Dear Common Dreams Readers:
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
 |
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 |
 |
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 |
 |
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 |
 |
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 |
 |
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 |
 |
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 |
 |
Views Thursday, June 29, 2017 The Fire Burns, the Caldron Bubbles America serves up its news in a caldron from hell, or so it sometimes seems. The fragments are all simmering in the same juice: bombs and drones and travel bans, slashed health care, police shootings, the Confederate flag. Double, double, toil and trouble . . . Suddenly I’m thinking about the... Read more |
 |
Views Thursday, June 22, 2017 When the Detainee Is American... The corpses pile up like sandbags along the planet’s geopolitical borders. “Perhaps his condition deteriorated and the authorities decided it was better to release him in a coma than as a corpse.” So said an expert on North Korea recently, quoted in the New York Times following the death of 22-year... Read more |
 |
Views Thursday, June 15, 2017 Uprooting the N-Word The word, inappropriately uttered, has the news value of a bullet fired off at the mall. One word. It’s the ticking time bomb of American history. It pulsates with paradox. I want to take a moment to honor at least that: the paradox. How come its meaning changes depending on who says it? Some... Read more |
 |
Views Thursday, June 08, 2017 A Dying Man’s Gift of Awareness “Tell them, I want everybody to know, I want everybody on the train to know, I love them... ” These words are also part of the geopolitics of murder — these words of light and hope, alive and pulsing amid the bullet casings, the blood and wreckage, the shattered lives. They were the dying words of... Read more |