Reflections on Rivers of Blood Action: We All Must Come Together to Stop War

We are in some difficult times right now. There are too many people living in poverty and too many suffering from racism. We don’t have a system of health care or education that supports the citizens of this country. We are polluting the earth and this could lead to the end of us all.

We have a madman in the White House, but as S. Brian Willson posts to Facebook, “focusing on Trump is a distraction…. Trump is an avatar (or caricature), an undisguised buffoon serving as a mirror revealing read more

Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Trumping the Empire

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

I was 12. It was 1956. I lived in New York City and was a youthful history buff. (I should have kept my collection of American Heritage magazines!) Undoubtedly, I was also some kind of classic nerd. In any case, at some point during the Suez crisis of that year, I can remember going to the U.N. by myself and sitting in the gallery of the General Assembly, where read more

Glorifying Drones And Recruiting New Operators Propaganda Effort Has Many Helpers

One of thousands of squares commemorating war victims in the Drone Quilt Project.   Art by Leeza Vinogradov

I’ll admit here that I gave up on National “Public” Radio some years ago, around the time they began running promos for their agribusiness and other corporate sponsors. NPR’s coverage of the Iraq war was so carefully tailored to show the view through approved windows that I began to lose respect for their journalistic integrity. More like the New York Times and The New Yorker magazine, really, puffing Obama while panning Republicans, signalling their fealty read more

“Ain’t No Such Thing as a Just War” – Ben Salmon, WWI Resister

“Ain’t No Such Thing as A Just War” – Ben Salmon, WWI resister
by Kathy Kelly

July 10, 2017

Several days a week, Laurie Hasbrook arrives at the Voices office here in Chicago. She often takes off her bicycle helmet, unpins her pant leg, settles into an office chair and then leans back to give us an update on family and neighborhood news. Laurie’s two youngest sons are teenagers, and because they are black teenagers in Chicago they are at risk of being assaulted read more

Tomgram: Dilip Hiro, Two Impulsive Leaders Fan the Global Flames

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

Every now and then something lodges in your memory and seems to haunt you forever. In my case, it was a comment Newsweek attributed to an unnamed senior British official “close to the Bush team” before the invasion of Iraq in 2003. “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad,” read more

Essay: Militarism in Christian Context, Past and Present

Militarism in Christian Context Past and Present

EK Knappenberger, for Dr. D.F. Evans; October 2016

Posted to WarIsACrime.org July 2017

 

“War is a racket, where the few profit and the many pay.”[1]

“War is a force that gives us meaning.”[2]

“War is a lie.”[3]

 “War is hell.”[4]

 

If war is hell, then why do Christians participate in it?  There is a disconnect at the heart of the Christian community as it relates to the hell of war.[5]  Not only is the violence of war categorically unchristian, as we will briefly demonstrate below, but beyond even that, the attitude of militarism read more

Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Fighting the War You Know (Even If It Won’t Work)

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

In America’s Afghanistan, it’s all history — the future as well as the past, what’s going to happen, as well as what’s happened in these last nearly 16 years of war. You’ve heard it all before: there were the various “surges” (though once upon a time sold as paths to victory, not simply to break a “stalemate“); read more

The Fourth of July Like You’ve Never Seen It Before!

This year, sit back with your favorite beverage or herb, prop up your feet and open your head to consider Independence Day in a whole new way.

A historically critical article about the American Revolution would typically discuss how the democratic promises of the Declaration were left hanging at war’s end, followed by a decidedly undemocratic constitution six years later.

Examples of that would include abandoning ideals stated in the Declaration like: “all men (sic) are created equal” and read more

Sy Hersh, Exposer of My Lai and Abu Ghraib, Strikes Again, Exposing US Lies About Alleged Assad Sarin ‘Attack’

By Dave Lindorff

Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, the journalist who exposed the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese women, children and old people by US troops, the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal in Iraq, and many other critically important stories, has now obliterated the US government’s (and the US media’s) claim that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s military killed nearly 100 people with a Sarin nerve gas read more

A message from the U.S. to Iran

Submitted to the July 2, 2017, conference “United States, Human Rights and Discourse of Domination,” hosted by the University of Tehran and the Iranian World Studies Association.

I’m very sorry not to be there in person and am grateful to Foad Izadi for allowing me to submit this instead. I’m a critic of the institution of war and of all military violence, as well as of all antidemocratic government and all violation of civil liberties. People in Iran, the United States, read more