War Is A Crime

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

I remember well the antiwar movement of the Vietnam era. I was in it and it was distinctly in the streets, big time. I was typical, for instance, in traveling to Washington in October 1967 for a march on the Pentagon, which proved to be the largest antiwar protest read more

Donald E. McInnis’s book, She’s So Cold, is painful to read. McInnis was the defense attorney for one of three boys falsely accused of killing one of the boys’ sister. Much of the book is recreation of police interrogations that were videotaped, and of a court hearing.

This was one of those cases the mass media love and for which they effectively convict the accused in the minds of the public. This was in 1998 in San Diego, and the original victim’s name was Stephanie Crowe. But there were read more

By David Swanson, Executive Director of World BEYOND War, June 21, 2019

A new film by Will Watson, called Soldiers Without Guns, ought to shock a great many people — not because it utilizes a yet more gruesome form of violence or bizarre form of sex (the usual shockers in movie reviews), but because it recounts and shows us a true story that contradicts the most basic assumptions of politics, foreign policy, and popular sociology.

Bougainville Island was a paradise for millennia, inhabited read more

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

Yes, they’re now known as the “greatest generation,” while the generation that followed them is sometimes referred to as the “silent” one. In my own limited experience, however, those World War II vets, the ones I knew anyway, were remarkably silent about their wartime lives. My dad was one of them. Yes, read more

If you’re free, if you’re not locked behind bars (and I do realize that this is true of a smaller percentage of people in the so-called Land of the Free than anywhere else on earth), be grateful. One thing you can do is get your hands on important new books. I recommend this one: The Meaning of Life: The Case for Abolishing Life Sentences by Marc Mauer and Ashley Nellis, Featuring Six Portraits of Lifers.

This book does include powerful portraits of people sentenced to life in prison. It also read more

Martin E. Hellman is Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. His work spans cyber security, reducing the risk of a nuclear disaster, and peace. His invention of public key cryptography is at the heart of the secure portion of the Internet and has won him many honors, including the million dollar ACM Turing Award, the top prize in computer science. In read more

Jeffrey Ostler’s Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas, tells a complex, honest, and nuanced story of what overall and in many particular parts fits the UN definition of and the popular conception of genocide. So, of course, it is primarily a story of not surviving genocide, though I guess that would have been too much of a “Dog Bites Man” headline for any publisher.

But parts of the story are of surviving. Some of the surviving read more

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

In early October 2016, as the most staggering presidential election campaign of our lives was nearing its end, I wrote this about the man whom, I suggested, heartland working-class whites might consider dispatching to the White House as an American version of a “suicide bomber”:

“In relation to his Republican rivals, and now Hillary Clinton, he stands alone in accepting read more