War Is A Crime

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

Can you even remember when it began? Doesn’t it seem like forever? And the timing — if forever can even be said to have timing — has been little short of miraculous (if, by miraculous, you mean catastrophic beyond measure). No, I’m not talking about the January 6th attack on the Capitol and everything that led up to and followed it, including the ongoing televised hearings. read more

(a current image of the house that the McNamara’s lived in in Washington DC)

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, June 15, 2022

Pretty much anything that complicates the story of a person is a good corrective to the tendency to simplify and caricature. So, one has to welcome Craig McNamara’s book, Because Our Fathers Lied: A Memoir of Truth and Family, from Vietnam to Today. Craig’s father, Robert McNamara was Secretary of War (“Defense”) for much of the war on Vietnam. He’d read more

I wrote a book years ago called War Is A Lie, arguing that everything we’re told that supports war-making is untrue.

The parallels between the police-prosecution-prison system and the war system are extensive. I don’t mean the direct connections, the flow of weapons, the flow of veterans. I mean the similarities: the intentional failure to use superior alternatives, the ideology of violence used to justify horrible ideas, and the expense and corruption.

It’s not a mystery that diplomacy and read more

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Aisha Jumaan is the Founder and President of the Yemen Relief and Reconstruction Foundation. Jumaan has over 30 years of experience in public health, including in viral vaccine preventable diseases, cancer research, maternal & child health and nutrition, and women in development. She worked read more

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

It never seems to end, does it? Three-plus years after it first landed on our shores, Covid-19 is still killing more than 300 Americans daily, while cases are rising again nationally (though sinking in the Northeast read more

​The U.S. government took a family away from its house, jobs, schools, and friends, locked up all of its members, and then began ordering the male family members of the proper age to join the U.S. military and head straight off to war.

This wasn’t last month. This was in 1941. And it wasn’t at random. The family was of Japanese ancestry, and the incarceration was accompanied by the accusation of being subhuman creatures but also of being disloyal traitors. None of that makes it acceptable read more

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

The introduction you’re reading right now is already out of date or we wouldn’t be in the United States of 2022. I mean, we live in a country where, for years now, there have been more guns than people. According to the latest figures (for 2018!), almost read more

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

Sixty years later, I would still like a do-over. Yes, I went to a school where, to fiddle with the title of Rebecca Gordon’s article, the boys were (and only them). I’m talking about Yale College in the 1960s when it was all-male and the hunting (or do I mean haunting?) grounds for read more

1. Nukes are the “tough on crime” of foreign policy

Investing in children’s welfare and education costs less and reduces more crime than “tough on crime” policies which are often counterproductive, but voters in San Francisco just obeyed a bunch of corporate advertising and recalled a District Attorney because he had reduced crime rather than being “tough on crime.” Nuclear weapons cost tens of billions of dollars a year, plus the costs of the airplanes, submarines, bases, and troops. read more

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

Let’s face it, we’re on a different planet, even if you might not know it most of the time living here in the United States. After the old Cold War ended, it turned out that it wasn’t as easy as our leaders imagined to be the “sole superpower,” “ read more