London, Coventry, (Oxford)

I haven’t posted much here lately… Mostly because I’ve been busy catching up with old friends and colleagues here in England, and also traveling around a little and meeting some interesting new people.
Tuesday night I had dinner with my niece Rachel Clements, who’s what the Brits call an “A&E” doctor (what Americans call an ER doc.) Rachel is extremely smart, fit, and fearless: she works with the London Helicopter Emergency Medical Service, rushing around London in a chopper to rescue people in extremely dire straits … Well, they only use the chopper in the daytime. At night, she rushes around in a car with the paramedic on the team driving her. And okay, though I said ‘rushing around’, she did tell me over a great Italian dinner that a lot of the time on her shifts is spent waiting for the next call.
It was great to reconnect with Rachel, and really interesting to hear her talking with conviction and self-understanding about the challenges of her work, how she deals with the tough emotions it induces, and so on.
I told her how much I admire her, and admire the fact that she actually is out there, every day, saving lives, while as for the rest of us– ?
I would like to think that what I do might help to prevent future wars and all the suffering and death that wars always, without exception, bring in their train… But to be honest our track record in preventing the past ones has been really, really poor.
What more can we do to prevent the launching of a US war-of-choice against Iran?
We’re coming up to the fourth anniversary of launching the war-of-choice against Iraq, and I’m planning to write something to mark that occasion. A good time to reflect.
And later in the year, we’re coming up to the 40th anniversary of Israel’s launching of the ‘pre-emptive’ war of 1967 that set in train 40 years of rule-by-military-occupation over Golan and Palestine…
Anyway, yesterday I came to Coventry, in the heart of England,. where I spent the afternoon teaching a class for Prof. Andrew Rigby, the Director of the Centre for Peace & Reconciliation Studies at Coventry University. I talked mainly about my work on the Amnesty After Atrocities book, the conclusions I had drawn from it, etc. The student body was amazing! About two dozen of them, nearly all overseas students, with a very broad range of life experiences and all very articulate, thoughtful, and smart. It seems like an amazing center they have here.
Andrew’s on the editorial board of Peace News, too.
Today I’m returning to London via Oxford, where I’m having lunch with Avi Shlaim, at St. Antony’s College.