War Is A Crime

In many ways, war is ever more and less visible. Of course in U.S. academia, the Pinkerist pretense that we are living through a period of great peace is accomplished by all sorts of statistical manipulation, but first and foremost by declaring civil wars to not be wars, and declaring U.S. wars to be civil wars — a tricky thing to do when the minute the U.S. leaves, Afghans, for example, decline to keep killing each other (damn them!).

But in the United States, war and militarism — or some read more

Talk World Radio is recorded as audio and video on Riverside.fm. Here is this week’s video and all the videos on Youtube.

This week on Talk World Radio, one of the ways in which the killing machine of war just keeps on killing. Our guest Kiji Noh and co-author Claudia Chaufan have published an article in Social Medicine called “The Neglected Role of the Military as a Disease Vector: Implications for Covid-19 and for Global Health Policy.” Claudia Chaufan is Associate read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

Think of it as an irony of the first order that Joe Biden’s foreign-policy team came into office promoting new cold-war policies against the rising power on this planet, China. After all, even if it is that, it’s rising in a world that only recently read more

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The U.S. and other governments are not making the priority of rescuing endangered people from Afghanistan that a consumer of Hollywood movies might imagine being made were the endangered people Jews in Nazi Germany.

Sadly, the reality in the 1940s was no different from today. Major investments went into wars, and Western officials wanted no large numbers of refugees. They opposed them for openly racist reasons, exactly as if they worked for Fox News in 2021 only worse.

If only Afghans today were read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

In January 2004, Chalmers Johnson wrote “America’s Empire of Bases” for TomDispatch, breaking what was, in effect, a silence around those strange edifices, some the size of small towns, scattered around the planet. He began it this way:

“As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize — or do not want to recognize — that the United States dominates read more

It’s far from the longest U.S. war. There was no peace before or after it. There is no after it until they end it — and bombing has always been most of what it is. It has had nothing to do with opposing terrorism. It has been a one-sided slaughter, a mass killing over two decades by a single invading army and air force dragging along token mascots from dozens of vassal states. After 20 years Afghanistan was one of the worst places to be on Earth, and the Earth as a whole was a worse place read more

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.

My parents certainly had college dreams for me. After all, they wanted me to move up in life, big time. Where exactly “up” was seemed less than clear to me then. But after a great fight — I wanted to go to Cornell (girls!) — I lost and, in 1962, ended up just where they wanted me to be, at Yale. Even in those days, it cost a significant pile of dough to go there, a read more

Talk World Radio is recorded as audio and video on Riverside.fm. Here is this week’s video and all the videos on Youtube.

This week on Talk World Radio: Living through the dying of the Earth. Our guest Daniel Sherrell is the author of a powerful new book called Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. Daniel Sherrell is an organizer born in 1990. He helped lead the campaign to pass landmark climate justice legislation in New York and is the recipient of a Fulbright grant in read more