Colombian fishermen. Trump has been blowing up boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, accusing them of carrying drugs. Others have called this a war crime.
As I reported in a previous post, the trials at Nuremberg and Tokyo after World War II were essentially victor’s justice: the courts were organized by the victors and went only after people on the losing side. Outside of these trials, individual countries have tried their own military personnel for war crimes committed during World War II.
Another attempt at an international court of justice came in 1993, when the United Nations created an ad hoc tribunal to prosecute war crimes committed during the breakup of Yugoslavia. This tribunal operated until 2017, indicting 161 people.
The International Criminal Court (ICC)
The most recent attempt, and the organization we have today, is the International Criminal Court (ICC), which was established in 2002; its first trials began in 2009. Of the world’s 195 countries, 125 are members of the Court. Significantly, the most powerful states, including the United States, Russia, China, India, and Israel, have not joined the ICC and do not submit to its jurisdiction. Other non-joiners are the wealthiest of the predominantly Muslim nations—Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Qatar, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey, and Indonesia.
After several hours of struggling with the ICC website, I calculated that they have issued warrants for 50 individuals. Here are the totals:
African
Other Nationalities
Indicted, at large
9
11
In Custody
2
3
Convicted
16
Acquitted
4
Deceased, case dropped
5
Insufficient evidence
7
Under Investigation
1
5
In other words, 35 of the 50 indicted were from African countries. Could it be that Africans have committed most of the world’s war crimes? Or that those countries aren’t powerful enough to put a finger—maybe a whole fist—on the scales of justice?
Of the non-African suspects at large, six are Russians wanted for war crimes committed in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin is at the top of that list. Two are Israelis: Binyamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant. The remaining three are two Russians and one Ossetian wanted for crimes in Georgia.
Are there reasons that no Americans have been charged with war crimes? Crimes such as, for example, our government lying us into the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a country that never attacked us, which led to anywhere from 150,000 to over a million deaths? This notable absence from the list is not because the United States hasn’t joined the ICC; Russia hasn’t joined either and the court nevertheless indicted Putin.
And why hasn’t the ICC gone after the Saudi government for its innumerable war crimes against civilians in Yemen, crimes aided and abetted by the United States military? Perhaps the court veered off track when it hit an oil slick.
Why has the ICC indicted two Israelis and one Palestinian regarding the genocide in Gaza, but kept silent about the United States government’s support for this war under both the Biden and Trump presidencies? Why has it said nothing about the Trump regime’s unprovoked war on Iran, or its continuous attacks on small boats in international waters?
Closer to Home
Over the years I’ve learned not to expect much from politicians. As my grandfather frequently declared in his heavy Yiddish accent, they’re all “crooks und hooligans.” But most of us keep trying, pinning our hopes on the next election, willing ourselves to believe the sales pitch.
In 2005 my home town elected a new mayor, one who promised economic and social justice. I don’t know how successful Mr. Mamdani will be with his economic proposals. However, he got under my skin by vowing to arrest Netanyahu for war crimes if the Israeli prime minister came to New York, then admitting he had no legal authority to do so—and then holding cordial meetings with Trump to discuss real estate development and zoning laws.
Under normal circumstances it makes sense for a mayor to work with the president. But these aren’t normal circumstances. In addition to being an adjudicated felon, inveterate liar, and kleptocrat, Trump is a war criminal, and I don’t need the ICC to tell me so. I would sooner do business with a scorpion.
*The photo above was taken in an air-raid shelter in Dresden, after the firebombing. The massive firestorm sucked oxygen out of the room and replaced it with carbon monoxide and other lethal gases.
In my two previous posts we considered our species’ fantastic technological progress in what the current United States Secretary of Defense calls “lethality,” and our rather pathetic stabs at creating a more peaceful world.
Along with these attempts at preventing war we came up with the notion of regulating it—that is, limiting the damage by defining certain acts as “war crimes.”
Early Rules of War
Kings, religious leaders, and in recent times, international councils have laid down rules of conduct for the military. Though as we have seen in our own time, people engaged in mass murder aren’t likely to be constrained by such rules.
The earliest documented efforts to regulate behavior toward one’s opponents—at least, the earliest I could find—are in the biblical Book of Deuteronomy, which scholars believe was written in the 7th to 5th Centuries BCE. Among the rules: If you approach a distant city and they surrender before combat, don’t kill them but take them all as slaves. If they fight, kill all the men and take the women and children as slaves.
But if you take a beautiful woman from one of those cities captive and marry her, but later cease to desire her, you must let her go free and not treat her as a slave or sell her.
However, if the city you besiege is in the land that “God is giving you for an inheritance,” kill everything that breathes so they don’t infect you with their detestable religious practices. In other words, under certain circumstances, God not only allows but demands genocide. I’m sure Bezalel Smotrich, leader of Israel’s Religious Zionist party, would agree.
A thousand years later, in the 7th Century CE, Caliph Abu Bakr, the successor to Muhammad, instructed Muslims not to kill a woman, a child, or an infirm elder. Per contemporary Islamic scholars Zuhur and About-Enein, most enemy soldiers were to be killed, but some should be spared for ransom or enslavement.
We don’t know whether anyone in any of those societies was ever penalized for violating the rules.
Skip forward another 800 years, to 1474 CE, when the first war crimes trial we know of took place. The knight Peter von Hagenbach was charged with failing to prevent the murder, rape, and perjury committed by his troops. He pleaded that he was only following the orders of his superior, the Duke of Burgundy. (Haven’t we heard that excuse all too recently!). He even offered to show the court the written orders, but the judges refused to look at them. He was tortured, convicted, and beheaded.
There are no records of the troops being punished, or of the Duke being brought up on charges. It is probably not a coincidence that Hagenbach was extremely unpopular, as he had alienated his subjects and antagonized allies.
