Author: David Swanson

Mary Jo McConahay’s The Tango War is an engaging, extensive, well-researched, well-written account of a topic that still manages to offend me. World War II is sacred history in the United States, the ultimate clash of pure good and evil, the fundamental origin myth of the military industrial complex. It is the top subject of books, films, and shows. Finding a novel angle on World War II that has not yet been exhaustively covered is, at this point, a significant feat. Finding a whole read more

Last weekend I was on Iranian TV being asked about the meeting in Tehran at which the presidents of Iran and Russia had refused to agree with the President of Turkey to stop bombing people in Syria. I said Iran and Russia were wrong.

I also said that nobody involved, least of all the United States, was right.

Not only would the United States and the world be infinitely better off if in response to 9/11 the U.S. government had done nothing at all, as Jon Schwartz tweets each year, but Syria would read more

If one were to travel north through North America, with the seasons or the change in climate, harvesting crops of patriotic warmongering, the biggest drop in crop yield might come around the Mason Dixon Line, not the Canadian border.

Yves Engler’s new book, Left, Right: Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada’s Foreign Policy proposes to provide 10% of the explanation for why many Canadians suffer read more

A new report by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies “focuses on the five largest U.S. arms manufacturers — Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics — and their dealings with three repressive nations: Saudi Arabia, Israel and Egypt.”

This may prove to be a very valuable approach. The three nations reported on use U.S.-made weapons from the companies listed above to kill, injure, and traumatize huge numbers of innocent people both in other countries and in their read more

As the U.S. government simultaneously threatens the International Criminal Court for even acting as if it might prosecute the United States for crimes in Afghanistan (a topic “investigated” for years now, while the ICC has yet to actually prosecute any non-African for anything) and (with little apparent cognitive dissonance) uses read more

The United States is threatening sanctions against judges at the International Criminal Court should they continue their years-long investigation into the U.S. war on Afghanistan — a war which, in less than a month, will begin its 18th year.

A long list of prominent U.S. citizens and organizations, and thousands of additional signers, have put their names to a letter asking President Donald Trump to live up to his read more

I went in search of anything the United States was number 1 in that it shouldn’t be ashamed of, and came up empty. But I did find that the United States is number 1 in believing it is number 1. So, that’s something.

In my book, Curing Exceptionalism, I wrote:

“From John Winthrop before the fact to Tocqueville and on through John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, up to and including Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and most voices on U.S. television news today, as well as that neighbor or friend who’s read more

Rajni Lallah is a leading member of LALIT (which means struggle), a political organization in Mauritius in the forefront for the past 42 years of the struggle to decolonize and demilitarize the Chagos Islands. Rajni Lallah was 12 years old when she joined the women’s movement in Mauritius and remains active in Muvman Liberasyon Fam, a national women’s organization in Mauritius. When she was 14, she went to the first solidarity all-night vigil in support of Chagossian women on hunger read more

The University of Virginia’s Miller Center caught flak for appointing Trumpian Marc Short, but has now announced the appointment of John Negroponte, presumably hoping for little resistance since Negroponte’s not a Trumpman.

But shouldn’t morality still matter? Shouldn’t a center that has yet to ever feature an opponent of war but keeps inviting mercenaries and soldiers and warmongers to speak have to have some limits? We’re talking about a man who oversaw death squads in Honduras read more

According to an ABC News / Washington Post poll, 49% of a sampling of the U.S. public wants impeachment begun (they don’t specify when, but presumably any moment now) against Trump, while 43% do not. There are almost certainly millions of additional Democrats who would move into the pro-impeachment column if that party’s leaders did so. Same with Republicans. Many more Independents read more