War Is A Crime

We expect 17-year-olds to have learned a great deal starting from infancy, and yet full-grown adults have proven incapable of knowing anything about Afghanistan during the course of 17 years of U.S.-NATO war. Despite war famously being the means of Americans learning geography, few can even identify Afghanistan on a map. What else have we failed to learn?

The war has not ended.

There are, as far as I know, no polls on the percentage of people in the United States who know that the war is still read more

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

In the Heart of a Dying Empire
The Adolts in the Room (and No, That Is Not a Typo!)
By Tom Engelhardt

When you think about it, Earth is a relatively modest-sized planet — about 25,000 miles in circumference at the Equator, with a total surface area of 197 million square miles, almost three-quarters of which read more

I confess that the idea of fighting for “the soul of the Democratic Party” has always sounded as sensible to my ear as fighting for the soul of a cow plop, and plans to improve the world through the Democratic Party about as strategic as a preemptive compromise. The following statement from the Democratic Party has given me second thoughts:

“We declare again that all governments instituted among men derive their just powers from the consent of the governed; that any government not based upon read more

September 28, 2018, marks 100 years since the stupidest parade I’ve ever heard of. And this is a world awash in stupid. Donald Trump wanted to hold an insane weapons parade in Washington this November. That was dumb. But so was, on a far lesser scale, the move by various peace groups to de-prioritize going ahead with a massive celebration of having helped get the parade cancelled. I suppose the thinking is that we have got just too many victories for peace to be bothered with inspiring people read more

By Dave Lindorff

 

Whatever your view of Brett Kavanaugh, let’s get one thing clear:  While he’s hoping to become the ninth justice of the US Supreme Court, he is not on trial. He is facing a confirmation hearing by the Judicial Committee of the US Senate.

Republican backers of this clearly flawed and truth-challenged candidate are insisting indignantly, in the case of mounting charges from alleged victims, that he’s entitled to a “presumption of innocence” as several read more

Hawes Spencer is a journalist who has reported for the New York Times, NPR, the Hook, and other publications. He has taught journalism at Virginia Commonwealth University and James Madison University. For over two decades, Hawes Spencer edited two weekly newspapers in Charlottesville, Virginia, both of which he co-founded: C-ville Weekly and The Hook. As the editor of the Hook, his staff delivered 149 awards from the Virginia Press Association during read more

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

Like many in my generation, undoubtedly including Donald Trump, I went into space early (and I’m not even counting all those hours in my early teens I spent reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy or H.G. Wells’s War read more

It’s been quite a time for, in the phrase of the moment (which TomDispatch regular John Feffer wields particularly effectively today), “the adults in the room.” We’re talking, of course, about the very Washington insiders whom a “senior administration official” in an anonymous op-ed read more

By Dave Lindorff

            In the preface to his remarkable three-volume History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky, writing in 1930 about earth-shaking events in which he was a key actor, explains his view of writing history. Citing the reactionary French historian Louis Madelin, who wrote that “…the historian ought to stand upon the wall of a threatened city, and behold at the same time the besiegers and the besieged” in read more