Author: David Swanson

The last time the U.S. President and UK Prime Minister announced an “Atlantic Charter” it happened in secret, without public involvement, without Congress or Parliament. It laid out plans for shaping the world upon the conclusion of a war that the U.S. President, but not the U.S. Congress and not the U.S. public, was committed to taking part in. It decreed that certain nations would need to be disarmed, and others not. Yet it put forward various pretenses of goodness and fairness that have read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, June 10, 2021

The similarities between the movement to abolish war and the movement to abolish police and prisons jump out at me anew when reading Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, which is about police and prison abolition. The book has a foreword by Naomi Murakawa that includes this:

“Police push millions of people into the criminal punishment system, where ant-Black death-dealing rises through each circle of hell. Black people comprise 13 read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, June 8, 2021

You can talk with perfectly intelligent, educated, well-rounded people in the United States who don’t happen to work on trying to save the world from war (this is one of the dangers of relaxing your social distancing, that you run into these people), and when you raise the topic of war they’ll sometimes mention how there used to be a Cold War and a danger of nuclear apocalypse “back in the 80s.”

Just a month ago in U.S.-media-created-reality read more

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, we’re discussing that barbaric vestige of uncontrollable ignorance and sadism, capital punishment. Our guest is Alexandra Klein. Professor Alexandra Klein researches and teaches in the area of criminal law, criminal procedure constitutional law, and the death penalty. Her scholarship has been published in, or is forthcoming in the Ohio read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, June 7, 2021
Remarks on June 7, 2021, to North Texas Peace Advocates.

In a world beyond war, . . . death, injury, and trauma from violence would be radically reduced, homelessness and immigration driven by fear would be largely eliminated, environmental destruction would slow considerably, government secrecy would lose all justification, bigotry would take a huge setback, the world would gain over $2 trillion and the United States alone $1.25 trillion every year, read more

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, it’s time to end the terrorism-generating war on terrorism. Our guest is Scott Horton. Scott Horton is the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of Antiwar.com, host of Antiwar Radio on KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, and author of Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and of the new book we’ll read more

I wish I were joking, even a little. Malcolm Gladwell’s book, The Bomber Mafia, maintains that Haywood Hansell was essentially Jesus tempted by the Devil when he refused to burn Japanese cities to the ground. Hansell was replaced, and Curtis LeMay put in charge of U.S. bombings of Japan during WWII. LeMay, Gladwell tells us, was none other than Satan. But what was very much needed, Gladwell claims, was Satanic immorality — the willingness to intentionally incinerate perhaps a million read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 26, 2021

Here’s a video from one of the facilitators lined up for World BEYOND War’s online course on War and the Environment which begins on June 7th, 2021:

This course could not be more important. A culture of extraction and destruction is closely tied to a culture of war. Questioning that ethos of destruction and consumption is challenging, but it has belatedly begun. Challenging a culture of militarism is even harder.

In the United States, for read more

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 we’re talking about activism on behalf of the basic human rights of Palestinians. Our guest is Nora Barrows-Friedman. Nora Barrows-Friedman is an associate editor at The Electronic Intifada and the author of In Our Power: US Students Organize for Justice in Palestine. She is also the co-host of The Electronic Intifada Podcast, read more