War Is A Crime

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, June 17, 2021

With the U.S. House voting and the U.S. Senate promising to vote on repealing an AUMF (Authorization for the Use of Military Force) from 2002 (essentially a sort of weasely pseudo-permission for President George W. Bush to decide on his own whether to attack and destroy Iraq in violation of the UN Charter and Kellogg-Briand Pact, among other laws), we could end up saying good-bye to a shameful piece of legislation. And without a replacement AUMF read more

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Almost 20 years later, the U.S. military high command still didn’t want to leave the country where they had so impressively turned so many “corners” amid so much “progress” read more

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As French journalist and novelist Anatole France so aptly wrote in his 1894 novel The Red Lily, “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.” More than a century and a quarter later, that could easily have been written by Mitch McConnell and pals, or just about any Republican read more

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

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

In this century, Memorial Day, a civic holiday, has gained an almost religious tinge. That last Monday in May is meant, of course, to honor the dead of this country’s wars and has a history that goes back to the period 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

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

Let’s face it: right now, we Americans know something about dystopias, up close and personal. And here, I’m not just thinking of the almost 600,000 (or is it read more