War Is A Crime

By Muslim News, March 25, 2022

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

Recently, making my way through the New York Times — and yes, at 77 and a creature of habit, I still read its paper version — I found two articles of special interest to me, one above the other, on page 17. These days, I hardly need to say that the front page (and its online equivalent) remains a riot of Ukraine news. That day, four major Ukraine stories were piled read more

By David Swanson

If you find yourself in a room, zoom, plaza, or planet in which only more war is considered a sane policy, check quickly for two things: which inmates are in charge, and are there any open windows handy. You may have to make the case for turning the place upside-down from within it, but you’ll have to figure out a way to get yourself considered sane first.

Logically, there are two basic things you can do with a war, continue it or end it. Typically you end it by negotiating an read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, March 22, 2022

I’ve just become aware of and read the 2020 book by Ned Dobos, Ethics, Security, and The War-Machine: The True Cost of the Military. It makes a pretty strong case for the abolition of militaries, even while concluding that it may or may not have done so, that the matter should be taken on a case-by-case basis.

Dobos sets aside the question of whether any war can be justified, arguing instead that “there may be cases where the costs and read more

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

It’s strange, don’t you think, this feeling of having been here before? Well, not quite here. It wasn’t Ukraine and Europe then, but Afghanistan and the Greater Middle East. And if this is indeed Cold War II, Russia isn’t the Soviet Union, but an read more

AUDIO:

Talk World Radio is recorded as audio and video on Riverside.fm — except when it can’t be and then it’s Zoom. Here is this week’s video and all the videos on Youtube.

VIDEO:

This week on Talk World Radio we’re discussing the war on Yemen with Hassan El-Tayyab, the legislative director for Middle East policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation. Prior to joining FCNL in August 2019, Hassan El-Tayyab was co-director of the national advocacy group Just read more

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

Consider this perhaps the strangest thing of all in our all-too-strange world: the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced essentially never leads the news. Yes, the immediate crises of our world, most recently Vladimir Putin’s disastrous invasion of Ukraine, are 24/7 headlines for weeks at a time. And any set of events that read more

Last week I spoke to a very smart class of high school seniors in Washington DC. They knew more and had better questions for me than your average group at any age. But when I asked them to think of a war that was possibly justifiable, the first one somebody said was the U.S. Civil War. It later came out of course that at least some of them also thought Ukraine was justified in waging war right now. Yet, when I asked how slavery had been ended in Washington DC, not a single person in the room had read more