Author: David Swanson

We’re hearing a lot about U.S. veterans being deported, just as we hear about healthcare and retirement and homelessness and countless other topics as impacting veterans in particular. The implication, and often the explicit assertion, is that we should especially care about injustice when it hurts veterans, because they’ve especially earned the right to be treated decently, by participating in the greatest mass-murdering crime sprees of recent decades — the wars that most of us (and may read more

Excepted from Curing Exceptionalism: What’s wrong with how we think about the United States? What can we do about it? (April, 2018).

Try this experiment: Imagine that space aliens really come to earth and really have, as I think is very unlikely, developed the ability to travel to earth while simultaneously remaining so primitive as to violently attack the places they visit. In contrast to the space aliens, could you identify as an earthling to such an extent as to diminish your other senses of identity? “Earthlings — F— Yeah!” “We’re Number 1!” “Greatest Earthlings on Earth!” And can you hold that thought, read more

The U.S. Senate voted down, 55 to 44, a bill co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders that would have ended U.S. involvement in the Saudi Arabia-led war against Yemen. However, veteran anti-war activist David Swanson saw the action as a sign of progress, given that the Senate has never conducted such a vote based on the War Powers Act. Swanson, publisher of the influential web site WarIsACrime.org and director of World Beyond War, has found that Americans “around the country think that read more

It’s hard not to focus on the fact that Trump has picked the 100th anniversary of the first Armistice Day celebration for his weaponry parade (more on that below). But there was another parade a month and a half before the armistice that cries out for comparison because of its remarkable stupidity. I’m thinking of the Liberty Loan Parade in Philadelphia:

This was a parade to squeeze more money out of people to pay for war, to celebrate patrioti-nationali-militarism, and to reject fake news. read more

Tuesday’s debate and vote in the U.S. Senate on whether to end (technically whether or not to vote on whether to end) U.S. participation in the war on Yemen can certainly be presented as a step forward. While 55 U.S. Senators voted to keep the war rolling along, 44 voted read more

On March 1, 2018, I was very privileged to take part in a discussion of issues of racism, freedom of speech, patriotism, and war at Saint Mary’s Hall, a private high school in San Antonio “Military City USA” Texas.

I was one of five speakers who had been invited to speak about issues we had raised related to take-a-knee protests. The videos are all here, including video of all the read more

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