Robert C. Koehler
Robert Koehler is an award-winning, Chicago-based journalist and nationally syndicated writer. His new book, Courage Grows Strong at the Wound is now available. Contact him at koehlercw@gmail.com or visit his website at commonwonders.com.
Articles by this author
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Views Thursday, September 21, 2017 Reclaiming the Truth About Vietnam “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... Read more |
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Views Thursday, September 07, 2017 Begging for War "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... Read more |
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Views Thursday, August 31, 2017 The Man Who Stood Up To Armageddon 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... Read more |
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Views Thursday, August 24, 2017 Facing History in the Age of Trump Tempting as it is to isolate Donald Trump as the worst president in history (and “worst” is putting it mildly . . . more like the most narcissistically infantile, the most Nazi-friendly), doing so achieves nothing beyond a fleeting sense of satisfaction. Yeah, he’s scary. His supporters are scary... Read more |
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Views Thursday, August 17, 2017 Why Does North Korea Hate Us? 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, that the tiny pariah... Read more |
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Views Thursday, August 10, 2017 Terrorism for Profit Donald Trump stands cluelessly at the edge of history, exemplifying everything wrong with the past, oh, 10,000 years or so. The necessity for fundamental change in humanity’s global organization is not only profound, but urgent. Trump’s latest outburst about North Korea’s nukes — threatening that... Read more |
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Views Thursday, July 27, 2017 Opening Gitmo to the World To read Witnesses of the Unseen: Seven Years in Guantanamo is to run your mind along the contours of hell. The next step, if you’re an American, is to embrace it. Claim it. This is who we are: We are the proprietors of a cluster of human cages and a Kafkaesque maze of legal insanity. This torture... Read more |
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Views Thursday, July 20, 2017 Dead Civilians and the Language of War Finally it comes down to this: Some people are expendable. In certain parts of the world — where we and our allies are waging war — the expendable people come in two categories: terrorists (good riddance!) and civilians, whom we only kill if and when necessary, and whose deaths often elicit... Read more |
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Views Thursday, July 13, 2017 Nukes and the Global Schism The United States boycotted the U.N. negotiations to ban — everywhere across Planet Earth — nuclear weapons. So did eight other countries. Guess which ones? The international debate over this historic treaty, which became reality a week ago by a margin of 122 to 1, revealed how deeply split the... Read more |
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Views Thursday, July 06, 2017 Skewing Democracy White Every real problem this country — and this planet — face is replaced by a fantasy problem, which all the powers of government then pretend to address. Meet Donald Trump, master of the street con, trickster extraordinaire. How many cabinet positions and high-level government posts have been filled... Read more |