War Is A Crime

Go to 13:55 in the following video:

By David Swanson

The full extent of Russia’s lunacy is hidden from us by a considerate Western press careful of our delicate sensibilities. The demands that Russia made back in December read more

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

In case you haven’t noticed — and I know you have — this country, as I wrote recently, is being (un)built before our very eyes. As a start, an read more

AUDIO:

Talk World Radio is recorded as audio and video on Riverside.fm, unless we can’t get it to work and then it’s recorded on Zoom. Here is this week’s video and all the videos on Youtube.

VIDEO:

This week on Talk World Radio, we’re talking about the difficulty the U.S. government has in ceasing to threaten war on Iran or even committing to uphold future commitments. Our guest, Robert Fantina, is a Member of the Board of Directors of World BEYOND War. He is based in Canada. read more

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

Yes, it’s true. After 20 years of war — actually, more like 30 years if you count American involvement in the Russian version of that conflict in the 1980s — the U.S. has finally waved goodbye to Afghanistan (at least for now). Its last act in Kabul was the read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, January 10, 2022

You’d hardly guess it from all the silent acceptance of war as a legal enterprise and all the chatter about ways to supposedly keep war legal through the reform of particular atrocities, but there are international treaties that make wars and even the threat of war illegal, national constitutions that make wars and various activities that facilitate wars illegal, and laws that make killing illegal with no exceptions for the use of missiles read more

There are plenty of good occasions to pretend not to know something: an embarrassing secret of a friend, a plan for a surprise party, the punchline of a child’s joke.

There are plenty of good excuses to actually not know something: it would take decades of study, it’s of no interest or value, it would cost so much money to research it that you could have saved millions of lives instead.

There are, I think, fewer good justifications for pretending to yourself (not just to others) not to know read more

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

What Will We Remember of 2022? Nation (Un)Building and Planet (Un)Building, American-Style By Tom Engelhardt

Let me start 2022 by heading back — way, way back — for a moment.

It’s easy to forget just how long this world has been a dangerous place for human beings. I thought about this recently when I stumbled upon a little memoir my Aunt Hilda scrawled, decades ago, in a small notebook. In it, she commented in passing: “I was graduated during that horrible flu epidemic of 1919 read more

I live in a wealthy country, the U.S., and in a corner of it, a part of Virginia, not yet hit hard by fires or floods or tornados. In fact, until Sunday night, January 2nd, we’d had rather pleasant, almost summerlike weather most of the time since summer. Then, Monday morning, we got several inches of wet, heavy snow.

It’s now Thursday, and trees and branches have been coming down all over the place. We shook branches repeatedly as the snow was first arriving, to get some of it off. We still read more