War Is Love

Photo by Truthdig.

On Monday I was arrested along with many other people in the street in front of the U.S. Capitol, participating in the new Poor People’s Campaign, the first multi-issue coalition we’ve seen in years that properly takes on militarism rather than indulging the fantasy of a $1 trillion a year military coexisting with decent humanitarian and environmental policies.

Yet it was hard at this peaceful gathering and in the “training” before it not to notice people’s habitual read more

And how does this differ from the Nazis’ Warsaw Ghetto?: Israel Crosses a Line as IDF Snipers Murder Unarmed Protesters in the Ghetto of Gaza

By Dave Lindorff

Funeral of an 8-month old baby who died from IDF-fired tear gas at the Gaza border protest

Hong Kong — Sitting in this peaceful city on the far side of world from the United States can put some things in perspective. For one thing, the local papers, both Chinese-language and the English-language South China Morning Post today featured front-page images of dead Palestinian protesters lying on the ground in Gaza. Accompanying read more

Tomgram: Engelhardt, A Staggeringly Well-Funded Blowback Machine

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

An Empire of Nothing at All?
The U.S. Military Takes Us Through the Gates of Hell
By Tom Engelhardt

[This essay is the introduction to Tom Engelhardt’s new book, A Nation Unmade by War, a Dispatch Book published by Haymarket Books.]

As I was putting the finishing touches on my new book, the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute published read more

Talk Nation Radio: The Movement Music of Tom Neilson

This week on Talk Nation Radio we will be speaking with and listening to the music of Tom Neilson. He has received over two dozen awards, including two song of the year awards from Independent Musicians. In 2017, he received the Arab American Women Association Award for Education About Palestine Through Performance Art. In 2015 he was nominated for the United Nations Nelson Mandela Award for Lifetime Achievement in Peace and Justice. Tom and his partner Lynn Waldron will be performing this September read more

Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Road to Hell in the Middle East

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

It’s already long forgotten here, but the theocratic regime in Iran was really our baby. After all, in 1953, the CIA and British intelligence engineered a coup to replace a democratic government in Iran with the autocratic Shah and so gave Iranians just what they didn’t want (including read more

Forces of Corruption Are Horrified of a Trump Impeachment

If you do a daily web search for “impeachment,” here’s what you’ll get used to seeing. Most use of impeachment is outside the United States. Most use of impeachment within the United States is outside of Washington, D.C. Most media mention of impeachment in relation to Trump is strongly opposed to it and to the small-d democratic threat it holds for those in power. And the very worst members of both major parties (yes, including the “resistance”) are leading the charge against any read more

Militarism Mapped

World BEYOND War has just released an updated 2018 mapping of militarism in the world. The map system can be explored and adjusted to display what you’re looking for, as well as display precise data and its sources at http://bit.ly/mappingmilitarism

Here are some examples of what it can show:

Where wars are present that directly and violently killed over 1,000 people in 2017:

Where wars are present and where wars come from are two different questions. If we look at where money is spent on wars read more

BDSM, #MeToo, torture and the drumbeat for war: Welcome to the Apocalypse

By John Grant

                        In the privacy of intimate relationships, I have engaged in role-playing and other consensual sexual activity.
— NY Attorney General Eric Schneiderman upon resigning

                        I’m not going to sit here, with the benefit of hindsight, and judge the very good people who made hard decisions, who were running the agency in very extraordinary circumstances.
read more

Two Interrogations, Gina Haspel and Adolf Eichmann

“the evasions and obfuscations of these two willing technicians of state terror are chillingly similar”

 

By Brian Terrell

On May 9, Gina Haspel, Donald Trump’s choice for head of the Central Intelligence Agency, testified at her Senate confirmation hearing in Washington, DC. Some senators questioned her about her tenure, in 2002, as CIA station chief in Thailand. There, the agency ran one of the “black sites” where suspected al-Qaida extremists were interrogated using procedures that read more