The Lieber Code
The first modern codification of war crimes was written by Francis Lieber in 1863, at the behest of Abraham Lincoln. The Lieber Code prescribed the death penalty for many crimes. However, while thousands of men were tried for Lieber Code crimes committed during the Civil War, only three were executed. Five others were hanged not for these Lieber Code crimes but for spying or being guerillas. All of the condemned men fought for the Confederacy.
During General Sherman’s march and under his orders, Northern troops looted Southern homes and burned them to the ground, which was prohibited under the Code, and starved the population, yet none of them were brought to trial, let alone punished. The articles I’ve read say Sherman’s troops “may” have committed sexual assaults against Black women but spared white women. The Lieber Code prohibits rape, but no one was prosecuted.
The Lieber Code influenced the adoption of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. It also influenced the Geneva Conventions adopted after World War II.
World War II—the International Tribunals
Who was prosecuted at the trials in Nuremberg and in Tokyo after World War II? Certainly not the victors. In Europe, Nazi leaders, concentration camp commanders, doctors conducting human experiments and euthanasia, and Einsatzgruppen (death squad) members were tried. In Asia, Japanese military and political leaders.
Who was not prosecuted?
In Japan, members of the royal family were granted immunity. Also, General MacArthur offered full political immunity to high-ranking officials—even those who conducted inhumane medical experiments including vivisection and open-air pathogen and chemical tests, as well as mass attacks using plague, anthrax, and cholera that killed thousands of Chinese—in exchange for the data about their experiments. The U.S. government also paid money for that data.
In Europe, “historians estimate that fewer than one percent of those involved in criminal actions against civilians were punished in any meaningful way. Germany had millions of men…in occupations that enabled genocide and mass repression. The Cold War began almost immediately after the German surrender. Western intelligence services considered many…to be useful assets in the emerging confrontation with the Soviet Union. Former SS officers and Gestapo personnel were recruited into the West German police, the intelligence services, and even NATO advisory circles.”
And let us not forget the scientists, engineers, and spies, many with Nazi pasts. Per Edward Reid, “Between 1945 and the 1960s, the United States government brought more than 1,500 German scientists and engineers into the country through Project Paperclip to work on guided missiles, jet and rocket engines, aerodynamics, aerospace medicine, and submarine technology.”
Per Eric Lichtblau, “The CIA, the FBI, and the military all put Hitler’s minions to work as spies, intelligence assets, and leading scientists and engineers, whitewashing their histories.” For almost all of them, their histories were hidden from the public.
World War II—Other Prosecutions
What about the winners of that war, the Allies? Each country’s military courts were responsible for trying their own soldiers for crimes such as looting, individual and mass rape, and killing prisoners of war. The number of known incidents is huge and the majority of perpetrators were never even charged.
Looking at rape committed by United States servicemen only, sociologist J. Robert Lilly estimates 4,500 instances in France from D-Day (June 1944) to the end of the war (May 1945). Given that study after study shows that nine out of ten rapes go unreported, Lilly’s estimate was almost certainly a vast undercount.
And guess who did get prosecuted? Documents dated October 1944 show that of 152 United States troops facing charges, 130 were Black.
We do have some figures for war crimes committed by Soviet troops during World War II. Among them is the Katyn massacre, in which 22,000 Polish military, police, and intelligentsia were shot and buried in mass graves. There were also mass rapes, with estimates ranging up to 2 million German women and over 100,000 Polish women, as well as forced labor and torture of prisoners.
Fire Bombs and A-Bombs
Intentionally killing civilians who are not taking part in hostilities is a war crime. This includes military strikes that treat civilian and military targets as a single entity, or using weapons that cannot be aimed properly at a specific target.
On the other hand, consider this list from World War II: Our firebombing of Dresden, with 20,500-25,000 killed. This was an entire populated city, not a military target. The similar firebombing of Tokyo, 100,000 dead. Our atom-bombing of Hiroshima, 140,000 killed, with an unknown but undoubtedly very large number of additional deaths over subsequent decades from long-term radiation poisoning. The A-bombing of Nagasaki, 80,000, also with unknown numbers of long-term fatalities.
Our government has always justified these mass murders as necessary to win the war. Historians have expressed conflicting views.
I don’t believe that any of these atrocities were necessary. Regarding the use of nuclear weapons, after the first A-bomb test in July 1945, American military authorities could have invited their Japanese counterparts to witness such a weapon being dropped on an uninhabited island, and then said, “This is what we will do to you if you don’t surrender.” Or they could have stopped at Hiroshima—why did they have to also destroy Nagasaki?
Maybe they just wanted to prove their “lethality.”
* * *
In the next post we’ll look at the “rules-based international order” established after the Second World War.
In this post I’m going to focus on attempts to create peace among nations, and the gap—a Grand Canyon, really—between the hopeful words of these attempts and the actual deeds of those nations.
In a previous post we looked at “civilized” societies, essentially those whose economies are based on agriculture rather than hunting and gathering. In these societies the farmers’ surplus supports people who live in cities and don’t work the land—including a class of murderers, the nobility and kings. Traditionally, their job was to lead the men of their nation in battle against neighboring nations. Sometimes this was an honorable task, for defense, but often enough they marched off to slaughter the inhabitants of other places, reduce the survivors to slavery, and seize the land.
To Study War No More
Over the millennia our species became so much better at murder! We graduated from stone axes and obsidian arrowheads to bronze and iron, from catapults to guided missiles, from gunpowder to hydrogen bombs.
But throughout those years, at least some individuals dreamed of ways to end war. In the 8th Century BCE, the Hebrew prophet Isaiah could only imagine peace coming about during the “last days,” and by divine intervention: “And He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.”
Twenty-six centuries flew by. In 1795 CE, seeing that God hadn’t stepped in yet, the philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed a league of nations to ensure perpetual peace.
In 1815, after the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, the dominant European powers formed the Concert of Europe. It was quite successful for almost 100 years, in that it maintained peace and relative stability among the European nations—while allowing them to suppress internal revolutions and expand and exploit their colonies in Asia and Africa. (This last is an important point—I’ll return to it later.)
