Universality or Fighting Over Scraps

Why should rich people get pandemic survival checks? Why shouldn’t descendants of enslaved people get reparations payments? Why should someone who doesn’t go to college pay taxes to make college free? Why should smokers get health coverage? Why should someone get out of their student debt when I didn’t?

I don’t claim to have a universal answer to all such questions. There are some questions that I would certainly answer differently if they stood alone. If the rotten U.S. political system read more

A Global Demand to 35 Governments: Get Your Troops Out of Afghanistan / A Thank You to 6 That Already Have

By World BEYOND War, February 21, 2021

The governments of Albania, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mongolia, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, UK, and US all still have troops in Afghanistan and need to remove them.

These troops range in number from Slovenia’s read more

10 Key Points on Ending Wars

There’s a webinar on these topics tonight. Join in.

1. Victories that are only partial are not fictional.

When a ruler, like Biden, finally announces the end of a war, like the war on Yemen, it is as important to recognize what it does mean as what it doesn’t. It doesn’t mean the U.S. military and U.S.-made weapons will vanish from the region or be replaced by actual aid or reparations (as opposed to “lethal aid” — a product that’s usually high on people’s read more

Talk Nation Radio: Brian Ferguson: War Is Not Built into Homo Sapiens

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

Yemen Yes! Now Afghanistan!

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

U.S. Should Pay Iran Reparations

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

Talk Nation Radio: Rachel Small: Blocking Trucks to Move Canada from War to Peace

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