Author: David Swanson

Sarah Williams Goldhagen is a contributing editor at Architectural Record and served as the Architecture Critic of The New Republic from 2005-2013. Her articles have also appeared in The New York Times, The American Prospect, and Art In America, and she has contributed scholarly essays to many publications, including Assemblage, The Harvard Design Magazine, and The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Goldhagen’s new book read more

Remarks at Saint Mary’s Hall, San Antonio, Texas, March 1, 2018
Accompanying Powerpoint.

Thank you for inviting me. What I contended in the article that got me invited here was that one of the biggest taboos in the United States, one of the behaviors treated most as a heresy, as a violation of national religion, is disrespect for the U.S. flag, the national anthem, and the patriotic militarist exceptionalism that accompany those icons.

We’ve just seen a school shooting in Florida by a young read more

The power of mass demonstrations to mobilize activism and move those in positions of power is minimized, first and foremost, by those opposed to popular power. Do not listen to them. Make them listen to us!

Can you give two days to stop the slaughter of innocents and the shameless profiteering from their blood? If you can give more, so much the better. But by giving two days, you will guarantee that others will give more. You will be part of building the necessary momentum, the key ingredient in read more

I asked my Facebook page which high school teacher they’d least like to have had a gun in their desk. Go read their answers.

I’d elect those people over any recent president or any current member of Congress.

These bursts of public discussion with dashes of sanity thrown in that follow each particularly media-covered mass-shooting are always encouraging. And it’s especially encouraging to have young people being allowed to have a say.

But let’s be clear about the limitations of what’s happened read more

World Beyond War has been raising funds for and renting billboards in opposition to war. We’ve run into censorship from numerous billboard companies but persevered, and more billboards are on their way.

First we put this message up here in Charlottesville, Va., and then in Baltimore, Md. (see explanation of the 3% calculation here):

Now we’re putting these two images up on billboards in Syracuse, NY, where drone pilots participate in U.S. wars from Hancock Air Base:

For 8 hours a day for 16 read more

It’s sort of silly that it matters. The United States bombed North Korea flat with ordinary, non-bioweapons bombs. It ran out of standing structures to bomb. People lived in caves, if they lived. Millions died, most of them from regular old non-scandalous but mass-murderous bombs (including, of course, Napalm which melts people but doesn’t give them exotic diseases). North Koreans to this day live in such terror of a repetition of history that their behavior is sometimes inexplicable and bewildering read more

If you had just asked me if peace needed a “business plan,” I’d have replied, “Sure! Just like it needs a toupeed golfing fascist reality-TV creep in the White House! That’ll just about fix everything! War is over! Thanks!”

But after reading Scilla Elworthy’s book The Business Plan for Peace, I say, “Yeah, OK, that sounds pretty good, actually. Here, let me tweak it some!” In fact, I’ve added this book, despite some quibbles, to my bookshelf of war abolition advocacy. read more

Michael Knox is an Emeritus Distinguished University Professor at the University of South Florida, Chair of the US Peace Memorial Foundation, and Editor of the US Peace Registry. His antiwar activities began in 1965 in opposition to the war in Vietnam. As a delegate to the 20th National Student Congress, he introduced a successful resolution to hold an antiwar demonstration in August of 1967 in front of the White House. In 1970, Knox co-founded a draft counseling center and in 1971 he blew the read more

Dear Taliban,

Thank you for your letter to the American people.

As one person in the United States I cannot offer you a representative reply on behalf of all of us. Nor can I use polls to tell you what my fellow Americans think, because, as far as I know, polling companies haven’t asked the U.S. public about the war on your country in years. Possible explanations for this include:

1. We have several other wars going on, and the blowback includes a lot of self-inflicted mass-shootings.
2. Too many wars at a time doesn’t make the most desired packaging for advertisements.
3. Our previous president announced that your war was over.
4. Many here actually think it is over, which makes them useless for polling on the topic of ending it.

I do want to let you know that some of us saw your letter, that some news outlets reported on it, that people have read more

35% of U.S. mass shooters are military veterans, as compared with 14.76% in the general population for the same gender and age. See documentation of this below.

First a couple of Tweets:

Now an image from: https://jrotceagles.com

Whether the latest school shooter’s participation in a JROTC program that took NRA money and trained in marksmanship contributed to the shooting or not, it is symptomatic of a culture in which many schools are forgetting that read more