From Indigenous People’s Day to Armistice Day

Remarks by phone on October 17, 2020, to Indigenous People’s Day event in Washington, D.C., delayed from October 12.

There may be no more important place to mark Indigenous People’s Day than Washington, D.C., the center of global weapons dealing, base building, and war making — the leading hub of nuclear weapons production and environmental destruction, the seat of a national and imperial government that overseas colonies of second-class citizens on Caribbean and Pacific islands as well as read more

Military Bases Never Go Unused

Housing on the Guantanamo base.

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, October 13, 2020

If, like me, you have the unfortunate habit of pointing out the dishonesty of the cases made for various wars, and you begin to persuade people that the wars are not actually for the eradication of the weapons of mass destruction that they proliferate, or the elimination of the terrorists that they generate, or the spreading of the democracy that they stifle, most people will soon ask “Well, then, what are the read more

Memories of Voter Suppression

Back in July 1962, when, according to Donald Trump, America was “great,” I was in the Deep South, working to register Black voters.  It was a near-hopeless project, given the mass disenfranchisement of the region’s Black population that was enforced by Southern law and an occasional dose of white terrorism.

It all started in the fall of 1961, the beginning of my senior year at Columbia College.  My roommate (Mike Weinberg) and I, both white, had joined the campus chapter of the Congress read more

Top Poisoner of Pacific Is U.S. Military

“We’re number one!” The United States famously fails to actually lead the world in anything desirable, but it does lead the world in many things, and one of them turns out to be the poisoning of the Pacific and its islands. And by the United States, I mean the United States military.

A new book by Jon Mitchell, called Poisoning the Pacific: The US Military’s Secret Dumping of Plutonium, Chemical Weapons, and Agent Orange, tells this story. Like all such catastrophes, this one escalated read more

Horror story in two parts: Part II — A Travesty of Justice: UK Caters to the US Desire to Crush Assange

By Ron Ridenour

The second indictment of alleged violations of the Espionage Act belatedly filed by the US against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange actually should not include him since there is no contention that he spied for any warring enemy, nor is he a U.S. citizen or resident, which the 1917 law targeted.

The original indictment focused on allegations that Assange had criminally aided Chelsea Manning in “hacking” into and downloading secret documents that read more

A horror story in two parts — Part I: Will England Send Assange-the-Messenger to America’s Dungeons?

By Ron Ridenour

Most people might be excused for not knowing it, because the story is mainly ignored, or is shamelessly misreported in the corporate media when it does get any attention. A courageous Australian journalist, abandoned by his own country, is being railroaded by a British court towards extradition to the US where he could face life in prison in solitary confinement for the “crime of espionage”—exposing US war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

What read more