How Not to Prevent U.S. Military Suicides

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, July 13, 2021

If I were to just read the admirable recent study of U.S. military suicides from the Costs of War Project, my inclination would immediately be to join with President Biden and start proclaiming the war on Afghanistan a success, or with Obama in announcing that the Korean War was a success after all, or with the general U.S. establishment in declaring all wars a noble “service” read more

Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, Teetering on the Existential Edge

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

On an unnaturally hot late June day in the Northeast, my eight-year-old grandson was walking back to a broiling car to continue a long trip. It was in the mid-nineties and he and his three-year-old sister were complaining about how miserable they were when, out of nowhere, he said, “This is why climate change is important!”

Startled, his mother agreed, and then he suddenly read more

Biden Defends Ending a War He’s Not Fully Ending

It’s been a dream of peace-loving people everywhere for over 20 years now for a U.S. government to end a war and to speak in support of having done so. Sadly, Biden is only partially ending one of the endless wars, none of the others having yet been fully ended either, and his remarks on Thursday were too glorifying of war to be of much use in the cause of abolishing it.

That said, one would not wish for Biden to bow before the belligerent demands of the U.S. media and escalate every possible read more

The Way Between

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, July 6, 2021

For decades I — and, no doubt, everybody else who points out the power and effectiveness of nonviolent action — have had the endlessly recurring experience of being asked “But shouldn’t people defend themselves with wars rather than do nothing?”

How did wars get to be the only alternative to nothing? If I were to run around shouting “Will you deny people the right to stick slugs up their noses rather than do NOTHING?” read more

Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, The Drugging of American Politics

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

Between the 1960s and 2021, the United States fought two disastrous drug wars in distant lands and historian Alfred McCoy covered them both. The initial one was, of course, the Vietnam War, which, as he reminds us today, left staggering numbers of American soldiers hooked on heroin. In those years, McCoy quite literally tramped the “heroin trail” in Laos, “meeting gangsters read more

Talk World Radio: Yurii Sheliazhenko on Ukraine as Imperial Chess Board

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, we’re discussing Ukraine, war, and peace. Our guest Yurii Sheliazhenko is executive secretary of the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement and a board member of the European Bureau for Conscientious Objection. He obtained a Master of Mediation and Conflict Management degree in 2021 and a Master of Laws degree in 2016 at KROK University. In addition read more

Tomgram: Engelhardt, Living on a Sci-Fi Planet

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

An All-American Horror Story Three-Quarters of a Century of Nuclear Follies — And That’s Just Where to Begin By

Yes, once upon a time I regularly absorbed science fiction and imagined futures of wonder, but mainly of horror.  What else could you think, if you read H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds under the covers by flashlight while your parents thought you were asleep?  Of course, that novel was a futuristic fantasy, involving as it did Martians arriving in London to take read more