War Is A Crime

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Recently, I visited New York’s Guggenheim Museum for a show of conceptual art by Danh Vo, whose family fled Vietnam as the American war there ended in 1975. He was four years old when he became a refugee and, through a series of flukes, found himself in Denmark, which has been his home ever since. Much of his read more

By Dave Lindorff

            Media news reports and commentary as well as political statements coming out of Washington on the surprising blossoming of peace talks between North and South Korea tend to focus on the question of whether North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is really “serious” about eliminating his recently developed nuclear weapons arsenal, or whether he will just try to keep what he has while decrying US military threats to his regime.

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Suzy Hansen’s book Notes on a Foreign Country is the diary of someone going through the process of gaining the world by losing their religion, the religion of U.S. Exceptionalism. She begins as an ordinary U.S. resident, not believing anything that you would find unusual, but assuming all the certifiably insane things you assume are not even questionable:

• The United States is the best place to live.
• Its government generally means well.
• It seeks to help the rest of the world whose problems it has had little to do with creating.
• History doesn’t matter much.
• The other 96% are all a bit backward.

Hansen’s book, focused on her experience living in Istanbul, is a powerful case for living abroad and for reshaping U.S. education and culture read more

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

In her new book, Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, Nomi Prins remembers how the 9/11 attacks affected her. She was, at the time, working for Goldman Sachs (which has been sending read more

It may almost seem too obvious to mention, but I don’t think that’s why we so seldom mention it. I don’t mean being male, or being mentally disturbed, or having been cruel to women, or living in places like the United States where it’s easy to acquire weapons of war. These and many other factors are very significant and very often discussed, as they should be, when we consider mass killings.

There’s something else that ties a lot of mass killers together, and it’s also obvious, but read more

Ronan Farrow’s book War on Peace: The End of Diplomacy and the Decline of American Influence recounts episodes from the Obama-Trump militarization of U.S. foreign policy. While the book begins with and has been marketed with the story of Trump firing lots of key diplomats and leaving positions unfilled, much of its content is from the pre-Trump, Obama-era and even Bush-era erosion of diplomacy as something distinct from war and weapons sales.

The distinction between employing diplomats whose read more

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

Recently, President Trump declared war on undocumented immigrants heading for the southern border — you know, all those marauding “rapists” and their pals — and, as seems appropriate in any “war,” he promptly ordered the mobilization read more

By Dave Lindorff

Investigators from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) have only recently reached Douma, scene of an alleged chemical bombing attack on April 7, and have not yet had time to test samples they collected to see if banned poison chemicals were actually used, but already US mainstream media reporting on the situation in the Damascus suburb where the alleged chemical attack is said to have occurred is starting to shift. That shift tends to make the story read more

Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years, from the administration of John F. Kennedy to that of George H. W. Bush. Ray’s duties included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President’s Daily Brief, which he briefed one-on-one to President Ronald Reagan’s five most senior national security advisers from 1981 to 1985. In January 2003, Ray co-created Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) to expose how intelligence was being falsified to “justify” read more