War Is A Crime

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

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

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

Autocrats, Incorporated
Thoughts on Election Day 2018
By Tom Engelhardt

Who could forget that moment?  The blue [red] wave — long promised but also doubted — had, however modestly [however massively], hit Washington and [the Democrats had just retaken Congress] [the Republicans had held Congress] [the Democrats had taken the House].  The media, Fox News and read more

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

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

He was the candidate who, while talking to a foreign policy expert, reportedly wondered “why we can’t use nuclear weapons.” He was the man who would never rule anything out or take any “cards,” including nuclear ones, off the proverbial table. read more

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

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War

Some are inclined to recognize that Trumpies are dwelling in an alternative universe in which neither climate collapse nor nuclear apocalypse is a concern but terrifying wild hoards of Muslim Hondurans are skipping and dancing into the Fatherland armed with gang symbols, deadly rocks, and socialistic tendencies.

Others are alert to the fact that the so-called “mainstream” — the viewpoint of pro-status-quo, anti-improvement institutions — is also fabricated read more

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

Back in the mid-1990s, I wrote the following in my book The End of Victory Culture, with memories of the American world of my 1940s and 1950s childhood in mind:

“The worlds of the warrior and of abundance were, to my gaze, no more antithetical than they were to the corporate executives, university research scientists, and military officers who were using a rising military budget read more