Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, The New Cold War Comes to Asia

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

Yes, it’s hard even to remember (if you aren’t of a certain advanced age), but I grew up in a world where the two superpowers, the United States and Russia, both increasingly armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and so unable to fight each other directly without the possibility of the planet going up in flames, engaged in what came to be known as a Cold War. Meanwhile, read more

From National Security to International Security

Have human institutions evolved sufficiently to cope with the modern world?  When it comes to national security, the answer appears to be:  No.

Ever since the emergence of individual nations, their governments have sought to secure what they consider their “interests” on an ungoverned planet of competing nations.  Amid this international free-for-all, nations tended to pursue national security or national advantage through military might.

Of course, the downside of this arrangement was that read more

The U.S. Military Base Empire: Its Impact and the Resistance to it, with David Swanson (a WIRN Webinar)

By Massachusetts Peace Action, October 11, 2024

Ending all wars means closing all military bases. The United States of America, unlike any other nation, maintains a massive network of foreign military bases around the world, over 900 bases in more than 90 countries and territories. These bases are costly in a number of ways: financially, politically, socially, and environmentally. U.S. bases in foreign lands often raise geopolitical tensions, support undemocratic regimes, and serve as a recruiting read more

Nobel Peace Prize Goes to Qualified Recipient for First Time in at Least Six Years

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, October 11, 2024

Congratulations are in order for Nihon Hidankyo, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations. The Nobel Peace Prize has for the first time in at least six years gone to a group of people who work to reduce warmaking, people who in fact seek to abolish nuclear weapons. Nihon Hidankyo has relentlessly done the work of educating the world, thanklessly, for many years. This prize should be celebrated far and wide.

Congratulations read more

Undercounting Deaths in Gaza While Claiming It’s the Worst War Ever

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, October 7, 2024

We generally accept that if you do a census and only count the people who answer their doors you miss some people, and that you can calculate an estimate that reliably gets closer to reality than the list of people who answer their doors. Of course it will get closer, the more information you can gather. But those insisting that people who do not answer their doors be treated as not existing are widely understood, not as principled fact checkers, read more