OMG, War Is Kind of Horrible

By David Swanson

For decades, the U.S. public seemed largely indifferent to most of the horrible suffering of war. The corporate media outlets mostly avoided it, made war look like a video game, occasionally mentioned suffering U.S. troops, and once in a blue moon touched on the deaths of a handful of local civilians as if their killing were some sort of aberration. The U.S. public funded and either cheered for or tolerated years and years of bloody wars, and came out managing to believe falsely read more

Ahimsa Conversation # 106 David Swanson

By Ahimsa Conversations, March 13, 2022

The notion that war is normal and we have to struggle for peace is a fundamental lie. Actually, every war is the consequence of a long, concerted and diligent effort to avoid peace. David Swanson, co-founder of the network World BEYOND War, unravels the lies that accompany most wars – that it is defensive, necessary, humanitarian. The common claim that history is full of wars is misleading because read more

Is Psychiatry a Mental Illness?

By David Swanson

Bruce Levine’s books have been getting more and more thorough in their debunkings of the claims of psychiatry. His latest is A Profession Without Reason.

Some mental illnesses that have been eliminated include drapetomania, or the mental illness causing enslaved people to try to escape; and homosexuality, or the mental illness causing people to love people that somebody else might wish they wouldn’t. These mental illnesses have been eliminated by ceasing to call them mental read more

The Imperialist Roots of Putin’s Policy

A key factor that explains Vladimir Putin’s military invasion of Ukraine is traditional Russian imperialism.

Throughout the world’s long and bloody history, other powerful territories (and, later, nations) expanded their lands through imperial conquest, including Rome, China, Spain, France, Britain, Germany, Japan, and the United States.

Russia was no exception.  Beginning with the small principality of Moscow in 1300, Russia employed read more

Military Spending | Foreign Policy Primer For U.S. Congressional Candidates

This RootsAction Zoom call from Tuesday, March 8th is the second in a series of events for the recently released RootsAction Education Fund Foreign Policy Primer for U.S. Congressional Candidates.

Download the complete foreign policy primer here: https://progressivehub.net/foreignpolicy

Hosted by Ryan Black of RootsAction and ProgressiveHub, guests Lindsay Koshgarian of the National Priorities Project, David Swanson of RootsAction and World read more

Talk World Radio: Now That War Victims and Burn Pits Matter, Meet Iraqis Who Live Near Burn Pits

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 talking about burn pits. Our guest Kali Rubaii is an assistant professor of anthropology at Purdue University, researching the environmental health impacts of war. She did research among farmers from Anbar, Iraq, in 2014 and 2015, documenting the environmental read more