Steve McKeown was a radio operator in the 4th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army in Vietnam in 1966 to 1967. He was a founding member of Veterans For Peace Chapter 27 in Minneapolis / St. Paul, and is the coordinator for their newsletter. Steve has spoken to hundreds of classes in elementary and high
Dan Crenshaw Sounds Like a Propagandist for Mass Murder
What is more sick about U.S. society?
1) It’s totally 100% acceptable to make cruel stupid jokes about people’s appearance.
2) There’s an exception. You shouldn’t do it if the thing you’re making fun of relates to their participation in mass murder.
3) Violation of that exception is such a sin that you must publicly repent and grovel.
4) This is true even if the sin was committed on a steadfastly unfunny and unintelligent television program that nobody watches.
5) The
A Tale of Two Marines
These two young men may have an infinite number of things in common, but the actions they took this week do not.
One used a pro-war ceremony at a professional basketball game to reject the celebration of militarism, and to protest war-profiteering advertising in sports.
One became the latest “mass shooter” — which I put in quotation marks only because he had already been a mass shooter, but he had been an acceptable kind of mass shooter.
On Tuesday evening, former U.S. Marine Josuee
Another Amazing Coincidence: Man Trained to Mass Murder Commits Mass Murder
The suspect in today’s mass shooting (well, the biggest one I’ve heard of thus far this morning; the day is young) is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps.
Another mass shooter in Florida last week just happens to have been in the military.
The man who killed with a van in Toronto this year had been briefly in the Canadian military and promoted his crime on Facebook beforehand as a military operation.
The mass-killing in a Florida High School earlier this year was also promoted by the killer
Celebrate Armistice Day, Not Veterans Day
By David Swanson for The Humanist
Do not celebrate Veterans Day. Celebrate Armistice Day instead.
Do not celebrate Veterans Day — because of what it has become, and even more so because of what it replaced and erased from U.S. culture.
Former American Humanist Association President Kurt Vonnegut once wrote: “Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not. So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.”
What Else You Can Do
You’ve been radically misled to believe that the only thing, or the most important thing, or one of the super important things you can do is vote. Voting in a functioning democracy would be a fairly important thing to do, but wouldn’t somehow eliminate the thousands of important things that would also need doing. Voting in a broken democracy is a mildly important thing to do, for the reasons you know by heart, but also for this reason: Seeing so many people so eager to do something
Talk Nation Radio: Greta Zarro on Organizing a World BEYOND War
Greta Zarro is Organizing Director at World BEYOND War. She has a background in issue-based community organizing. Her experience includes volunteer recruitment and engagement, event organizing, coalition building, legislative and media outreach, and public speaking. Greta graduated as
I’ll Be Speaking in Albuquerque on December 12, 2018
I’ll be speaking on the topic of “The Abolition of War Requires New Thoughts, Words, and Actions”
Wednesday, December 12th, 2018, at 6:00 p.m. (doors open at 5:30)
First Unitarian Church of ABQ, 3701 Carlisle Blvd. NE (at Comanche)
Flyer: PDF.
Charlottesville: The Movie
This past Saturday in Charlottesville, Va., I watched the premier of the film Charlottesville, produced by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
The film begins by lamenting the fact that the word “Charlottesville” now means to many people not our city but an August 2017 fascist rally in our city. Yet the film is entirely about that rally and is titled “Charlottesville” which will presumably contribute to the problem it laments.
I hope it does, because I
Mass Shooters’ Histories in the U.S. Military Most Amazing Coincidence
Obviously having been a member of the U.S. military can’t have any causal connection to mass shootings, and that’s why it makes the most amazing coincidence over and over again that so many individuals who’ve been trained to kill lots of people bizarrely end up killing lots of people.
Another mass shooter in Florida just happens to have been in the military.