we could do so. The problem is that the worst of our nature is better organized than the best of it.
→ read full articleTraces of Evil
Robert C. Koehler – Common Wonders,
22 Sep 2014
Hurray! God bless drones and “mission accomplished” and a million Iraqi dead and birth defects in Fallujah. God bless torture. God bless the CIA. But guess what? “Still we continue to face a terrorist threat. We cannot erase every trace of evil from the world, and small groups of killers have the capacity to do great harm.”
→ read full articleHatred in the Nuclear Era
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Aug 2014
August 6th, 2014 – “Why are we violent but not illiterate?” asked columnist Colman McCarthy. Well, for one thing, we don’t wrap illiteracy in a shroud of glory and call it war or self-defense or national security; nor have we developed a multi-trillion-dollar industry called the Illiteracy Industrial Complex (or maybe we have, and call it television).
→ read full articleNever Again to Us
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service,
28 Jul 2014
“Israel regrets every injury to civilians. I call on the residents of Gaza: Don’t stay there. Hamas wants you to die; we want you to be safe.” – Netanyahu. Glenn Greenwald compared this remark to a 1941 comment by Joseph Goebbels: “One suddenly has the impression,” the Nazi propaganda minister wrote, “that the Berlin Jewish population consists only of little babies whose childish helplessness might move us, or else fragile old ladies.”
→ read full articleThe Oxymoron of Peace
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Jul 2014
Austerity is for losers. There’s always money to wage war and build weapons, indeed, to continue developing weapons, generation after generation after generation. The contractors are adept at playing the game. Jobs link arms with fear and patriotism and the next war is always inevitable.
→ read full articleA Momentum of Cynicism
Robert C. Koehler – Common Wonders,
16 Jan 2012
At this late stage of the American republic, military-industrial corruption permeates not only our foreign policy but our ideals. We go to war because the business of war is beyond all constraint. “In a striking departure from the ideological preferences of the post-Vietnam Democratic Party, President Barack Obama has made overseas arms sales a pillar of U.S. foreign policy,” Loren Thompson, chief operating officer at the Lexington Institute, a D.C. think tank, wrote – uncritically – for Forbes last week.
→ read full articleThe Suffering of Fallujah
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service,
2 Aug 2010
And so it turns out that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, though not until we arrived and started using them. This is the power of language. Call it “war” and along come glory, duty, courage, sacrifice: the best of humanity writ large. The word is impenetrable; it sets the heart in motion; God makes an appearance, blesses the troops, blesses the weapons. Operation Iraqi Freedom: They’ll greet us with open arms. At what point do we learn our lesson, that “war” is a moral cesspool of horrific consequences, especially, and most troublingly, unintended ones?
→ read full articleRevenge of the Weeds
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service,
19 Jul 2010
We can’t keep playing conquering fool, arrogantly ordering the world to our liking by killing everything that doesn’t fit into it. We can’t keep throwing more of the same at our problems. We can’t keep fighting nature, or one another, and expect somehow to win in the end. We can’t keep buying time at an increasingly horrific price. Time is running out. And petroleum isn’t the only thing we’re addicted to.
→ read full articleRecovering From Empathy
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service,
19 Apr 2010
I remain stuck, churning in my own outrage and despair just as I have –- and so many millions of Americans have –- since the war on terror was launched amid all its lies and cowardly righteousness in 2001. For God’s sake, we’re killing people. We’re doing so in large numbers, with high-tech savagery. We aren’t even defending ourselves. We’ve invented an enemy out of whole cloth.
→ read full articleREFLECTIONS ON AN ANNIVERSARY
Robert C. Koehler – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Apr 2010
“Everything feels obscene,” a friend said seven years ago, when we carpet-bombed Baghdad, launching the invasion. It still does, but in a dull, chronic, “used to it” way — outrage mixed, these last few years, with “hope,” smearing the war effort with a thick, national ambivalence. Is it still going on? Well, yeah, with a […]
→ read full articleA PERSONAL STAKE IN SANITY
Robert C. Koehler - Tribune Media Services,
20 Feb 2010
When we write about mass slaughter, even the good kind, which we call “war,” the waging of it should be on trial in every sentence. Anything less than that is propaganda, the chief characteristic of which is moral opacity. Sadly, this is how our news is delivered to us. Reading it makes me feel homeless. […]
→ read full articleTHE SOURCE OF CORPORATE POWER
Robert C. Koehler - The Huffington Post,
31 Jan 2010
“If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech.”The words are those of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for the majority in last week’s landmark Supreme Court decision marking some sort of culmination in the long corporate trek to […]
→ read full articleCARING AND KILLING: TIME IS RUNNING OUT, MR. PRESIDENT
Robert C. Koehler - Tribune Media Services,
4 Dec 2009
Dear Barack . . . Mr. President . . . brilliant, courageous (I once thought) guy I voted for: You’re great. I mean the way you put words together. As I listened to you on Tuesday night, I thought about the interlocking, dovetail-joint perfection of your language: the crisp-edged certainty of your delivery, the clean […]
→ read full articleTHE TOSSED SHOE AWARD
Robert C. Koehler,
26 Sep 2009
“Businesses exist to serve the general welfare. Profit is the means, not the end. It is the reward a business receives for serving the general welfare. When a business fails to serve the general welfare, it forfeits its right to exist.” Do Adam Smith’s famously forgotten words of caution for capitalists apply to journalism? Is […]
→ read full articleWE SHALL NOT BE MOVED
Robert C. Koehler, Tribune Media Services,
24 Aug 2009
“A fight, a fight . . .” Oh Lord. From what depths did this story come? This was the power of the peace circle, pulling something out of me beyond any known zone of emotional safety. There were five or six of us, in a small breakout group, challenging one another with the deepest […]
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