Author: David Swanson

Trump changed many things.

U.S. media outlets will now point out when a president is lying. If that policy holds consistently, we’ll never have a war again.

Congress will now vote to end a war (Yemen) and a president will veto it. If Congress can repeat that on a monthly basis, and the president not veto, we’ll end a lot of wars.

Top military officials will openly laugh about tricking a president into believing he’d withdrawn more troops than he really had from a war (Syria). If presidents read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, November 20, 2020

Thus far, people in 187 countries have signed this pledge:

“I understand that wars and militarism make us less safe rather than protect us, that they kill, injure and traumatize adults, children and infants, severely damage the natural environment, erode civil liberties, and drain our economies, siphoning resources from life-affirming activities. I commit to engage in and support nonviolent efforts to end all war and preparations for war and to create a sustainable and just peace.”

You can sign it too, at https://worldbeyondwar.org/sign

People who sign it have the option of checking various boxes to indicate how they’d most like to get involved in working for peace.

The result is not, as critics will be quick to point out, immediate peace. The result is a huge number of people, organized by location and interest area, working to end war. The result is chapters of read more

Pictured: Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the United Arab Emirates Armed Forces (MbZ) and some guy.

The New York Times seems to publish a book-length love letter to MbZ about every six read more

This week on Talk Nation Radio: the decision to rule the world. Stephen Wertheim is a historian of U.S. foreign policy. He is Deputy Director of Research and Policy at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is also a research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. His terrific new book is called Tomorrow the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy.

Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
Music read more

I’m not misusing the word “war” to mean something like the war on Christmas or drugs or some TV pundit whom somebody else insulted. I mean war. There is a new U.S. war in Western Sahara, being waged by Morocco with the support of the U.S. military. The U.S. military, unbeknownst to most people in the United States — it’s perfectly knowable but few give a damn — arms and trains and funds the militaries of the world, inlcuding almost read more

Chris Lombardi’s fantastic new book is called I Ain’t Marching Anymore: Dissenters, Deserters, and Objectors to America’s Wars. It’s a wonderful history of U.S. wars, and both support for and opposition to them, with a major focus on troops and veterans, from 1754 to the present.

The greatest strength of the book is its depth of detail, the rarely heard individual accounts of war supporters, resisters, whistleblowers, protesters, and all of the complexities that catch so many people in read more

This week on Talk Nation Radio: the poisoning of the Pacific and who the worst culprit is. Joining us from Tokyo is Jon Mitchell, a British journalist and author based in Japan. In 2015, he was awarded the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan’s Freedom of the Press Lifetime Achievement Award for his investigations into human rights issues on Okinawa. His latest book, Poisoning the Pacific, reveals the environmental damage caused by decades of U.S. military operations.

Total run time: 29:00
read more

In June 2019, Joe Biden promised wealthy so-called donors that nothing would fundamentally change. At this moment hundreds of millions of people — from those shooting off fireworks to those ranting as though they will soon shoot up public places in their MAGA hats — seem convinced that everything will fundamentally change. Biden was wrong. Everybody else is right. Either everything will change for the better or one or both of the twin dangers of environmental and nuclear apocalypse will change read more

This week on Talk Nation Radio, we’re discussing peace journalism. Our guest Steven Youngblood is the founding director of the Center for Global Peace Journalism at Park University in Parkville, Missouri, where he is a communications and peace studies professor. He has organized and taught peace journalism seminars and workshops in 27 countries and territories. Youngblood is a two-time Fulbright Scholar (Moldova 2001, Azerbaijan 2007). He also served as a U.S. State Department Senior Subject read more