A blog about a criminal enterprise
Dear European governments, look at the map of U.S. military bases above and tell us again about your self-respect, about how you’re going to fight Trump in Greenland (where he also has a military base), about all the military violence metaphors in your newspapers’ columns about trade policies, but understand that we know about the thing you’ve never mentioned: the empire of bases. You don’t even issue self-respecting threats to evict foreign bases like the president of Honduras has done.
Pieces
Associated Press reports: “‘Shockingly, our “brilliant” NATO Ally, the United Kingdom, is currently planning to give away the Island of Diego Garcia, the site of a vital U.S. Military Base, to Mauritius, and to do so FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER,’ [Trump] said in a post on his social media platform Truth Social. ‘There is no doubt that China and Russia have noticed this act of total weakness.’
“‘The UK giving away extremely important land is an act of GREAT STUPIDITY, and is another
This was a headline in the New York Times on Tuesday: “With Threats to Greenland, Trump Sets America on the Road to Conquest: After a century of defending other countries against foreign aggression, the United States is now positioned as an imperial power trying to seize another nation’s land.” Here is a sentence from the article that followed: “Never in the past century has America gone forth to seize other countries’ land and subjugate its citizens against their will.”
Setting aside
Of course it would take millions of images to convey the full story of the harm done by military bases, foreign and domestic, but a key point is, I think, conveyed by the map above. The countries colored blue or purple have U.S. military bases in them. The countries colored red or purple have been threatened with war by the United States or actually attacked or invaded by the U.S. military within the past year.
The blue countries tell a story of global empire, of a nation seeking to dominate the
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A television writer named Annie Jacobsen recently tweeted that she’d been “prophetic” when she wrote a real CIA scheme of attacking Venezuela into a fictional program, after which the U.S. government actually attacked Venezuela. Another word would be “propagandistic” — not in the sense of the direct, immediate lie, but in the sense of the long con. While there have been societies that could not imagine murder, and
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, January 6, 2026
We live in a world where feeding grain that could feed 10,000 people to captive animals in order to butcher those animals and eat their dead flesh, thereby feeding 1,000 people and devastating our ecosystems, is unquestionable, where grotesque levels of consumption based on climate and environmental destruction and human exploitation are just part of living, where locking huge numbers of people in cages is deemed a positive contribution to society,
I discussed Venezuela with Santita Jackson:
What was defined at Nuremberg as the supreme international crime (one country attacking another one) is depicted by Trump and even the supposedly anti-Trump corporate media as some sort of law-enforcement. Bombing is liberating. Kidnapping is capturing. Murdering people on boats is “impeding the flow of drugs.”
Imagine if, say, Saudi Arabia or Norway or India were to impose deadly sanctions on the United States, attempt numerous comical coups, murder boaters off the U.S. coast, impose a no-fly-zone
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, December 26, 2025
Every single person in the United States, from those who’ve been most harmed to those who’ve been most privileged, would be better off if we had a normal government that put even a moderate effort into universally improving everyone’s lives. If we had a government that took trillions of dollars away from the war machine and the untaxed oligarchs and provided as a matter of basic rights for all
then nobody would ever be denied an education