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The U.S. and other governments are not making the priority of rescuing endangered people from Afghanistan that a consumer of Hollywood movies might imagine being made were the endangered people Jews in Nazi Germany.

Sadly, the reality in the 1940s was no different from today. Major investments went into wars, and Western officials wanted no large numbers of refugees. They opposed them for openly racist reasons, exactly as if they worked for Fox News in 2021 only worse.

If only Afghans today were read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

In January 2004, Chalmers Johnson wrote “America’s Empire of Bases” for TomDispatch, breaking what was, in effect, a silence around those strange edifices, some the size of small towns, scattered around the planet. He began it this way:

“As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize — or do not want to recognize — that the United States dominates read more

It’s far from the longest U.S. war. There was no peace before or after it. There is no after it until they end it — and bombing has always been most of what it is. It has had nothing to do with opposing terrorism. It has been a one-sided slaughter, a mass killing over two decades by a single invading army and air force dragging along token mascots from dozens of vassal states. After 20 years Afghanistan was one of the worst places to be on Earth, and the Earth as a whole was a worse place read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

My parents certainly had college dreams for me. After all, they wanted me to move up in life, big time. Where exactly “up” was seemed less than clear to me then. But after a great fight — I wanted to go to Cornell (girls!) — I lost and, in 1962, ended up just where they wanted me to be, at Yale. Even in those days, it cost a significant pile of dough to go there, a 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: Living through the dying of the Earth. Our guest Daniel Sherrell is the author of a powerful new book called Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. Daniel Sherrell is an organizer born in 1990. He helped lead the campaign to pass landmark climate justice legislation in New York and is the recipient of a Fulbright grant in read more

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 David Swanson, World BEYOND War, August 15, 2021

So, people get hurt when you stop waging wars, and peace is dangerous, and . . . and . . . well, women’s rights!

What do the stupid peace lovers say now?

Well, here’s what this one says:

On September read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

My Extreme World
And (Un)Welcome to It

By Tom Engelhardt

Admittedly, I hadn’t been there for 46 years, but old friends of mine still live (or at least lived) in the town of Greenville, California, and now… well, it’s more or less gone, though they survived.  The Dixie Fire, one of those devastating West Coast blazes, had already “blackened” 504 square miles of Northern California in read more

To take recent news reports seriously, it seems just possible that sometime this year the U.S. Congress might pass a pair of pieces of legislation that combine to do more good than harm.

Not only that, but this might happen because the better members of the House of (Mis-?)Representatives take a stand by refusing to vote for something unless they get what they say they want. Should that actually happen, the precedent might be at least as valuable as the particular legislation.

This idea depends 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: Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army officer, director of the new Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), senior fellow at the Center for International Policy (CIP), and contributing editor at Antiwar.com. read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Only recently, almost four decades after his death, I discovered that my father still liked to have some of his friends call him “major.” That was his ultimate rank in what was then known as the U.S. Army Air Corps, not the U.S. Air Force, for which he volunteered within days of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (He would, symbolically enough, die on Pearl Harbor Day read more