War Is A Crime

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

On January 6, 1941, at the edge of what would become a terrible global war, Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed Congress and spoke of a better future “founded upon four essential human freedoms.” These were, as he saw it, freedom of speech and expression, freedom read more

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

Honestly, how many times in your life have you ever run across a headline like this: “Top general says he would resist ‘illegal’ nuke order from Trump”? That was Air Force General John Hyten, head of the U.S. Strategic Command, the present commander of read more

World Beyond War joins with Just World Educational in promoting Earth Day events for on or about April 22, 2018, that will challenge the greatest destroyer of the earth: the war industry.

World Beyond War’s Coordinating Committee member Gar Smith has edited the anthology, The War and Environment Reader, which makes an excellent guide to this issue.

Here are some preliminary ideas from Just World Educational:

• Work with you or others you might suggest to organize one or more dedicated “War Hurts Earth” events in your community.
• Plan good outreach to local media so that the fact and content of these events get well covered—and also, contribute Opinion pieces or Letters to the Editor around these issues to local or national media.
• Create and make freely available a basic fact-sheet providing data on issues like the contribution the Pentagon makes to carbon emissions, the number of acres deforested during the US-Vietnam War, etc.
• Create and make freely available a series of graphic images (such as the above one), that people can use in their publicity.
• Work with Just World Books to make discounted copies of The War and Environment Reader or other print resources available for sale at your events.
• Help out with networking in communities nationwide, to maximize engagement with your local initiatives.

Hashtag: #WarHurtsEarth.

Here are some resources from World Beyond War:

Work with or form read more

The new poor people’s campaign should get every ounce of support we can find and generate. I say that without the qualifications and caveats I would usually include, because the Poor People’s Campaign is doing something that may not be strictly unprecedented in U.S. history but is certainly extremely rare in recent decades. It’s pursuing a worthy noble goal, that of ending poverty, while making ending war a central part of its vision, and doing so voluntarily.

Of course this makes read more

Jackson Lears is the Board of Governors Professor of History at Rutgers University. Lears is the editor of the journal Raritan: A Quarterly Review. His books include: Something for Nothing: Luck in America and Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. He recently wrote an article called “What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Russian Hacking” for the London Review of Books.

Total run time: 29:00
Host: David Swanson.
Producer: David Swanson.
read more

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

In 1956, in an interview with journalist Anna Louise Strong, Chinese leader Mao Zedong famously said of American imperialism: “In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of; it is a paper tiger.”  It wasn’t the first time he had used the image.  Ten years earlier he had told Strong read more

A No Foreign Bases conference was held in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S., on January 12-14, 2018. Here is a tiny fraction of the highlights:

Full videos here.

David Swanson on Monroe Doctrine:

David Swanson in Baltimore:

LEARN MORE AND GET INVOLVED.

By Dave Lindorff

We already knew that Tulsi Gabbard was courageous, when the Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii resigned from her position as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee in disgust during the primary season in 2016, declaring publicly what we now know to have been true — that the DNC was manipulating the primaries to favor Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders — was courageous. Now as basically the only member of Congress with the guts to call out the US as the cause read more

By John Grant

Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world.
– Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

[T]he trick of being a man is to give the appearance of keeping your head when, deep inside, the truest part of you is crying out, Oh shit!
– Michael Chabon, Manhood For Amateurs

A shaming can be like a distorting mirror at a funfair, taking human nature and making it look monstrous.
– Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

God read more

UKRAINE:

CHARLOTTESVILLE:

Letter from Charlottesville to Ukraine

By David Swanson

Nazi rallies in the news in recent years have most prominently been held here in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA, and in Ukraine. I want to send thoughts of solidarity to those in Ukraine resisting fascism. And I want to let you know that some of us are urging our government in Washington, D.C., to stop supporting fascism both in the United States and in Ukraine. In addition, we are pointing to the examples being set read more