Author: David Swanson

Brian Ferguson is a Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University. He is an expert in the anthropology of war, including ethnic conflicts, tribal warfare, the impact of expanding states on indigenous war patterns and the collapse of states. His 1995 book, Yanomami Warfare: A Political History, challenges popular assumptions about the Yanomami tribe in the Amazon, and has sparked debate within his field. Ferguson is director of the MA program in Peace and Conflict Studies as Rutgers read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, February 4, 2021

If the U.S. government follows through on what President Joe Biden said today about Yemen, that war’s days are numbered.

If the rest of us learn the appropriate lessons, the war on Afghanistan should start picking out a tomb stone.

Biden said the U.S. military was ceasing to participate in the war on Yemen, and that the United States would be ending any “relevant arms sales.”

Making sure those statements are held true in the ordinary sense read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, Febuary 4, 2021

Why would I say such an outrageous, treasonous, delusional, OBVIOUSLY-funded-by-Putin thing? Am I hoping to enrage war-crazed sadists who’ve seen too much television “news”?

Not at all. I want them to still be around when I say that it would actually be preferable for the United States to pay reparations to the entire rest of the earth.

Well, then, why would I say such a thing, and exactly what type of mental disorder would allow read more

This week on Talk Nation Radio, putting your body in front of weapons shipments and organizing for peace. Our guest is Rachel Small, Canada Organizer for World BEYOND War, an organization of which I’m the executive director. Rachel Small is a community organizer based in Toronto, Canada, on Dish with One Spoon and Treaty 13 Indigenous territory. She has organized within local and international social/environmental justice movements for over a decade, with a special focus on working in solidarity read more

It took a variety of approaches to market the 2003 war on Iraq. For some it was to be a defense against an imagined threat. For others it was false revenge. But for Samantha Power it was philanthropy. She said at the time, “An American intervention likely will improve the lives of the Iraqis. Their lives could not get worse, I think it’s quite safe to say.” Needless to say, it wasn’t safe to say that.

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By David Swanson, Executive Director of World BEYOND War, and Heinrich Buecker, der World BEYOND War Landeskoordinator in Berlin

Billboards are going up in Berlin that proclaim “Nuclear Weapons Are Now Illegal. Get Them Out of Germany!”

What can this possibly mean? Nuclear weapons may be unpleasant, but what exactly is newly illegal about them, and what do they have to do with Germany?

Since 1970, under the Nuclear Nonproliferation read more

By GCTV with Bill Miller, January 25, 2021

Steve Ellner is a retired professor of the Universidad de Oriente in Venezuela and currently an Associate Managing Editor of Latin American Perspectives. He is the author and editor of over a dozen books on Latin American politics and history, his most recent being his edited Latin American Extractivism: Dependency, Resource Nationalism, and Resistance in Broad Perspective (2021). He has published on the op-ed page of the New York Times and Los Angeles Times and in the Nation and is a regular read more

Remarks to Phoenix Humanist Society, January 24, 2021

Powerpoint is here.

Whether humanism means atheism, or a commitment to questioning all accepted beliefs, or an identification with all of humanity rather than a small sub-group, or a celebration and promotion of all the richness of human culture, I’m in favor of it, and it has a great deal to do with the project I work read more