The Ukraine War Has Never Been America’s War

Although supporters of the Russian invasion, occupation, and annexation of Ukraine blame “U.S. imperialism” for the Ukraine War, the U.S. role has been relatively minor.  The major actors have been Ukrainians, striving for independence, and Russians, striving to end it.

For centuries, a great many Ukrainians, chafing under Czarist and, later, Soviet rule, longed for national independence.  This rejection of Russian domination―based in part on Stalin’s extermination of four read more

Tomgram: Engelhardt, This Little War of Mine (and Yours and Ours and Theirs)

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War, What Is It Good For? Remarkably Little If You’re a “Great” Power on Planet Earth in the Twenty-First Century By

I was born on July 20, 1944, amid a vast global conflict already known as World War II.  Though it ended with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 before I could say much more than “Mama” or “Dada,” in some strange fashion, I grew up at war.

Living in New York City, I was near no conflict in those years or in any since. My dad, however, had volunteered read more

Having Enemies Is a Choice

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, April 23, 2023

What’s something that nobody can give you unless you want it?

An enemy.

This ought to be obviously true in both the personal sense and the international sense.

In your personal life, you acquire enemies by seeking them out and choosing to have them. And if, through no fault of your own, someone is cruel to you, the option remains of not behaving cruelly in return. The option remains of not even thinking anything cruelly in return. That option might read more

What a Supporter of Peace Can Know and Do on Memorial Day

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, April 21, 2023

Some countries have a Catholic Church holiday every day of the year. The United States has a war holiday every day of the year. Some of them, such as so-called Veterans Day, began as peace holidays that — like Mother’s Day or Martin Luther King Jr. Day — were carefully stripped of any peace content, and were instead turned toward the glorification of war and war read more