TMS Digest: How Would Peace-Making Fare Against Israel’s “Elimination Project” in the Occupied Palestine & Trump’s Annihilation Threat Against Iranian People.On issues that devastate communities and pain us all with capacity for empathy, including the unfolding ecological crisis, Israel’s wars USA fights & genocide it funds & NATO’s losing war in Ukraine.
Dear TMS Colleagues, Members, and Supporters, I put this week’s digest with a heavy heart and a burning question: how do you make peace with powerful forces that seek to eradicate, annihilate and eliminate things and human groups at whim, and as an act of declared policy objective? Before I get to the heart or thematic items directly relevant to those who long for peace on earth, I would first like to request the TMS community to email me (at fanon2005@gmail.com) any items – your own and/or others’ – that you think need wide circulation within our TMS network -and beyond. Second, in putting these digests and special issues, I use as my own analytical guide Karl Marx’s historical and structural insight into history-making, of which peace activism-scholarship is an inseparable part. Worth quoting the big man here: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) To be sure, Marx was wrong on many things, but as the late Isiah Berlin pointedly wrote, “you can disagree with Marx, but you cannot not engage with him”, if you are serious about analysing world affairs, that is, organized human activities. I pay closer attention to the fundamental forces that influence, create, or shape these circumstances under which we seek to make peace, agitate for peace activism, and educate one another. My “madness” has a method, and it is rooted in Marxian structuralist readings of humans. Of the many contributing factors to the sordid state of our world, the two rogue UN member states of USA-Israel, the Axis of Evil, their words and deeds, are of disproportionate significance. I compiled this week’s digest with a heavy heart. For two of the most influential UN member states, both nuclear-armed and rogue – joined in the hips – USA and Israel –sent their heads of state to make their unconcealed Hitlerite threats against the targeted national populations in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Occupied Palestine, (92 million and 7-8 million peoples, respectively). Both Trump and Netanyahu, unarguably war criminals, however international law including the Genocide Convention is interpreted, put the UN Charter to a giant shredder. The charter was designed to prevent the scourge of another world war after the senseless mass murder 100 million humans worldwide between 1938 and 1945. We live a short drive from Winston Churchill’s home of 25 years named Chartwell where visitors can view his type-written letter to his US counterpart President FDR in a glass display case. After several visits to the English man’s house – now a museum – his words to FDR, “nations united against evil”, have etched in my memory. This is of course irrespective of the fact that Churchill the man was not known for his virtues or humanity, but rather associated with concentration camps and genocidal colonial repression in places like Kenya post-Nazi genocide in Europe. Throughout my nearly four-decades of involvement in international affairs, with my personal focus on my Buddha-forsaken native country of Burma (or Myanmar) and increasingly with respect to genocides, I have long considered this august body medically dead. Its 5- veto-wielders have used and misused international law and the collective space for all member states as they deem fit. I felt I was witnessing the funeral of the UN when I was watching US President Donald Trump and ICC’s wanted Benjamin Netanyahu at the podium tell brazen lies, hurling insults and making outrageous threats against large-scale human communities, unbefitting their official positions as President and Prime Minister. By and large, much of the Western/European leaders in governments, legislatures, religious bodies and culture and intellectual institutions have been silent in the face of the two very public acts of the brazen violation of the UN Charter by the reigning American and Jewish Supremacists with their power to unleash their nukes on any “enemy” population. The burning question inside my head is the following: how do peace activists, professionals (scholars and/or practitioners) and public who just want to live in peace respond to the declarations of intent for annihilation and elimination of our fellow human communities? Neither war nor peace is the exclusive domain of We the Moderns, to belabour the obvious. Many thousands of years ago – and in all human communities, making wars against and seeking peace with enemy populations has been integral to mental cultures. Even medieval sieges were aimed at bringing the defiant and resistant enemy (in the walled or fortified city-state or kingdom) to military surrender. POWs were taken away as additional sources of labour, skilled and otherwise. Resources taken over, treasuries looted, women mass-raped. But the Trumpian declaration of annihilation of Iran and Israel’s pursuit of “Mein Kampf in reverse” or as B’Tselem’s scathing report of the Jewish Supremacist state’s “Elimination Project” (against the entire Occupied Territories, after the flattened Gaza) pose the single greatest intellectual and moral challenge to the community of peace scholars, peace thinkers and peace activists. Over 3,000 years ago history’s first-recorded written peace treaty was sealed between the Indo-Aryan Hittite kingdom, known as Hattusa, in present-day Turkiye, and its enemy kingdom of Egyptian pharaohs. After our my family visit to Hattusa from Ankara this past summer, our Turkish host Mehmet Öztürk who retired his editorship of World Languages at Anadolu News Agency took us to his native city of Corum. Thanks to Mehmet’s arrangement the city’s mayor and a former Turkish academic Dr Halil Ibrahim Asgin received us in his office and gifted our family with a replica of The Kadesh Treaty signed in BC 286. I am sharing the photo of this replica here.
Photos by Maung Zarni, 27 Sept 2026. In the history of Buddhist thoughts, Gotama the Buddha (or the Enlightened Human, not the Almighty Creator rooted in Abrahamic monotheistic faiths) was said to have inserted himself between the two warring kings and sought to mediate their conflict, on the verge of bloodbath. I am sure there are other religious and scriptural systems of thought peace is a goal, a way of life, and a value. Alas, the world today, that is, humanity at large, face two fundamental existential threats: the emerging ecological crisis and the decaying US Empire on its last leg, and aspiring Jewish Supremacist Empire, both hellbent on resorting to elimination and annihilation as their declared methods. Read on. Peace, Zarni |
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