The Concert of Europe fell apart in 1914, with the beginning of World War I. Although the war started in Europe, it involved colonies and allies all around the globe, from Japan to the United States, Australia to Brazil. In a mere four years we slaughtered around 20 million of our own species and wounded around 17 million others.
Most people were so horrified by the bloodbath that it was called “the war to end wars.” In 1919, at the Treaty of Versailles, the victors formed a League of Nations to establish peace. The organization lasted only 20 years. It did not prevent a number of civil wars in Europe and elsewhere, nor the wars between Greece and Turkey, the Japanese invasions of Manchuria and China, nor the Italian invasion and annexation of Ethiopia.
The Treaty also imposed such harsh conditions on the losers of the first World War—on Germany, in particular—that it planted the seeds of World War II.
That war lasted from 1939 to 1945. During those six years we outdid ourselves! We piled up between 65 and 90 million corpses through combat, genocide, famine, and disease. I expect that many more who died subsequently, for example from radiation poisoning in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, haven’t been included in that total. I haven’t been able to find estimates of the wounded.
The next attempt to create global peace was the United Nations. It prevented wars among the wealthy, industrialized nations of what we call the First World—the United States, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and all of Europe.
Unsurprisingly, like the Concert of Europe, the United Nations did not attempt to stop the wealthier, more powerful countries from invading, exploiting, and murdering the populations of the Third World, and from doing their best to keep former colonies from becoming independent. Some examples are the French-Algerian War (killing between 400,000 and 1.5 million), and the United States invasions and bombings of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (between one and two million).
Another outcome of World War II was the establishment of war crimes tribunals. I’ll look at that next time.
What does it mean to be civilized? The word is related to the Latin civitas, or city. Per the National Geographic Society, “…the most basic definition of the word civilization is ‘a society made up of cities.’” It definitely does not mean that we’re decent people. Though some of us may be, others are a murderous, thieving lot.
Humans have always been killing each other, but we didn’t have major wars until we developed agriculture and began to settle on farms rather than wandering about hunting and gathering. Now the surplus that we could store in granaries allowed us to build our cities—and to structure our societies into rigid hierarchies. The surplus produced by the peasants was appropriated to feed those who don’t plow and plant: kings, nobles, priests, professional soldiers, merchants, artists, and artisans.
In this way, we get what we call “civilization.” On the positive side, those of us with at least some education and leisure can enjoy Mozart and Puccini, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, Hitchcock and Kurosawa, the Dome of the Rock and the Sistine Chapel. These benefits of civilization are less available to the illiterate, or those who can’t afford to travel or even go to the movies, such as undocumented immigrants harvesting tomatoes in California, women sewing fast fashion in Bangladeshi factories, and child laborers in United States slaughterhouses.
What we also get, with civilization, are kings who want to be emperors, who always want more wealth, more power, and more followers willing to kill for a share of the spoils.
The pattern is always the same: a tribe led by an egomaniacal mass murderer invades the territory of another tribe. They slaughter the inhabitants or reduce them to slavery, declare themselves the rightful owners of the land they seized, and declare the new order to be the will of the gods. The ruler’s policies are much the same as those of tyrants throughout the ages and around the globe, including in the United States today.
The earliest known empire was the Akkadian, founded by Sargon in 2334 BCE. Sargon bragged that he tore down the protective walls of the Sumerian city of Uruk, and brought its king “in a dog collar to the gate of [the god] Enlil.” He established the world’s first standing army, supported by the labor of the peasantry. Sargon’s grandson, Naram-Sin, proclaimed himself a “living god.”
In the wars of Sargon’s time and in those described in the Bible, a victory was usually followed by the almost wholesale slaughter of prisoners. Those who were spared were carried off as slaves.
Modern America is quite different. After slaughtering 1-2 million people in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, we carried off only some of the children—remember “Operation Baby Lift”?—and apparently treated them reasonably well, apart from severing their connection to their families, their home, and their Vietnamese identity.
The ruthless warrior Shi Huang conquered rivals to form the earliest Chinese empire (Qin dynasty), consolidating his rule in 221 BCE. He enslaved peasants and convicts for his massive construction projects. Here in the United States, according to a 2022 report, we rely on the forced labor of around 800,000 convicts to produce $11 billion in goods and services, sometimes in hazardous occupations, while paying them only pennies or nothing at all.
The state of Qin introduced a registration system for its population, which initially collected the names of individuals and later began keeping track of entire households. Modern China does much better, employing over 700 million AI-powered surveillance cameras, centralized police cloud databases, and behavioral tracking networks. Cities in other nations around the world are catching up, though, including Lahore, Kabul, Singapore, London, Istanbul, New York, Los Angeles, and various cities in India, Russia, and South Korea. George Orwell would be blown away by today’s technological achievements!
Like so many kings around the world, Shi Huang claimed that he had the Mandate of Heaven. One of the titles of Egypt’s pharaohs was “the good god;” from 3,000 BCE up to the Ptolemaic period ending in 30 BCE, pharaohs were considered divine. European rulers insisted on what they called the “divine right of kings.” Even after most of Europe discarded kingship, the concept of that divine right persisted. Hitler said that he was “fighting for the work of the Lord” and that Nazism was “divinely ordained.”
And on April 12, 2026, here on the other side of the Atlantic, another egomaniacal murderer posted an image of himself as Jesus.
In 2003 Sylvia and I took an exploratory road trip through the Pacific Northwest, going up through Northern California and Oregon and from the coast to as far east as Boise, Idaho, and finally decided to move to the St. Johns neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. In 2005 we sold the place in Oakland and rented a house, sight unseen, in St. Johns, figuring we’d use it as a base while we looked around for something we wanted to buy.
Toward the end of August we packed everything and everyone, including two sedated cats, into my Subaru station wagon and a U-Haul truck. Our friend Helen Robillard, a strong, competent woman, wrangled the U-Haul. Sylvia alternated riding passenger in my car and in the U-Haul with Helen. The trip was pleasant aside from some pitiful mews from the cat carriers.
