War Is A Crime

I was driving to town.

I rounded a curve and jammed the brakes.

There was a raccoon walking away

Right in the middle of the road.

I slowed down to the speed of her gait.

I had a good chance to look at her.

I determined she was a she

With a dark outer coat.

About twenty feet and she turned

To cross to the left side of the road.

And as she turned, she stopped for a second

And looked right at me

Before scurrying into the woods.

The way she looked haunted me

All the way into town.

It was a look of judgment.

It read more

By John Grant

As gullible North Americans were warned of disease-ridden Mexican and Central American rapists, killers and ISIS terrorists invading America from the infernal regions of the western hemisphere, on November 17 and 18, Veterans For Peace and other activist organizations sponsored a two-day border-straddling demonstration in Ambos Nogales, the term that covers both Nogales, Arizona (population 20,000) and Nogales, Sonora, Mexico (population 220,000).

Speaking read more

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

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

I remember Chalmers Johnson once describing to me his surprise on discovering that, after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union imploded, the whole global military structure that Washington had set up — which he later came to call “America’s read more

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

Whatever you may think of President Trump, it’s important to be fair to him. You might have noticed that, on his recent trip to France (“five days of fury”), read more

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

In July 2017, by a vote of 122 to 1, with one abstention, nations from around the world attending a United Nations-sponsored conference in New York City voted to approve a treaty to ban nuclear weapons.  Although this Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons received little coverage in the mass media, its passage was a momentous event, capping decades of international nuclear arms control and disarmament agreements that, together, read more

November 15, 2018

On November 14, the Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives blocked a resolution that its supporters say would end U.S. participation in the war and famine in Yemen. It is unclear, however, what effect this resolution would have on the ground even if it were passed into law. It imposes no limits on arms sales to Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates. It does not propose any oversight or limitation of activities CIA or of private contractors from the U.S. in read more

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

The Donald and the Fake News Media
An Affair to Remember
By Tom Engelhardt

Face it: it’s been an abusive time, to use a word he likes to wield. In his telling, of course, it’s he or his people who are always the abused ones and they — the “fake news media” — are the abusers. But let’s be honest. You’ve been abused, too, and so have I. All of read more