War Is A Crime

By David Swanson, Executive Director of World BEYOND War

Indigenous people in Canada are giving the world a demonstration of the power of nonviolent action. The justness of their cause — defending the land from those who would destroy it for short term profit and the elimination of a habitable climate on earth — combined with their courage and the absence on their part of cruelty or hatred, has the potential to create a much larger movement, which is of course the key to success.

This is a demonstration read more

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

The War in Questions
Making Sense of the Age of Carnage
By Tom Engelhardt

My first question is simple enough: After 18-plus years of our forever wars, where are all the questions?

Almost two decades of failing American wars across a startlingly large part of the planet and I’d like to know, for instance, who’s been fired for them? Who’s been impeached? Who’s even read more

Elections, I think most of us can agree, usually bring out the idiocy, superficiality, and illogic in everyone who can muster any. Imagine supporting, as many did, Sanders and then Trump because they were both “outsiders.” On Tuesday, I heard somebody on CNN announce that Sanders and Klobuchar were both “change candidates” (because you’d have to change every bit of the platform of one of them to match that of the other?). Tokenism no longer embarrasses voters or even the candidates who read more

Jefferson Morley is a Washington author and investigative reporter. Over the last 35 years he has served as Washington correspondent for The Nation and Salon and as editor and reporter at the Washington Post and Washingtonpost.com for 15 years. He is the author read more

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

When it came to war, this year’s State of the Union Address, given by a president who had, at least in part, been voted into office for criticizing America’s “endless read more

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

When I first met Michael Klare in the late Neolithic age (it was actually the early 1970s), he was already researching the U.S. military in a way no one else was doing. His first book on the subject, War Without End: American Planning for the Next Vietnams, had just been published. The title remains eerily apt, given Washington’s twenty-first-century “forever wars.” read more

Charles Kenny’s book, Close the Pentagon, has an endorsement from Steven Pinker despite wanting to close something that Pinker rarely acknowledges exists.

This is a book to answer the question: What if someone who believed that war was only committed by poor, dark, distant people, and had therefore almost vanished from the earth, were to encounter the U.S. military and the U.S. military budget?

The answer is basically a proposal to move the money from militarism to human and environmental needs read more

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

I suppose this should shock no one, but as the stresses of climate change grow, they only heighten other stresses already built into this world of ours; new realities, that is, have a tendency to create more extreme versions of some very old ones as well. A new two-year study of the phenomenon by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, for instance, focuses read more