Just as we pulled into our new neighborhood we were greeted by a terrific downpour—our introduction to the climate of the Pacific Northwest. Helen backed the U-Haul across the lawn, right up to the covered front porch of the house. We hung a tarp over the gap between porch and truck and unloaded.
Even before moving we had learned that our landlord, a very pleasant gentleman, had sold the house to someone else, a guy named Brian Friel.
I don’t remember when we first met Brian, but once we had moved in he told us we were responsible for taking care of both the back yard of the house and the adjacent empty lot, which he also owned. We hired someone to mow the grass. A week or so later he came and inspected and told us we needed to remove the mass of blackberry brambles around the perimeters. We replied that the brambles had been here before we moved in, and that normally people paid to have brambles removed. It was not our job.
A couple of months later part of the sidewalk in front of the house had to be repaired (not the part that Helen had driven over). Brian hired the cheapest labor to pour the concrete and they poured it in the rain. You don’t pour concrete in the rain. When the city inspector looked at it, of course he said it had to be redone. Brian hired a different crew and this time some neighborhood kids rode their bicycles through it while it was still wet and someone carved their initials and a heart in it.
After a third time replacing the slabs, Brian ordered Debbie, one of the people who did occasional work for him, to sit in her car by the new patch while it dried overnight, to guard against juvenile vandals. By then it was winter and Debbie was freezing in that old jalopy, so we invited her inside where she could sit by our front window and keep an eye on the sidewalk.
Gary, a short older man, was another occasional employee. Once Brian promised him $100 for some clean-up on one of his properties, but only forked over $50 when the job was done. When Gary asked why, Brian shrugged dismissively. “I’m cheap,” he said. There was no agreement in writing so there wasn’t anything Gary could do.
Spring came. One day Brian came by and said he was going to take over the basement for storage. We said no. We were paying to rent the house, which included the basement. We were using most of it to store our own belongings. I got the impression that Brian wasn’t used to people saying no to him.
By then we had purchased a fixer-upper a few blocks away. We hired Mike, a carpenter that Debbie had recommended, and Sylvia and I worked as his assistants—along with Debbie and Gary.
Not too long after, Brian showed up with another scheme. He planned to build a new house in our side yard for his own use, but didn’t want to spend the money on the permits that would require. It would cost him a lot less to call the new house an extension of the existing one. Doing so legally would require connecting the two buildings somehow, such as with a passageway between them. He would just have to tear down our kitchen wall, leaving that room open to the outside while the passage was being constructed, and… Again, we said no. We were renting the house, which included a kitchen with four walls.
One afternoon, Brian arrived with a large nursery pot, at least 5-gallon size, full of dirt and raspberry canes, and set it down in the back yard. He intended to plant them there, to use when he was living in that house he was building.
Debbie happened to be visiting us when he arrived. As soon as he left, she and I exchanged glances and headed for the back yard.
Sylvia was washing dishes and looking out the kitchen window, and told me she saw that pot arrive with Brian and then almost immediately zip back out of the back yard and disappear.
When Brian returned the next day he seemed quite perturbed, and asked if I had any idea what happened to it. I replied that there were meth-heads in the neighborhood. They’ll steal anything.
That same day a pot of raspberry canes appeared in another back yard a few blocks away. Once planted, they thrived in their sunny patch for about 12 years before needing to be replaced. The berries were quite tasty.
This is actually not a sequel to a Jane Austen novel. I’m talking about Pride groups around the country that cancelled events this June.
As many of you know, I was one of the organizers of the first protest march immediately after Stonewall. Around 400-500 brave souls came out in the street that day, July 27, 1969. A year later, on June 28, 1970, 10,000 of us trekked up New York’s Sixth Avenue to Central Park, while over 1,000 strutted along Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles. In subsequent years, as our movement chalked up legal successes, as we became more acceptable, similar events took place all over the country and overseas.
Soon enough the corporations moved in. Putting on annual celebrations cost a bundle, and local Pride organizations became dependent on corporate sponsorship. As always, the sponsors began to dominate the festivities, overshadowing our grass roots groups with expensive floats staffed by hired models—near-naked buff young men cavorting to dance music blasted over loudspeakers. The implication was that they didn’t discriminate and would hire your openly gay ass. The real point, of course, was to sell their beer, whiskey, soda, cars, household goods, etc.
They turned our marches into parades, one commercial after another. Dajenya, one of my comrades in the Gay Liberation Front, asked rhetorically, “Are we a movement or a market?” My wife and I stopped going to the San Francisco parades more than two decades years ago. Even then I thought that if the political climate changed, those corporations would dump their gay workers faster than you can hit delete on your keyboard. The last actual march I attended was organized by Reclaim Pride in NYC, 50 years after Stonewall—no floats, no corporate sponsors, no cops.
Now—in 2026—some of the biggest corporations have withdrawn funds from Pride events, in addition to axing DEI initiatives, to suck up to the Trump regime. (Check out the Advocate’s list of companies not to patronize.) https://www.advocate.com/news/companies-that-stopped-sponsoring-pride#rebelltitem13 Police forces and some local governments have become increasingly hostile as well.
As a result, some Pride organizations around the country have scaled down or even cancelled events. I’m aware particularly of such cancellations in Arlington, TX and Eugene, OR. Other cities doing the same include (but are not limited to) Ashtabula OH, Tampa FL, and Tucson AZ. Some of these Pride organizations have said they were cancelling the marches to “protect” LGBT people from potential violence. Other reasons for cancelling are that we can’t march without permits or corporate money.
Fortunately, at the time I write this, young people in both Arlington and Eugene are planning to march anyway, without police permits or corporate sponsorship.
What cowardice! Why did these organizations allow themselves to become so dependent on big money and government? Are they going to tell us to go back in the closet to protect ourselves?
