Author: David Swanson

The Richmond (Va.) Times Dispatch recently published an editorial, republished by other papers with the headline: “Remembering why we still fight in Afghanistan.” It’s a rather striking piece of writing, because it does not even attempt to offer a single reason why anyone would “fight” in Afghanistan. The read more

When I discovered that militarism is one of the top destroyers of the natural environment, I piled that onto my case against war. I did the same when I found out war wasted more money than anything else, was a major promoter of bigotry and racism, was the primary justification for government secrecy and the erosion of civil liberties, was the top barrier to the rule of law and global cooperation, militarized local police, etc., etc. When I came to see how counterproductive war was, increasing read more

It’s popular to refer to the political line of a major corporate party in the United States as something like “the resistance” when the other of the two parties is on the throne of what both parties have, over many decades, actively converted into an unconstitutional position of something wildly beyond old-fashioned royal powers. Around 2004 the Democratic Party line was to pretend to oppose wars. Around 2018 it wasn’t. So the “resistance” of that party’s followers included war opposition read more

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