Author name: davidswanson

By David Swanson, Progressive Hub, July 26, 2025

Polluted with dangerous, human-made chemicals.

So writes Mariah Blake in the preface to her important book, They Poisoned the World: Life and Death in the Age of Forever Chemicals. The United States is the place where she writes that every child is born pre-polluted, but I think merely because she’s writing about the United States, not because it isn’t also true of everywhere else on Earth. In fact, Blake quotes Rachel Carson as having read more

Is Donald Trump a strong leader? By what measure can his second term so far be deemed a success? Then there is the issue of America First. Trump hasn’t stopped foreign wars; he actually continues to fund them. And what about the Epstein files? Where is the transparency?

CrossTalking with David Swanson, Misty Winston, and Bryce Greene.

God told me he has a message for you. It is this.

The peoples of the Earth, led by the United States, are concentrating wealth in the hands of a small percentage of the people. You may ignore this more than you deny it, but even if you deny it, as time passes, you go on having less and less of the wealth — and suffering as a result. You do not deny or ignore that result. Consequently, you’ll likely want to find something or someone to blame other than those hoarding all the money.

The read more

A year and three-quarters since the escalated genocidal assault on Gaza was launched, a year and a half since the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to halt its genocidal actions, eight months since the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant read more

I wish U.S. academics would spend less time fantasizing choices between various murders with trollies, or playing games with theories about how greedy robots might do diplomacy, and more time on the impeachment problem.

In a world full of starvation, illness, war, and other horrors, the problems with airports are minor, or we wouldn’t go near airports. (I only go near them if I think it can help address the world’s major problems.) Most of airports’ shortcomings are familiar: air travel does severe damage to the Earth’s climate, and in many cases is less convenient and even slower than train travel but has been made dramatically less expensive. And don’t get me started on the food. read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, June 28, 2025

Remarks at demonstration near Ramstein Air Base in Germany, June 28, 2025.

Where I live in the United States, if you watch a sports game on television, the announcers will sometimes thank the U.S. military for watching from 175 countries. But few people watching will stop and ask themselves what in the name of the holy dollar is one military doing in 175 countries. Almost all countries that have militaries have them in 1 country.

In fact the U.S. read more

Remarks at Neutrality Colloquium: A Call to Action for Active Neutrality & World Peace, June 26-27, 2025 in Geneva, Switzerland.

I grew up in a town in the United States that was built from nothing in the 1960s around an artificial lake with — in the lake — a fountain modeled on the fountain in Geneva. Yesterday I saw the fountain in Geneva for the first time, and felt at home.

I also feel at home with neutrality.

I think another word for neutrality is blindness.

Not in the sense read more

By Legitimate Targets​ @LegitTargets, June 18, 2025
Today on Legitimate Targets, Jackson Hinkle speaks with World B​EYOND War’s David Swanson (@davidcnswanson) about the prospects of a US WAR ON IRAN, UKRAINIAN TERRORISM & Trump’s FAILURE to “END THE WARS.”

🚨🇺🇸🇮🇷 BREAKING: WAR ON IRAN IS THE DUMBEST & DEADLIEST IDEA!

Today on Legitimate Targets, Jackson Hinkle speaks with World Beyond War’s David Swanson (@davidcnswanson) read more

And it’s doing tremendous damage.

The Helsinki Accords of 1975 look from the perspective of 50 years later like part of a trend away from the insanity of mass-murder and nuclear belligerence, in contrast to an opposing trend today. The war on Vietnam had given massive sadistic destruction a bad name, so bad that war promoters diagnosed society with a disease called the Vietnam Syndrome, whose only symptom was aversion to more wars — so bad that World War II became a wonderful event and the top subject of Hollywood. Opposition read more

For years, World BEYOND War and other peace groups from around the world had been attending peace conferences in Cuba. When I visited Cuba this past January it was with a visa for that purpose. I published here the remarks I made at the conference. We shouted as loudly as we could about January’s conference in websites, social media, emails, and media interviews. The notion that there could be read more

I recommend reading Charlottesville: An American Story by Deborah Baker. It’s an account, of course, not of all aspects of the city of Charlottesville, but principally of the Nazi-KKK-White Supremacist riot of 2017 that has taken on the name “Charlottesville” — including in a movie. The book itself is the furthest thing from predictable. The majority of it is pre-riot, with countless illuminating read more