When we first started marching, demonstrating, and protesting, gay sex was illegal in every state except Illinois. We had to deal with police raids and homophobic violence, and with legal discrimination against us in every aspect of life. When we marched, yes, no doubt it was dangerous, but we knew that we wouldn’t win rights or safety by staying home and asking politely.
We did not ask for permission to exist or beg for corporate handouts. Dear friends: this isn’t the time to step back; it’s the time to fight back.
As readers know, I was one of the founders of New York’s Gay Liberation Front back in 1969. Around 5 years ago, a few of us formed a group to create an accurate history of our organization, and hopefully to inspire young people to keep up the struggle. Just recently I was asked to write an article about how I see the LGBT movement today:
* * *
Looking back on it, I’m astonished and proud—and scared.
A handful of raggedy-ass kids, including me, formed the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and made life infinitely better for LGBT people, even saving the lives of many. But now all our gains might be undone.
Our predecessors in the homophile movement, brave as they were, pleaded for acceptance into American society and got nowhere. We in GLF had come up through the civil rights, anti-war, socialist, and feminist movements, and would not be satisfied with inclusion in a profoundly corrupt social order.
Rather than confining ourselves to a single issue, we allied with other radical organizations: the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, feminist and socialist groups. We demanded, we didn’t beg. We stormed politicians’ offices and psychiatry conferences. We inspired the formation of gay liberation groups around the globe.
We changed the world.
Here’s what it was like before GLF:
—Gay sex was illegal in every American state except Illinois. Same-sex marriage was not legal anywhere on the planet.
—LGBT people could be imprisoned, thrown into mental hospitals, subjected to electroshock “therapy,” fired from jobs, evicted by landlords, and refused service in public accommodations. Gay bashers could murder us, and be acquitted using the “gay panic” defense.
—There are openly queer people at all levels of the U.S. government.
—LGBT people could serve openly in the U.S. military, until 2025 when Trump ordered trans people removed.
—It’s illegal to discriminate against LGBT people in employment and housing.
Of course we still have a long way to go:
—The “gay/trans panic” defense was eliminated in 20 American states, but the other 30 still allow it.
—Although 129 nations have no laws against gay sex between consenting adults, 53 others criminalize it, prescribing lengthy imprisonment, flogging, even the death penalty.
Ironically, what we did win was the inclusion our predecessors longed for. We can marry. We can adopt kids. We can enlist and kill and die to enrich the 0.1%.
However, we failed to dismantle the basic structure of society, so our victories may prove ephemeral. It’s not only LGBT gains; it’s the gains of every allied group.
We’re up against a long-term right-wing strategy to erase all the progress we’ve made since 1969. We’re up against billionaires who own more wealth than half of humanity. Here in America they’ve purchased much of the media and all three branches of government.
Their tactic stays the same: target the most vulnerable groups—currently trans people and immigrants. Use the media to foment bigotry. Immigrants, even those with green cards, are being rounded up and put in concentration camps. States are passing anti-trans laws restricting everything from medical care to driving to what bathroom you can use.
Trans and other queer literature is being removed from school libraries—as are books on slavery, civil rights, women’s rights, and feminist history.
Marriage rights are next. In 2021, 70% of Americans approved of same-sex marriage. By 2025, due to a deluge of conservative propaganda, that dropped to 54%. Right wing lawmakers have asked the Supreme Court to return marriage recognition to the states, just as they did with abortion rights.
I say we need to reach out and make new alliances. And this time, to go beyond a few rights here and there—we need to change an economic system that allows a handful of billionaires to divide us, to enslave us, and to plunder the planet.
After all, what good will LGBT rights, Black rights, immigrant rights do us, on an uninhabitable Earth?
Our moon is in the news just now—a story about four astronauts in a spacecraft jumping over the moon. So far the mission, named Artemis II, seems to have gone well except for a broken toilet.
* * *
When I was ten years old, in 1953, one of my favorite hangouts was the Hayden Planetarium, which is part of the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. I sat raptly through the shows, thrust my little hand into the cavities of the Willamette meteorite, and stood on the scales that showed how much I’d weigh elsewhere in the solar system: 11.6 pounds on the moon, 27 on Mars, 177 on Jupiter. I was star-crazy. In a previous blog post I wrote about this, about wanting to be the first little girl on Mars.
I don’t remember when we got our first television, but in addition to the westerns and cartoons, I became addicted to Captain Video, a science fiction series. It had cheap sets and ridiculous plots, yet was convincing enough to a small child. By my early teens I was devouring science fiction novels. I believed it was just a matter of time before humans developed the technology to carry us across the galaxy.
Back then the popular kids made fun of us science nerds. These were the boys who didn’t get straight A’s but excelled at sports, and the girls who dressed stylishly, who giggled and flirted with the jocks. They called us “eggheads,” and if we wore glasses, “four eyes.” And yes. It hurt.
Then, on October 5, 1957, a month after I’d started attending the Bronx High School of Science, I saw the New York Times headline: SOVIET FIRES EARTH SATELLITE INTO SPACE; IT IS CIRCLING THE GLOBE AT 18,000 M.P.H. That was Sputnik. America panicked at the news. Here we were in the midst of the Cold War, and we were falling behind technologically. The “commies” were beating us. President Eisenhower called for changes in the educational system, saying, “we need scientists in the ten years ahead…scrutinize your school’s curriculum and standards.” That uproar eventually led to the formation of NASA.
My initial reaction to the fuss was a kind of schadenfreude. All those popular people who scorned nerds were now suffering for it. Now maybe we would get a measure of respect. However, my satisfaction didn’t last long. As I wrote in that earlier blog post, I approached an air force recruiter who came to our high school, thinking the military would train me as a pilot, which would be my ticket to space, and he told me they don’t teach girls to fly, just to be secretaries or weather girls.
At any rate I drifted away from science during my junior year, when I got to choose a non-science elective. I was falling asleep in chemistry class but came alive in creative writing sessions.
On June 16, 1963, the Soviets launched the first woman astronaut, an amateur skydiver named Valentina Tereshkova. This was 20 years before the United States gave that honor to a woman, Sally Ride, a NASA physicist who also held a private pilot’s license.
