The powerful unplugged
It’s not a matter of how they intend to police the rest of us, argues David Ransom, but how to get the brutes off our backs.

The military-
industrial complex
If Napoleon had ever got his hands on the modern machinery of warfare, Sigmund Freud might have had a few nightmares. Brick pictures the delusions of grandeur.

While this magazine was being finished, the TV news was dominated by pictures from Palestine. Among them was a terrified small boy being shot to pieces.

Somehow you just know it. Whenever helicopter gunships, tanks and high-velocity rifles are trained on children, violent conflict is more likely to be prolonged. Modern weaponry confers a false sense of omnipotence on those who wield it – rather like the toy soldier I once called ‘Me’ and imagined could balance the Moon on its little finger, though its head was fixed to its body with a match stick.

So how about a different model altogether? You’ll meet a new, self-improving version of a global police officer on your way through this magazine. Globocop finds the humility to learn how to stop relying on brute force, drop the dead weight of lethal weaponry, bring inanimate corporations to book and serve the majority of the world’s people instead. By the end the creature begins to look, well, almost human.

One of the frustrations of working on this magazine is that we are rarely able to comment on developing events as they happen. This can be very frustrating, especially when small boys are being shot with high-velocity rifles in the here-and-now. Last September Katharine Ainger posted reports on our website (www.newint.org) direct from the World Bank/IMF protest in Prague. They were quite unlike the misleading yarns spun by most of the mass media at the time. Perhaps we should do this more often. Let us know what you think.

David Ransom
for the New Internationalist Co-operative
davidr@newint.org

Why I reject nuclear deterrence
Former Navy commander Robert Green found out the hard way that the big bad bomb is a lethal waste of space.

A tawdry trade
There’s not much to be said for the arms traffickers, so Gideon Burrows tells us what we still have to hold against them.

BRUTE FORCE – THE FACTS

Doing law differently
People’s resistance to corporate rule has created a fresh sense of where justice lies. Jayan Nayar traces its grassroots.

Bull by the horns
Costa Ricans – who don’t kill the bull but kiss it between the horns – have not had a standing army for more than 50 years. Andrew Bounds can’t find a good reason why they would ever want it back.

Power pax
A short history of megalomania.

This tattered chrysalis
The people of Chechnya have been waiting for peacekeepers all their lives. Olivia Ward fears nothing will ever come from the Security Council of the United Nations.

Worth knowing...
About the UN, good books and action groups.