Trump’s destructive embassy decision: The Shadow of Smuts on Trump’s Jerusalem Declaration

By Linn Washington, Jr.

U.S. President Donald Trump and Jan Smuts, a former prime minister of South Africa are politicians from two different eras who share two things in common.

Actions by Trump and Smuts, while separated by several decades, prompt many people in America and South Africa respectively to use the same word to describe each leader: racist.

And, Trump, like Smuts, has acted decisively on behalf of Israel.

Trump has created a “racially hostile read more

Charlottesville Finally Gets A Peace Monument

Well, we tried a petition, and I tried a TED talk (in fact two of em), and the Daily Progress daily newspaper, and Channel 19 four times: one, two, three, four, and Channel 29 too. No opposition whatsoever has been voiced to the idea of putting up a peace monument in Charlottesville, a town famously full of war monuments, including several for a war that has fallen out of favor.

Finally, the Charlottesville City Council has listened. A peace monument is not only in the works but is already visible read more

Should We Pay the Staggering Economic and Human Costs of Nuclear Weapons?

This October, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that its estimate of the cost for the planned “modernization” the U.S. nuclear weapons complex over the next three decades has risen to $1,200,000,000,000.00.  For those of you not familiar with such lofty figures, that’s $1.2 trillion.  Furthermore, when adjusted for inflation, the cost of the program―designed read more

Sun Tzu: The Ass of War

Sun Tzu, whose book, The Art of War, was written some 2,500 years ago during a period of constant war, and popularized in the West some 100 years ago (just in time for industrialized warfare), is the leading example of what’s wrong with digging up ancient platitudes as guides for action today in the areas of war and peace.

“That the impact of your army may be like a grindstone dashed against an egg — this is effected by the science of weak points and strong.”

This “wisdom” provides nothing read more

Focus: Update on the FBI and Justice Department

Tomgram: John Feffer, Drowning Liberalism in the Bathtub

This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com.

By the time you read this, the latest brouhaha will undoubtedly be history — or do I mean “fake history”? — and largely forgotten. It will have been replaced by an explosion of media coverage about some other nightmarish set of presidential tweets or comments. After all, it’s a pattern. I’m referring to President Trump’s recent retweeting read more

76 Years of Pearl Harbor Lies

Donald Trump is tweeting about a particular spot in Hawaii. He visited it recently on his way to threaten war in Asia. It’s a big feature this week in lots of U.S. magazines and newspapers. It has a lovely name that sounds like murder and blood because Japanese airplanes engaged in large-scale murder there in 1941: Pearl Harbor.

Pearl Harbor Day today is like Columbus Day 50 years ago. That is to say: most people still believe the hype. The myths are still maintained in their blissful unquestioned read more