Tereshkova’s story didn’t really catch my attention. At that time I was preoccupied with my first lesbian affair, leaving my parents’ home, trying to figure out how I’d manage to work nine to five and finish my B.A. at night, and protesting the Vietnam War.
I next noticed the space program on July 21, 1969, when I went to Central Park where a giant screen had been set up so we could watch a man walk on the moon. Once again I had other preoccupations: the Stonewall Riot had occurred three weeks before and some of us were organizing that first post-Stonewall gay protest march—and the Gay Liberation Front.
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In 1990, 21 years later, a couple of aerospace engineers wrote a paper calling for humans to go to Mars. They and other colleagues subsequently formed The Mars Society, whose purpose was to promote colonization of the red planet. Robert Zubrin, co-author of that original paper and president of the society, also advocated American dominance of the heavens, writing that “if we desire peace on Earth, we need to prepare for war in space.”
I am reminded of a line from Tacitus: “To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a desert and call it peace.”
Elon Musk joined the society in 2001, and became a member of the board of directors after donating $100,000. Musk, the world’s richest man, with an ego even more bloated than his bank account, doesn’t intend to make the journey himself. He wants his offspring to populate the planet. So far he has 14 of them, by four different women.
Terrestrial life can’t survive on Mars. These lunatics (or marsatics, to coin a word) aren’t just thinking about enclosed pressurized domes where humans would work, venturing outside only for research or mining minerals. Their idea is to terraform Mars—that is, to re-form the surface of Mars to create conditions resembling those on Earth. Eventually they want to spread our species throughout the universe, to survive after they finish trashing our planet, and even after the sun goes nova in another 5 billion years.
Here’s what Mars is like currently:
An average surface temperature of -80F. That’s minus 80 degrees, and it’s an average—it can get quite a bit colder.
A surface pressure that is 0.6% that of Earth, comparable to the pressure at 18.9 miles up into Earth’s stratosphere.
An atmosphere composed primarily of carbon dioxide (95.97%), argon (1.93%), and nitrogen (1.89%). There are only trace amounts of oxygen (0.146%). By comparison, Earth’s atmosphere is 78.08% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, and 0.04% carbon dioxide.
Cosmic radiation 40-50 times higher than Earth’s, due to the thin atmosphere and lack of a magnetic field. Humans could stay on the planet for only four years, after which the exposure would be fatal.
According to a NASA study, terraforming Mars is simply not possible using present day technology. I’ve read that the surface temperature could be raised somewhat by releasing the frozen CO₂ at the poles, but an oxygen-rich environment would take thousands of years to establish. Also, since Mars lacks a magnetic field, any newly created atmosphere would be stripped away by solar wind. Even if that weren’t the case, Mars’s low gravity would limit the planet’s ability to retain an adequately thick atmosphere.
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Now about that broken toilet: Those earlier American astronauts who made lunar landings, there to plant American flags, evacuated into plastic bags and deposited their waste on the moon.
With current technology, it should take seven to nine months for astronauts to reach Mars. How will they store that much food on a spacecraft? What about water? Will they fling their shit into space, where it may eventually land splat on some other planet in our solar system, or more likely drift off into interstellar space, sending a message about us to wherever it finally lands?
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It’s been more than half a century since I entertained the fantasy of becoming an astronaut, but I’m still star-crazy. On clear evenings I go outside and look up, and murmur their names, poetry on my lips. This week I can see Venus about to set. Orion and Sirius aren’t far behind, followed by Aldebaran, Procyon, Castor and Pollux—and there’s Jupiter overhead, and Arcturus to the east!
They put my petty troubles in perspective, and give me peace. Born billions of years before us, they will light the skies long after we’re gone, long after the warmongers and egomaniacs are done strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage
Remember the movie Casablanca? And the scene where Humphrey Bogart is just about to part from Ingrid Bergman forever and she’s weeping, and he reminds her of the good times they had together, saying “We’ll always have Paris.” Well, I’m not about to part with my wife Sylvia. But we also have memories of Paris, and I’d like to share a few…
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Sylvia’s teenage son had become addicted to drugs, and after several failed attempts to treat him locally, we sent him to a rehab facility in Utah. We visited every two months—that was the only visiting that was allowed, and it was mandatory—so by 2002 we had accumulated enough frequent flier mileage for a trip to Europe.
We signed up for the spring term at the Alliance Française—me in the beginner’s class, and Sylvia at a more advanced level, as she’d studied the language and spent a summer there as a teenager.
If you’re on a limited budget, the best time to visit Paris is in August. French law mandates five to six weeks paid vacation per year, and because it’s the hottest month, a lot of Parisians spend August on vacation somewhere else. Quite a number of them rent out their apartments to tourists.
Workers in every country except the United States must receive a certain amount of paid time off, anywhere from a miserly 10 days in Japan to 45 days in Yemen. Even poverty-stricken Indonesia, where I had visited in 1983, provides 29 days. Only in the United States are we dependent on the generosity of our employers, or what our union can fight for—if we have a union.
Sylvia and I were able to rent two apartments in Paris, for two weeks each—much more reasonable than staying in hotels. Rents in Paris were comparable to what they would be in San Francisco.
We didn’t really want to eat a lot of rich French restaurant food, and we didn’t need to, because I had my own kitchen. I would walk to the nearby marché biologique on the days it was open and fill a couple of shopping bags with organic groceries. That way the trip cost us only one month’s extra rent, plus hiring a cat sitter, plus loss of income as I was a contract worker. I believe Sylvia was between jobs at the time anyway.
Our first apartment was on the top floor, five flights up. It had formerly been the servant’s quarters. The building had a tiny elevator; two people could fit in it if they were very friendly. However the apartment had lots of light. Outside our windows the sky was full of swallows, and in the evenings we could watch flocks of pigeons circling before they came to roost.
