Talk Nation Radio: Barry Sweeney on Ireland, Peace, and Neutrality

Barry Sweeney is a member of the coordinating committee of World BEYOND War, of which I’m the director. Barry is based in Ireland, but is often in Vietnam and Italy. His background is in education and environmentalism. He taught as a primary school teacher in Ireland for a number of years, before moving to Italy in 2009 to teach English. His love for environmental understanding led him to many progressive projects in Ireland, Italy, and Sweden. He became more and more involved in environmentalism read more

Greatest Crime on Earth

By David Swanson, Director, World BEYOND War
Remarks at No Bases Conference in Dublin, Ireland, November 18, 2018

I’m willing to bet that if I asked everyone in Ireland whether the Irish government should take orders from Donald Trump, most people would say no. But last year the Irish Ambassador to the United States came to the University of Virginia, and I asked her how allowing U.S. troops to use Shannon Airport to get to their wars could possibly be in compliance with Irish neutrality. read more

No to NATO, No to Bases, No to Wars in Distant Places

As I head over to Ireland for a conference on closing U.S. and NATO military bases around the world — and at which some of us will make plans for protesting NATO in Washington on April 4, 2019 — the presidents of France and Germany are talking up the need for a European military that can fight the United States, Russia, and/or China. There are three responses to this development, two of which will get us all killed more quickly than the other.

One is this. Down with the stupid, ungrateful, read more

Talk Nation Radio: Stephen McKeown on Armistice Day

Steve McKeown was a radio operator in the 4th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army in Vietnam in 1966 to 1967. He was a founding member of Veterans For Peace Chapter 27 in Minneapolis / St. Paul, and is the coordinator for their newsletter. Steve has spoken to hundreds of classes in elementary and high schools, colleges, churches, and community groups on matters of war and peace. And he has been part of organizing all kinds of peace activism including related to Armistice Day, the 100th anniversary read more

Dan Crenshaw Sounds Like a Propagandist for Mass Murder

What is more sick about U.S. society?

1) It’s totally 100% acceptable to make cruel stupid jokes about people’s appearance.

2) There’s an exception. You shouldn’t do it if the thing you’re making fun of relates to their participation in mass murder.

3) Violation of that exception is such a sin that you must publicly repent and grovel.

4) This is true even if the sin was committed on a steadfastly unfunny and unintelligent television program that nobody watches.

5) The repentance is incomplete read more

A Tale of Two Marines

These two young men may have an infinite number of things in common, but the actions they took this week do not.

One used a pro-war ceremony at a professional basketball game to reject the celebration of militarism, and to protest war-profiteering advertising in sports.

One became the latest “mass shooter” — which I put in quotation marks only because he had already been a mass shooter, but he had been an acceptable kind of mass shooter.

On Tuesday evening, former U.S. Marine Josuee Hernandez read more

Another Amazing Coincidence: Man Trained to Mass Murder Commits Mass Murder

The suspect in today’s mass shooting (well, the biggest one I’ve heard of thus far this morning; the day is young) is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps.

Another mass shooter in Florida last week just happens to have been in the military.

The man who killed with a van in Toronto this year had been briefly in the Canadian military and promoted his crime on Facebook beforehand as a military operation.

The mass-killing in a Florida High School earlier this year was also promoted by the killer as read more

What Else You Can Do

You’ve been radically misled to believe that the only thing, or the most important thing, or one of the super important things you can do is vote. Voting in a functioning democracy would be a fairly important thing to do, but wouldn’t somehow eliminate the thousands of important things that would also need doing. Voting in a broken democracy is a mildly important thing to do, for the reasons you know by heart, but also for this reason: Seeing so many people so eager to do something alerts read more

Talk Nation Radio: Greta Zarro on Organizing a World BEYOND War

Greta Zarro is Organizing Director at World BEYOND War. She has a background in issue-based community organizing. Her experience includes volunteer recruitment and engagement, event organizing, coalition building, legislative and media outreach, and public speaking. Greta graduated as valedictorian from St. Michael’s College with a bachelor’s degree in Sociology/Anthropology. She then pursued a master’s in Food Studies at New York University before accepting a full-time read more

Charlottesville: The Movie

This past Saturday in Charlottesville, Va., I watched the premier of the film Charlottesville, produced by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.

The film begins by lamenting the fact that the word “Charlottesville” now means to many people not our city but an August 2017 fascist rally in our city. Yet the film is entirely about that rally and is titled “Charlottesville” which will presumably contribute to the problem it laments.

I hope it does, because I read more