War Is A Crime

An old silent pond
A frog jumps into the pond—
Thud! Dried up last year.

After killing a spider,
how noble I feel
in the TV glow!

I write, erase, rewrite
Erase again, and then
Twitter deletes me

Useless, useless,
the heavy rain
On Arkansas coast

In the moonlight,
The color and scent of the wisteria
Seems so Norwegian

Plum flower temple:
Voices rise
From fallout shelters

Everything I touch
with tenderness, alas,
Has comments beneath

The wren
Earns his living
Unlike bad Russians

Over-ripe sushi
The read more

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

I have to admit that, as I read the nightmarish front-page stories daily — and yes, I’m old enough to still read the New York Times in print every morning — and absorb the latest read more

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

I don’t normally do this, but in the context of TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon’s latest all-too-well-timed piece on paying (or rather not paying) one’s taxes, let me quote a couple of paragraphs I once wrote for this site about my own distant past and then briefly explain why:

“And here’s a little story from the Neolithic age we now call ‘the Sixties’ about read more

AUDIO:

Talk World Radio is recorded as audio and video on Riverside.fm — except when it can’t be and then it’s Zoom. Here is this week’s video and all the videos on Youtube.

VIDEO:

This week on Talk World Radio, we’re talking about whether it’s good or bad for a country to have a permanent military. Our guest, Ned Dobos is Senior Lecturer in Ethics at the University of New South Wales in Canberra, Australia. He is the author of Ethics, Security, and the War read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, April 11, 2022

Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons and was attacked. Therefore every country should have nuclear weapons.

NATO didn’t add Ukraine, which was attacked. Therefore every country or at least lots of them should be added to NATO.

Russia has a bad government. Therefore it should be overthrown.

These lessons are popular, logical — even unquestionable truth in many minds — and catastrophically and demonstrably wrong.

The world has had incredibly good read more

By Chicago Area Peace Action, April 10, 2022

David Swanson of World BEYOND War reveals the workings of the military- industrial complex, how it distorts the federal budget and U.S. foreign policy towards spending on war and preparations for war, and away from investments in addressing urgent problems like pandemics, climate change, and racial and economic injustice. The presentation explains the tools of influence used by the weapons industry, read more

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

Ukraine in Perspective A Historical Feast of Death and Destruction from the Peloponnesian Wars to Late Tomorrow Night By Tom Engelhardt

Excuse me if I wander a little today — and if it bothers you, don’t blame me, blame Vladimir Putin.  After all, I didn’t decide to invade Ukraine, the place my grandfather fled almost 140 years ago. I suspect, in fact, that I was an adult before I even knew such a place existed.  If I could be accused of anything, maybe you could say that, for most of my life, read more

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

In the spirit of this prolonged moment from hell, let me offer you a homemade conspiracy theory that will hopefully compete with the most vivid — or do I mean livid? — QAnon-ish ones around. Imagine this (even though it’s not true) as an explanation for the origins of the disastrous war in Ukraine: the major weapons-making corporations of our own military-industrial complex read more

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

On a recent trip to Europe as part of his administration’s response to the invasion of Ukraine, Joe Biden visited a convention center in Poland. It was serving as a base for troops from the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division. After sharing a pizza with several of those soldiers, he read more