The second apartment was in the Belleville neighborhood and directly above an excellent boulangerie, the one that supplied bread to the presidential palace. I’d go downstairs in the morning, pick up a loaf of fresh bread, and pack sandwiches for our excursions. We did eat out occasionally—once at a French restaurant, and the other times at less pricey North African and Senegalese places.
We frequently took the Paris Métro, which is quite comparable to the New York subway as they were both built around the same time. The station near our apartment had an escalator that groaned like a wounded elephant, and we found that very amusing. But we noticed immediately that the French subway system isn’t wheelchair accessible (except for the most recently built line), while a third of New York’s subways have been updated, and San Francisco’s BART is now totally accessible.
We loved the aroma of fresh bread drifting up from the boulangerie, and from other bakeries we passed on our excursions. We were less pleased with the stench spreading from the street-corner pissoirs, designed for men and used exclusively by them. (The city has since replaced them with self-cleaning booths, available to both sexes and free.)
We did some typical tourist things, like inching through the halls of the Louvre along with swarms of other tourists, their cameras constantly flashing, many of them posing in front of the art so they could show the folks back home that they’d really been right next to the Mona Lisa. I was horrified, thinking about the long-term damage to the paint. Flash photography is against the rules there, but the museum guards did nothing.
The Musée d’Orsay was less crowded. The van Gogh collection lifted me into the stratosphere. His paintings appear to breathe, to be alive. Seeing them in person was utterly different from seeing reproductions, and worth the entire trip. If I were the kind of person who wants to own art and was given a choice between a van Gogh and the entire contents of the Louvre, I’d take the van Gogh. I’d fly back tomorrow, even for just a weekend, to gaze at one of those paintings again.
We also visited Sainte-Chapelle, a 13th-Century royal chapel. To me it’s one of the two most beautiful buildings in the world, second only to the 7th Century Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Both seem to have as much stained glass as solid wall and are flooded with light and color.
Sainte-Chapelle was built with two levels, the higher one for les privilégiés, that is, the royal family and members of their court, while the lower was for the servants. The old sign marking the separation is still there. By contrast, the Dome was open to all Muslims. Also, since Islam prohibits making images of humans or animals, stained glass in the Dome forms geometric patterns and verses from the Quran. The windows in Sainte-Chapelle depict scenes from the Bible, and culminate in an image of King Louis IX asserting his divine right to rule.
I was less taken with Notre Dame. It was too massive (over 11 times the size of the Dome, 32 times the size of Sainte Chapelle!) and dark and gloomy, almost black inside. Turns out the black walls were the result of centuries of burning candles. After the 2019 fire, both inside and outside were restored, and from photographs I see that the interior is white again. I’ll be sure to stop by next time I’m visiting van Gogh.
As it happened, we were at Notre Dame on August 14, the day the city’s Catholics hold a procession for the Feast of the Assumption. Now that really impressed us! The priests carried a silver statue of Mary out of the church and through the streets, followed by thousands of people, mostly women. The priests called out Mary’s many titles and virtues, one by one. After each item was called out, the thousands of voices responded, nous marchons vers toi (we walk toward you). I can still hear their chant, in descending tones, still see in my mind’s eye the paralyzed young man, his mother pushing him in a wheelchair, no doubt hoping for a miracle.
On another day we were sitting outdoors in a park across the street from a MacDonald’s, and noticed some pigeons feeding on the scraps people dropped. Unlike other birds we’d seen everywhere else in Paris, these poor creatures looked really, really sick. (I was reminded of photos in my high school biology textbook, one of a healthy chicken, the other of a chicken fed a vitamin-deficient diet. Even then I was shocked by the cruelty of the experiment.)
As it happened, Sylvia’s daughter Betsy was dating a young Frenchman whom she’d met in college, and they were in Paris at that same time. While rushing to meet her, Sylvia tripped on a cobblestone and injured her ankle. We didn’t know if it was a bad sprain or a fracture, so after briefly visiting with Betsy we caught a taxi to the nearest hospital.
The waiting and exam rooms were quite shabby compared to those in the U.S.—as I remember, they were direly in need of new paint—but everyone was kind and efficient. We didn’t have to wait long. While Sylvia was being X-rayed, I filled out a form with her name and address. We figured they’d send us a bill, and we could present that to Kaiser when we got home.
It was just a bad sprain. They prescribed a painkiller and told her to buy crutches and use them while it healed. When we returned to our apartment I looked up the words in my pocket dictionary, went to the nearest pharmacy, and asked for cannes anglais. Stumbling over the pronunciation, I explained that my friend had injured her cheval.
The pharmacy clerk frowned disdainfully as she corrected my French. “Cheville,” she said—her ankle, not her horse.
“Oui, madame, merci,” I replied.
She was the only rude person I encountered during our stay, but she did bring me the correct item.
Sylvia healed rapidly. A few days later when we went for a stroll in what the guidebook said was a nearby forest, but was actually a manicured grove, she realized she could walk on her own. “I’m glad I don’t need the crutches anymore,” she said, cheerfully quoting Pollyanna. I don’t remember how we disposed of them.
On our last day in Paris we had dinner at a café on the Rue de Belleville, the late afternoon sun streaming gold on us, on residents out for a stroll, Orthodox Jews along one side of the street, the North Africans and Senegalese in glorious native dress along the other. We wished that hour would never end…
…but all too soon we were on a plane back to San Francisco. No hospital bill awaited us upon our return. We thought most likely her medical care was covered by the French government and paid for by taxes, though possibly the fee was so trivial that they didn’t bother submitting the paperwork. (See below.)
As I write this, more memories come back to me. I still dream of returning, but that seems unlikely for a number of reasons, not least of which is that our government appears to be hurtling us into World War III. Yet Oscar Wilde once wrote, “When good Americans die, they go to Paris.” So perhaps we still have a chance.
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Today a tourist in Paris would have to pay up front for that urgent care visit: 30€ for the doctor and 27€50 for the X-ray, or $34.62 and $31.73 at the current exchange rate. In San Francisco it would be $100-$250 for the exam, plus $200-$400 for X-rays.
