Robert Koehler

"They must kill and continue to kill, strange as it may seem, in order not to know that they are killing." ~ Rene Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World Socially sanctioned killing is called war. The word "war" may be the most powerful word in human history, because it creates a mask of respectability … Continue reading “Yemen: Our Future?”

Peace, love and Donald Trump? I get the skepticism regarding the tentative nuclear disarmament agreement the president and Kim Jong-un reached last week, but not the cynicism – not the outright dismissal. It’s too easy to hate Trump, but he isn’t the point. In his reckless unpredictability – in his lust for applause and desperation … Continue reading “Trump, Kim, and the Nuclear Status Quo”

Whenever the topic is nuclear weapons, I remain in a state of disbelief that we can talk about them "strategically" – that language allows us to maintain such a distance from the reality of what they do, we can casually debate their use. Consider, in the context of the sudden rush of alarming news that … Continue reading “Peace and the Nuclear Paradox”

What’s a little cholera – excuse me, the worst outbreak of this preventable disease in modern history – compared to the needs of a smoothly functioning economy? A week before he was kicked out of British Prime Minister Theresa May’s cabinet for allegedly having watched pornography on his government computer, former First Secretary of State … Continue reading “Yemen’s Crisis Belong to All of Us”

Incoming! Incoming! Uh . . . pardon me while I interrupt this false alarm to quote Martin Luther King: “Science investigates,” he says in The Strength To Love, “religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge, which is power; religion gives man wisdom, which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The … Continue reading “Nuclear Annihilation and the Wisdom of Mass Salvation”

“. . . real security can only be shared . . .” I call it news in a cage: the fact that the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons has been awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. In other words, how nice, but it has nothing to do with the real stuff going on across … Continue reading “Peace on the Far Side of Nuclear Weapons”

“From Ia Drang to Khe Sanh, from Hue to Saigon and countless villages in between, they pushed through jungles and rice paddies, heat and monsoon, fighting heroically to protect the ideals we hold dear as Americans. Through more than a decade of combat, over air, land, and sea, these proud Americans upheld the highest traditions … Continue reading “Reclaiming the Truth About Vietnam”

“There are no good options,” Brian Williams said the other night on MSNBC, launching a discussion about North Korea with the implication that war – maybe nuclear war – is the only solution to the problem it represents. We’ve been cradling our own suicide for seven decades. The baby’s eyes open… And Williams was right, … Continue reading “Begging for War”

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 … Continue reading “The Man Who Stood Up to Armageddon”

"The bombing was long, leisurely and merciless . . ." And so we return to the Korean War, when North Korea was carpet-bombed to the edge of existence. The American media doesn’t have a memory that stretches quite so far back, at least not under present circumstances. One commentator at MSNBC recently explained, for instance, … Continue reading “Why Does North Korea Hate Us?”