War Is A Crime

Afghan villagers stand over bodies of civilians during a protest in the city of Ghazni, west of Kabul, Afghanistan, Sept. 29, 2019. An airstrike by U.S.-led forces in eastern Afghanistan killed at least five civilians. (AP Photo/Rahmatullah Nikzad)

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, August 15, 2021

So, people get hurt when you stop waging wars, and peace is dangerous, and . . . and . . . well, women’s rights!

What do the stupid peace lovers say now?

Well, here’s what this one says:

On September read more

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

My Extreme World
And (Un)Welcome to It

By Tom Engelhardt

Admittedly, I hadn’t been there for 46 years, but old friends of mine still live (or at least lived) in the town of Greenville, California, and now… well, it’s more or less gone, though they survived.  The Dixie Fire, one of those devastating West Coast blazes, had already “blackened” 504 square miles of Northern California in read more

To take recent news reports seriously, it seems just possible that sometime this year the U.S. Congress might pass a pair of pieces of legislation that combine to do more good than harm.

Not only that, but this might happen because the better members of the House of (Mis-?)Representatives take a stand by refusing to vote for something unless they get what they say they want. Should that actually happen, the precedent might be at least as valuable as the particular legislation.

This idea depends 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: Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army officer, director of the new Eisenhower Media Network (EMN), senior fellow at the Center for International Policy (CIP), and contributing editor at Antiwar.com. read more

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

Only recently, almost four decades after his death, I discovered that my father still liked to have some of his friends call him “major.” That was his ultimate rank in what was then known as the U.S. Army Air Corps, not the U.S. Air Force, for which he volunteered within days of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. (He would, symbolically enough, die on Pearl Harbor Day read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, August 9, 2021

A new film by Molly Castelloe called “Vamik’s Room,” introduces the viewer to Vamik Volkan and psychoanalysis of international conflict.

The idea is not as mystical as it may sound. There’s no notion that a conflict has a psychology, but rather that those engaged in it do, and that anyone engaged in diplomacy or peace making should be aware of what are often unstated and even unacknowledged motivations in the parties engaged read more

By Sky News Australia, August 9, 2021

I read Daniel Sherrell’s Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World sitting on the edge of what was left of the Shenandoah River after a summer of very little rain. Six inches is enough to canoe in but it’s less than that in many places. Fish are few and far between, yet humans are out there in canoes, dragging them over rocks, casting their lines, luring the last fish to their doom. I know the fish murders are not the problem, not read more

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

Here’s my question of the week: When it comes to America’s twenty-first-century wars, does the word “end” have any meaning at all? Almost 20 years after George W. Bush and crew invaded Afghanistan, the war there is officially “ending” (as the Taliban takes read more