War Is A Crime

Presented Friday, August 27, 2021, to the Northern Colorado Alliance for a Livable Future

I want to begin with five success stories.

The Peace Movement.

The people who spent 20 years largely excluded from the corporate media, lobbying Congress Members well paid not to listen to them, marching and protesting and holding teach-ins, making art, traveling across the globe or staying put on the same street corner for decades to build alliances and awareness, writing books and teaching courses, interrupting read more

Afghan villagers stand over bodies of civilians during a protest in the city of Ghazni, west of Kabul, Afghanistan, Sept. 29, 2019. An airstrike by U.S.-led forces in eastern Afghanistan killed at least five civilians. (AP Photo/Rahmatullah Nikzad)

By Kathy Kelly, Nick Mottern, David Swanson, Brian Terrell, August 27, 2021

On the evening of Thursday, August 26, hours after two suicide bombs were detonated at the gates of Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport killing and wounding scores of read more

The communications system we live in is highly complex, mostly driven by greed and profit, in part semi-public, full of filth I know we’d be better off without, and increasingly openly censored and monitored by defenders of accepted good thinking.

Fascist nutcases are spreading dangerous nonsense, while billionaire monopolists are virtually disappearing critics and protesters. It’s easy to get confused about what ought to be done. It’s difficult to find any recommendation that isn’t confused. read more

In many ways, war is ever more and less visible. Of course in U.S. academia, the Pinkerist pretense that we are living through a period of great peace is accomplished by all sorts of statistical manipulation, but first and foremost by declaring civil wars to not be wars, and declaring U.S. wars to be civil wars — a tricky thing to do when the minute the U.S. leaves, Afghans, for example, decline to keep killing each other (damn them!).

But in the United States, war and militarism — or some read more

Talk World Radio is recorded as audio and video on Riverside.fm. Here is this week’s video and all the videos on Youtube.

This week on Talk World Radio, one of the ways in which the killing machine of war just keeps on killing. Our guest Kiji Noh and co-author Claudia Chaufan have published an article in Social Medicine called “The Neglected Role of the Military as a Disease Vector: Implications for Covid-19 and for Global Health Policy.” Claudia Chaufan is Associate read more

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

Think of it as an irony of the first order that Joe Biden’s foreign-policy team came into office promoting new cold-war policies against the rising power on this planet, China. After all, even if it is that, it’s rising in a world that only recently read more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDLnlqocSBw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUQ808ZMTkI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hDAnR67Ija8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WKxPwNHh9w

The U.S. and other governments are not making the priority of rescuing endangered people from Afghanistan that a consumer of Hollywood movies might imagine being made were the endangered people Jews in Nazi Germany.

Sadly, the reality in the 1940s was no different from today. Major investments went into wars, and Western officials wanted no large numbers of refugees. They opposed them for openly racist reasons, exactly as if they worked for Fox News in 2021 only worse.

If only Afghans today were read more

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

In January 2004, Chalmers Johnson wrote “America’s Empire of Bases” for TomDispatch, breaking what was, in effect, a silence around those strange edifices, some the size of small towns, scattered around the planet. He began it this way:

“As distinct from other peoples, most Americans do not recognize — or do not want to recognize — that the United States dominates read more

It’s far from the longest U.S. war. There was no peace before or after it. There is no after it until they end it — and bombing has always been most of what it is. It has had nothing to do with opposing terrorism. It has been a one-sided slaughter, a mass killing over two decades by a single invading army and air force dragging along token mascots from dozens of vassal states. After 20 years Afghanistan was one of the worst places to be on Earth, and the Earth as a whole was a worse place read more