A blog about a criminal enterprise
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
Yes, it’s true. After 20 years of war — actually, more like 30 years if you count American involvement in the Russian version of that conflict in the 1980s — the U.S. has finally waved goodbye to Afghanistan (at least for now). Its last act in Kabul was the
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, January 10, 2022
You’d hardly guess it from all the silent acceptance of war as a legal enterprise and all the chatter about ways to supposedly keep war legal through the reform of particular atrocities, but there are international treaties that make wars and even the threat of war illegal, national constitutions that make wars and various activities that facilitate wars illegal, and laws that make killing illegal with no exceptions for the use of missiles
There are plenty of good occasions to pretend not to know something: an embarrassing secret of a friend, a plan for a surprise party, the punchline of a child’s joke.
There are plenty of good excuses to actually not know something: it would take decades of study, it’s of no interest or value, it would cost so much money to research it that you could have saved millions of lives instead.
There are, I think, fewer good justifications for pretending to yourself (not just to others) not to know
Late January of this year will mark the first anniversary of the entry into force of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This momentous international agreement, the result of a lengthy struggle by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and by many non-nuclear nations, bans developing, testing, producing, acquiring, possessing, stockpiling, and threatening to use nuclear weapons. Adopted by
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To receive TomDispatch in your inbox three times a week, click here.
What Will We Remember of 2022? Nation (Un)Building and Planet (Un)Building, American-Style ByLet me start 2022 by heading back — way, way back — for a moment.
It’s easy to forget just how long this world has been a dangerous place for human beings. I thought about this recently when I stumbled upon a little memoir my Aunt Hilda scrawled, decades ago, in a small notebook. In it, she commented in passing: “I was graduated during that horrible flu epidemic of 1919
I live in a wealthy country, the U.S., and in a corner of it, a part of Virginia, not yet hit hard by fires or floods or tornados. In fact, until Sunday night, January 2nd, we’d had rather pleasant, almost summerlike weather most of the time since summer. Then, Monday morning, we got several inches of wet, heavy snow.
It’s now Thursday, and trees and branches have been coming down all over the place. We shook branches repeatedly as the snow was first arriving, to get some of it off. We still
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, January 5, 2022
World BEYOND War has long supported efforts to stop noisy, polluting Navy jet flights over state parks in Washington State.
Now a report by Chief United States Magistrate Justice J. Richard Creatura has got the Seattle Times editorial board proposing some sort of “compromise.”
Some choice excerpts:
Here, despite a gargantuan administrative record, covering nearly 200,000 pages of studies, reports, comments, and the like, the Navy selected methods
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, January 5, 2022
Propaganda is most impactful when people don’t think it’s propaganda, and most decisive when it’s censorship you never knew happened. When we imagine that the U.S. military only occasionally and slightly influences U.S. movies, we are extremely badly deceived. The actual impact is on thousands of movies made, and thousands of others never made. And television shows of every variety. The military guests and celebrations of the
By RootsAction Education Fund, January 5, 2022
RootsAction Education Fund has published a Primer on Foreign Policy for U.S. Congressional Candidates.
Congressional candidates often have little or nothing to say about foreign policy, and a lot of them have a surprising reason when asked: they say that they don’t know anything about it.
Some of them seem to be telling the truth, and others who don’t explain themselves may also lack knowledge of foreign policy.
Even some candidates who do
AUDIO:
Talk World Radio is recorded as audio and video on Riverside.fm. Here is this week’s video and all the videos on Youtube.
VIDEO:
This week on Talk World Radio we’re talking about refusing military “service.” Our guest Charles Lenchner is a veteran peace activist, organizer, and political campaigner. Born in the United States, he grew up in Israel where he became an anti-occupation activist at a young age. In 1987, he was drafted into the Israeli Army and subsequently