War Is A Crime

Me in Cuba on trip with Code Pink in 2015.

Here’s a preview of a new, 3-part mini-series:

I’ve seen the first part. It’s only 12 minutes. The series was made in Cuban by Cubans and non-Cubans working together, and executive producers are Oliver Stone and Danny Glover. It’ll be on Youtube on Friday, October 9th on the Belly of the Beast channel. The series has the unfortunate title “The War on Cuba.”

Share it on Facebook and Twitter.

Of course, what the U.S. government does to Cuba is read more

U.S. poster from 1953.

Excerpted from Leaving World War II Behind

Hitler was clearly preparing for war long before he started it. Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland, annexed Austria, and threatened Czechoslovakia. High-ranking officials in the German military and “intelligence” plotted a coup. But Hitler gained popularity with every step he took, and the lack of any sort of opposition from Britain or France surprised and demoralized the coup plotters. The British government was aware of the read more

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

History? This is history?

I mean, in this country it is historic when this president, in one of his classically chaotic “news” conferences, refuses in advance to accept the results read more

The vast majority of people who experience war directly, first-hand, rather than through Hollywood movies or politicians’ speeches, are the people who live where wars are waged. In wars involving distant wealthy nations on one-side, some 95% of those killed or injured or traumatized, and 100% of those bombed out of their homes are people against whom war is waged, most of them civilians and the rest of them people doing exactly what any Hollywood movie or politician would tell them — have read more

Photo by Jack Gilroy, Great Bend, Penn., September 28, 2020.

If you do a web search for images of “Nazi salute” you find old photos from Germany and recent photos from the United States. But if you search for images of “Bellamy salute” you find countless black-and-white photographs of U.S. children and adults with their right arms raised stiffly out in front of them in what will strike most people as a Nazi salute. From the early 1890s through 1942 the United States used the Bellamy salute read more

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

It’s odd. These days as right-wing “militias” multiply — that is, armed groups of whites taking to the streets of our cities to protect Donald Trump, white supremacy, and god knows what else — I always think to myself: if such groups were Black, what would they be called? And you know the answer to that question perfectly well. They would be called “gangs.” read more

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

It certainly tells you something about our political moment. Of the two women who were reported to be Donald Trump’s leading candidates to jam instantly into the Supreme Court seat of the barely dead Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the first, 48-year-old Appeals Court judge Amy Coney Barrett, is an extreme anti-abortion read more

Excerpted and modified from Leaving World War II Behind

“One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once, ‘The Unnecessary War.’ There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle.” —Winston Churchill[i]

World War II grew out of World War I, and almost nobody tries to argue that World War I was just or glorious. By behaving more read more