Author: David Swanson

In Trump’s State of the Union he proposed building more nuclear weapons to counter “rivals” who “challenge” U.S. “values.” The Pentagon’s new Nuclear Posture Review proposes nuclear weapons to counter even “cyber warfare” and of course for “deterrence,” but also for “achievement of U.S. objectives if deterrence fails.”

How do we back Washington away from madness? This might help:

This past summer, former U.S. Senator read more

Did you hear the one about the “safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent”? There is, of course, nothing safe or secure about producing, maintaining, or threatening to use nuclear weapons. Nor is there evidence that they have ever deterred anything that the United States wanted deterred.

Trump’s State of the Union gave this justification for building more weapons:

“Around the world, we face rogue regimes, terrorist groups and rivals like China and Russia that challenge our interests, read more

A high school teacher is no longer teaching, and is receiving threats, because of how he spoke about the U.S. military. To read the news reports, you’d think that all he said was that people who join the military are stupid.

He did say that. He was wrong to say that. It isn’t true, and it’s bigotted.

He also said many things that are demonstrably true, valuable, useful, and generally censored:

1) The U.S. military doesn’t win any of its wars. (In the course of saying this he made bigotted read more

Ken Hughes is an expert on secret presidential recordings, especially those of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Hughes has spent two decades mining the Secret White House Tapes and unearthing their secrets. As a journalist writing in the pages of the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post, and Boston Globe Magazine, and, since 2000, as a researcher with the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, read more

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s new book, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment, could be criticized for how little it seems to focus on the Second Amendment, and how much on topics familiar from the author’s past writing. But the topics are radically unfamiliar to most U.S. Americans and extremely relevant to understanding what the Second Amendment was and is.

I’ve argued in the past that the Second Amendment read more

The United States is a global leader in putting people in cages (#1 in prisoners, second in prisoners per capita to the Seychelles, where the United Nations locks up “pirates,” and whose whole population is a fraction of the U.S. prison population). The U.S. is also in the top 10 for state executions.

How’s this method of crime prevention working for us?

Well, the United States is #11 in gun deaths, read more

I was afraid that The Post would give us a Hollywood film version of the publication of the Pentagon Papers and manage never to say what was in the Pentagon Papers. I was afraid it would be turned into a pro-war movie. I was afraid we’d be told that the Washington Post was a courageous institution while Daniel Ellsberg was a dirty traitor. I am pleased to have had no reason for such concerns.

The Post is not exactly an anti-war movie, Ellsberg is not a main character, the peace movement read more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD5uMFbxDkQ&feature=youtu.be

Colman McCarthy is a former Washington Post columnist, from 1969 to 1997, and the director of The Center for Teaching Peace in Washington DC. He teaches courses on nonviolence at Georgetown Law, Georgetown undergraduate, American University, the University of Maryland and Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School. He’s a pacifist, a vegetarian, and the author of several books including I’d Rather Teach Peace.

Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
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