The last time the U.S. President and UK Prime Minister announced an “Atlantic Charter” it happened in secret, without public involvement, without Congress or Parliament. It laid out plans for shaping the world upon the conclusion of a war that the U.S. President, but not the U.S. Congress and not the U.S. public, was committed to taking part in. It decreed that certain nations would need to be disarmed, and others not. Yet it put forward various pretenses of goodness and fairness that have
Abolishing Police and Abolishing Militaries
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, June 10, 2021
The similarities between the movement to abolish war and the movement to abolish police and prisons jump out at me anew when reading Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, which is about police and prison abolition. The book has a foreword by Naomi Murakawa that includes this:
“Police push millions of people into the criminal punishment system, where ant-Black death-dealing rises through each circle of hell. Black people comprise 13
Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Skeletons in My Virtual Closets
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In this century, Memorial Day, a civic holiday, has gained an almost religious tinge. That last Monday in May is meant, of course, to honor the dead of this country’s wars and has a history that goes back to the period
The Nuclear Danger Gone?
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, June 8, 2021
You can talk with perfectly intelligent, educated, well-rounded people in the United States who don’t happen to work on trying to save the world from war (this is one of the dangers of relaxing your social distancing, that you run into these people), and when you raise the topic of war they’ll sometimes mention how there used to be a Cold War and a danger of nuclear apocalypse “back in the 80s.”
Just a month ago in U.S.-media-created-reality
Talk World Radio: Alexandra Klein on Ending the Death Penalty
Talk World Radio is recorded as audio and video on Riverside.fm. Here is this week’s video and all the videos on Youtube.
This week on Talk World Radio, we’re discussing that barbaric vestige of uncontrollable ignorance and sadism, capital punishment. Our guest is Alexandra Klein. Professor Alexandra Klein researches and teaches in the area of criminal law, criminal procedure constitutional law, and the death penalty. Her scholarship has been published in, or is forthcoming in the Ohio
Tomgram: John Feffer, Still Waiting to Exhale
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Let’s face it: right now, we Americans know something about dystopias, up close and personal. And here, I’m not just thinking of the almost 600,000 (or is it
A World Beyond War or No World at All
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, June 7, 2021
Remarks on June 7, 2021, to North Texas Peace Advocates.
In a world beyond war, . . . death, injury, and trauma from violence would be radically reduced, homelessness and immigration driven by fear would be largely eliminated, environmental destruction would slow considerably, government secrecy would lose all justification, bigotry would take a huge setback, the world would gain over $2 trillion and the United States alone $1.25 trillion every year,
Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Formula for National (In)Security
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A World at the Edge What Planet Will Our Children and Grandchildren Inherit? ByLet me start with my friend and the boat. Admittedly, they might not seem to have anything to do with each other. The boat, a guided-missile destroyer named the USS Curtis Wilbur, reportedly passed
Tomgram: Nina Burleigh, How to Make Money Off a Pandemic
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Let me do something I’ve seldom done in one of these introductions and quote at length from a book. In this case, the initial paragraph of the preface to Nina Burleigh’s striking new work, Virus: Vaccinations, the CDC, and the Hijacking of America’s Response to the Pandemic:
“One of my first instincts in the surreal early days of lockdown in March 2020 was to hunt down
How John Hersey Blew the Whistle on the Reality of Nuclear War
Review of Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World
In this crisply-written, well-researched book, Lesley Blume, a journalist and biographer, tells the fascinating story of the background to John Hersey’s pathbreaking article, “Hiroshima,” and of its extraordinary impact upon the world.
In 1945, although only 30 years of age, Hersey was a very prominent war correspondent for Time magazine—a key part of publisher Henry Luce’s magazine empire—and