War Is A Crime

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

The other day, while walking the streets of New York City with some groceries in my backpack, I got drenched. The skies suddenly opened and it poured. All too literally. I finally managed to dash under one of the typical building construction platforms in our neighborhood and found shelter with quite a crew of fellow drenchies. I then stood there and watched the water all too read more

It’s a crowded field, I know. Soldiers are proudly publishing videos of their own gruesome crimes. Prime Ministers are touring the world in defiance of arrest warrants. But I want to make sure we’re aware of one prominent member of the list of individuals responsible for the crime of war: U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (Republican from the state of total submission to Trump).

War read more

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

Late-night comedian Seth Meyers recently offered these comments laughingly on “our” president and the ominous return of the Department of Defense to its old name (given up just after World War read more

The hunt for the political ideology driving each murder that makes the news obscures some key points.

One is that the shooter is almost always a man, even though women are equally capable of shooting, meaning that the ideology is one of masculinism.

Another is that the shooter, more often than not, shoots himself (and it may not make the news, but most often a shooter shoots only himself), which blows a rather large hole in the idea that he is working to advance some subgroup of people or some desired read more

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

Once upon a time about 150 years ago, I wrote a book called The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation on the long, slow collapse of the American sense of triumphalism read more

Every once in a while I come across mention of something that I proceed to forget again, which is that a copy of La Rotonda exists in the West Bank. That is, a near reproduction of a famous Renaissance villa sits on a hill in Palestine. It’s in the bottom right of the image above.

My first thought, when I remember this, is sadness that the U.S.-Israeli war machine will probably blow this building up.

My second thought is that poor Palestine is afflicted, on top of everything else, with billionaires read more

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

Defense? Who needs “defense” when “war” is so much easier to spell? As few could have missed by now, the Trump administration has flipped the name of the Department of Defense back read more

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

I live in New York City and, yes, you can’t leave your apartment for a walk on its streets (and I walk them miles a day) and not pass homeless, sometimes visibly disturbed (or unnerved) people standing, sitting, or lying on the sidewalks, sometimes even with signs suggesting their desperation and asking for any small sum of money that those passing them might care to give read more