A blog about a criminal enterprise
By David Swanson
When you imagine ending a war, do you imagine the U.S. President lamenting the human cost of the war’s financial expense while simultaneously demanding that Congress increase military spending — and while mentioning new wars that could potentially be launched?
Do you picture him blowing up families with missiles from robot airplanes, and committing to continuing those “strikes” while maintaining that such things don’t constitute continuing the war?
Did you hope that if
Talk World Radio is recorded as audio and video on Riverside.fm. Here is this week’s video and all the videos on Youtube.
This week on Talk World Radio: Better late and diastrously than never. It’s never too soon to end a war, even if you don’t really end it, tell lots of lies about it, and increase military spending to prepare for more wars.
Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.
Download from LetsTryDemocracy.
Download from
Malika Ahmadi, two, died in a U.S. drone strike on Kabul today, her family says. Has the war of 20 years cost us the ability to care?
The war on Afghanistan and the war on Iraq that it was a means of helping start, and all the other spin-off wars leave (if you count only bombing from above as leaving) millions dead, millions injured, millions traumatized, millions homeless, the rule of law eroded, the natural environment devastated, government secrecy and surveillance and authoritarianism increased
The Washington Post has been a leading promoter of the Rules Based Order, which some have confused with a pro-democracy initiative. The Post has, however, assembled a powerful case against democracy, that we all need to take seriously if we want to be, you know, serious.
I want to highlight just the most recent two additions to the anti-democracy argument that by now is quite overwhelmingly established.
On August 29th, a column
In some future lovely little war, perhaps with China or some other demonized target, some percentage of the U.S. public may suddenly exclaim: “Hey, since when does a draft include young women as well as men?!” Old tunes will be revised and sung in protest with lyrics about being the first one on your block to have your daughter come home in a box. The tragedies will be played out in tears and screams and flag-covered propaganda-regurgitating rationalizations.
Presented Friday, August 27, 2021, to the Northern Colorado Alliance for a Livable Future
I want to begin with five success stories.
The Peace Movement.
The people who spent 20 years largely excluded from the corporate media, lobbying Congress Members well paid not to listen to them, marching and protesting and holding teach-ins, making art, traveling across the globe or staying put on the same street corner for decades to build alliances and awareness, writing books and teaching courses, interrupting
Afghan villagers stand over bodies of civilians during a protest in the city of Ghazni, west of Kabul, Afghanistan, Sept. 29, 2019. An airstrike by U.S.-led forces in eastern Afghanistan killed at least five civilians. (AP Photo/Rahmatullah Nikzad)
By Kathy Kelly, Nick Mottern, David Swanson, Brian Terrell, August 27, 2021
On the evening of Thursday, August 26, hours after two suicide bombs were detonated at the gates of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport killing and wounding scores of
The communications system we live in is highly complex, mostly driven by greed and profit, in part semi-public, full of filth I know we’d be better off without, and increasingly openly censored and monitored by defenders of accepted good thinking.
Fascist nutcases are spreading dangerous nonsense, while billionaire monopolists are virtually disappearing critics and protesters. It’s easy to get confused about what ought to be done. It’s difficult to find any recommendation that isn’t confused.
In many ways, war is ever more and less visible. Of course in U.S. academia, the Pinkerist pretense that we are living through a period of great peace is accomplished by all sorts of statistical manipulation, but first and foremost by declaring civil wars to not be wars, and declaring U.S. wars to be civil wars — a tricky thing to do when the minute the U.S. leaves, Afghans, for example, decline to keep killing each other (damn them!).
But in the United States, war and militarism — or some
Talk World Radio is recorded as audio and video on Riverside.fm. Here is this week’s video and all the videos on Youtube.
This week on Talk World Radio, one of the ways in which the killing machine of war just keeps on killing. Our guest Kiji Noh and co-author Claudia Chaufan have published an article in Social Medicine called “The Neglected Role of the Military as a Disease Vector: Implications for Covid-19 and for Global Health Policy.” Claudia Chaufan is Associate