Events are certainly moving quickly. Some people say we’re headed into World War III, while others say we’re already there. I tend to hold the latter opinion, but what do I know? My crystal ball is in the shop and the mechanic says it might be time to let that clunker go. Nevertheless, I’d like to share a few thoughts.
Back in 1966 when we were protesting the Vietnam War, Charlotte E. Keyes wrote an article titled, “Suppose they gave a war and no one came?” Her title was an instant hit, but only in certain circles, and it didn’t stop the conflict. Between conscripts and volunteers, the armed services have never lacked for manpower. Although the draft was eliminated in 1973, plenty of young men and women continue to enlist.
America glorifies the military. When you meet someone who is or has been in uniform, you’re expected to say, “Thank you for your service.” Monuments are built to those who died in combat. Veterans—that is, those who survive—get low-cost or free health care, money for education, and other benefits. Some people, including several I’ve known personally, enlisted to escape their small towns or for the GI Bill, which pays for college.
Whether we have a poverty draft is debatable. “Poverty draft” refers to the idea that most young people who enlist in the military do so for lack of alternatives for escaping poverty. According to research by Prof. Alair MacLean, we do not. Offspring of the lower middle class are the demographic most likely to enlist, followed by those in the income level just above them. Least likely are the very poor, whose parents had low levels of education, and the wealthy, which suggests a “de facto wealth exemption.”
Nevertheless I question MacLean’s conclusions. Middle class kids didn’t used to have to take out huge loans at extortionate interest rates in order to pay exorbitant tuition costs. They wouldn’t have needed to enlist to get money for college. In other words, today’s middle class are the new poor when it comes to paying for higher education.
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The psychopaths—sorry, national leaders—who start wars, those orgies of mass murder, always seem to think their side will emerge victorious. In pre-industrial times they were called kings, but nowadays they’re presidents, prime ministers, supreme leaders, or just plain dictators.
These so-called leaders always have several strata of support.
Highest and closest is a ring of wealthy oligarchs, whose wealth depends on exploiting labor, including modern-day slavery and child labor. They have no qualms about sending in the troops to shoot strikers at home, or the military to squash rebellions in other nations. In other words, the oligarchs, like the dictators and presidents, are strongly psychopathic but without the dictators’ limitless need for public adulation.
The oligarchs support their nation’s leader, who is often their puppet, as long as his policies continue to enrich them, and will replace him (or try to) when he no longer serves their interests. Sometimes their strategy backfires, as when they lose control of him puppet and his wars turn out to be a national disaster. For example, Hitler attacked France and England to the west in 1940. In 1941, he attacked the Soviet Union, his ally to the east. It’s never a good idea to be fighting in all directions simultaneously.
Depending on which country and era we’re talking about, the oligarch circle may include the owners of:
Arms manufacturers, such as Krupp in Nazi Germany, and Lockheed Martin today
Fossil fuel corporations such as British Petroleum in pre-revolutionary Iran or Chevron today
Agricultural resource extractors, for example the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company in Congo and United Fruit Company in Latin America
Mineral extractors, such as De Beers diamond mining company in South Africa, or Swiss and Chinese cobalt mining enterprises in Congo
And many, many others.
The second stratum, just below, consists of the leader’s advisors. They aren’t part of the billionaire class, but the wealth and power they do enjoy comes from their sycophantic support of the dictator. Here in the United States those would include Trump’s cabinet, heads of various departments, and spokespeople. Some of them are at least as psychopathic as he is, or more so. Pete Hegseth and Kristi Noem, for example, appear to revel in cruelty.
Propagandists form another stratum. In the United States, owners of media such as Fox News and Sinclair, Inc. are probably part of the oligarch set, but I’d put the pundits who work for them, and the so-called “intellectuals” of the think tanks, on the third level. One of the most despicable think tanks is the Manhattan Institute, which has published papers supporting child labor and income inequality, abolishing the minimum wage, and “getting tough” with those lazy poor. I wrote about them in detail in a previous post.
The lowest stratum—the fourth level—has two segments. The first includes members of the general public who are fine with their leader’s wars as long as they personally benefit. For example, when I was with a group protesting the invasion of Iraq, a man walked up behind us and shouted, “You want to pay $25 a gallon?”
This was a very revealing comment. I’ll give him credit—he knew what the war was about. He didn’t buy the official lie about weapons of mass destruction. Slaughtering thousands of Iraqis was okay, as long as it meant that he was comfortable, as long as he could fill his tank cheaply.
In every empire, in every colonial power, the general public includes people like that man. On the other hand, if the current leader’s policies leave them worse off, they are equally happy to support a replacement.
The other segment of the lowest stratum is comprised of cultists who believe their leader was divinely anointed, and will actually kill and die for him. It is important to remember that they don’t get this idea all by themselves. They hear it from some Christian clergy and, in Israel, some powerful rabbis. (Not from Muslim religious leaders, however—the idea that a politician is divinely chosen and even speaks for God is heresy in Islam.) In America these days, they also hear it from the upper ranks of the administration, especially from the likes of Hegseth, who apparently actually believes he is leading a “holy war.”
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Personally, I don’t see the Bible as sacred, but rather a mishmash of mythology, history, poetry, and preaching. However, I do take some parts seriously, such as “thou shalt not kill,” and “love thy neighbor as thyself.” I cannot accept–completely reject–the part where God supposedly said to kill all the Amalekites, including their babies and all their animals.
In general I try not to injure any of God’s creatures. I will swat a mosquito if it lands on me, but if an ant walks across the kitchen counter, I’ll direct it onto a piece of paper and put it out in the garden. And if I saw a certain orange-haired mass murderer and an ant drowning in a swimming pool, and I had a choice between rescuing that murderer or that ant, guess which one I’d save.
I can’t abide the term holy war. It’s an oxymoron. Nor do I respect the various Geneva conventions that try to define war crimes.
