Author: David Swanson

A case can be made that just about any public statue in Charlottesville, Virginia, is the worst one. The much lamented statues of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson are not alone in their offensiveness. Determining a winner in a contest for the worst monument in Charlottesville is not nearly as important, I think, as removing any of the lot of them from our central public spaces and installing them in a museum. I’m grateful to everyone who has advocated for the removal of any of these monstrosities read more

Ross Caputi is a PhD student in History at UMass and a coauthor of the critically important new book The Sacking of Fallujah: A People’s History. Ross Caputi’s experience as a U.S. Marine in Fallujah in 2004 compelled him to speak out against the war and to organize solidarity efforts with Fallujah. He is also a co-founder of the Islah Reparations Project.

Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music by Duke Ellington.

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Pacifica read more

The U.S. Army tweeted a harmless rah-rah tweet and got hit with a burst of reality never encountered on corporate-controlled media. Score one for the internet.

The Army asked: “How has serving impacted you?”

Here’s a tiny sample of the responses:

read more

Albion Winegar Tourgée may be best known now, though not in his lifetime, as the lead attorney in the Plessy v. Ferguson case, which was a set-up, a staged incident, with the cooperation even of the railroad company, to get a man arrested for sitting in the wrong car, take the matter to court, and end segregation on trains — except that it backfired horribly and legalized apartheid for over 50 years.

Tourgée’s work was not one incident alone, and his positive influence hasn’t ceased. His read more

Danny Haiphong is an activist, journalist, and scholar. For the last five years, Haiphong has been a weekly contributor to Black Agenda Report. His articles have also appeared in The American Herald Tribune, MintPressNews, and CounterPunch. His work was featured in former Congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney’s latest book How the U.S. Creates Sh*thole Countries (2018). Haiphong recently co-authored the book American read more

A coalition organized as DivestCville.org is asking the City of Charlottesville, Va., to divest all public money from weapons companies, major war profiteers, and fossil fuel companies.

At its Monday, May 6, 2019, meeting, and through subsequent discussions, Charlottesville City Council decided that it would vote on a resolution on June 3rd to divest its general operating fund from weapons and fossil fuels. It also sketched out a plan to establish new policies for its retirement fund over the coming read more

If Iran had spent the last few decades lying about and threatening the United States, and had attacked and built military bases in Canada and Mexico, and had imposed sanctions on the United States that were creating great suffering, and then a lying scheming war-crazed Iranian official announced that he believed the United States had put some missiles on some fishing boats in the Chesapeake Bay, would you believe that . . .

a) The United States was a dangerous rogue state threatening Iran with read more

A new book called Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons by Kris Newby adds significantly to our understanding of Lyme disease, while oddly seeming to avoid mention of what we already knew.

Newby claims (in 2019) that if a scientist named Willy Burgdorfer had not made a confession in 2013, the secret that Lyme disease came from a biological weapons program would have died with him. Yet, in 2004 Michael Christopher Carroll published a book called read more

Marc Eliot Stein is a member of World BEYOND War’s Board of Directors. I’m the Executive Director of World BEYOND War. Marc has been a web developer since the 1990s, and over the years has built sites for Bob Dylan, Pearl Jam, the international literary site Words Without Borders, the Allen Ginsberg estate, Time Warner, A&E Network/History Channel, the U.S. Department of Labor, the Center for Disease Control, and Meredith Digital Publishing. He is also a writer, and for years he maintained read more

They say the last sip of a drink is mostly backwash. The last understanding of a war should be that every speck of it is backwash in the sense used by Ellen N. La Motte in her 1916 book The Backwash of War. La Motte was a U.S. nurse who worked at a French hospital in Belgium not far from a semi-permanent front line at which men slaughtered each other for no discernable purpose for months on end, and the mangled bodies from one side, plus the occasional civilian, were brought into the read more