Author name: davidswanson

Featuring:

• David Swanson, Executive Director of World BEYOND War, Campaign Coordinator for RootsAction. His books include “War Is A Lie.” Awarded 2018 Peace Prize by the U.S. Peace Memorial Foundation.
• Emma Claire Foley, RootsAction nuclear weapons policy expert, writer, and filmmaker. Her commentaries have been featured in Newsweek, NBC, the Guardian and other international news outlets.
• David Vine, Writer and political anthropologist. Author of the books “The

The U.S. Secretary of State has taken a break from demanding more weapons shipments to fuel the genocide in Palestine, to announce that he has “recognized” a genocide in Sudan.

Blinken says he has based his determination on the horrific killing of civilians in Sudan, without citing any evidence of intent to commit genocide. It is the voluminous evidence of that intent that distinguishes the genocide in Gaza from most wars, virtually every one of which in recent decades has amounted to a mass read more

Citizen George is a film that tells the story of the life, thus far, of George Lakey. A good and lengthy review is here. An 8-minute preview video is here.

George Lakey is an inspiration, mentor, leader, and pioneer for myself and for many of us who want to abolish war and violence, and who want to train the world in nonviolent activism as an alternative to war and as an alternative to acceptance of injustice.

The best way to begin learning from George Lakey is probably to read his books, and after read more

According to a headline in The Hill newspaper, which takes a position typical of U.S. corporate media, “New Year’s attacks fuel fears of extremism in military.”

In other words, an institution openly dedicated to mass killing and destruction may have fallen victim to infiltration by “extremists.” As if there could be something more extreme than a military.

The reason for this approach is that two U.S. military veterans attempted mass murders that made the news on the same day — and their read more

When Donald Trump again warms the throne in Washington on Martin Luther King Day, each of the three evils that King worked to abolish will get a major boost: racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.

Racism

While Trumplickers post-election propose recruiting abroad certain highly educated potential immigrants (and defunding and further destroying U.S. education — including by writing racism — not to mention critical thinking — out of history books while shaping them in a fundamentally racist read more

In thousands of movies and tv shows, a future is imagined in which full-grown adult humans with less self-control than toddlers both get into fist fights at the drop of a hat and possess the technology to obliterate entire cities or planets at the touch of a button. The fantasy of living in outerspace certainly does not help us preserve the one place we know how to live. But the most damaging fantasy here is that of maintaining widespread acceptance of violence and continuing to exist into an read more

By David Swanson
Remarks at December 13 Online U.S.-Iran Town Hall

I was asked to talk about Gaza and Syria, and so I shall, but I also want to talk about de-normalizing murder. There have been human societies in which murder was unthinkable, where the most typical Hollywood movie — marketed to U.S. children — has been seen as horrific and traumatizing. Normalizing murder is an option, not required by genes or economics or physics. I want us to take responsibility for that.

This week read more

Some weeks back I spoke with filmmaker David Bradbury:

Whether you object to genocide or internalize every scrap of Israeli propaganda, there isn’t any way in ordinary English to dispute that each shipment of weapons from the United States to Israel, whether given or sold, violates numerous U.S. laws, including the Foreign Assistance Act, the Arms Export Control Act, the Conventional Arms Transfer Policy, and the Leahy Law, and at the very least read more

A New York Times article from November 26, 2024, kept showing up on my computer screen, and I kept avoiding it in disgust. Finally, I gave in and read it. It began like this:

“Hummingbirds zooming around the garden from flower to flower and sipping nectar probably don’t appear at first glance to be models for instruments of war.”

Probably? Probably? Beautiful things of wonder that appear out of nowhere and can vanish again at any moment? Flying bursts of color smaller than your hand read more

As a resident of the most flamboyantly hypocritical and war-crazed nation on Earth, the United States of Armaments, I find it weirdly encouraging when one of the U.S. military’s many vassals and sidekicks goes above and beyond, trying out new forms of abuse that I haven’t encountered here.  Of course, I find such actions awful and often horrific — particularly if we’re talking about new forms of surveillance and torture tested by Israel on Palestinians. But right now I’m read more

Thousands of civic-minded people have been voluntarily helping out the not-yet-extant pseudo-government agency named after the ruler of not-yet-sunk Venice: the DOGE.

On a convenient webpage they are signing a petition and sending tweets to billionaire efficiency-creator Elon Musk. The petition reads:

To: Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency

Here’s how to improve government efficiency and cut spending: Audit the Pentagon, stop handouts to military contractors, and slash the read more

Netanyahu-free zones (ICC members) in blue. Source.

The International Criminal Court has taken an enormously important small step toward respectability and real internationalism by issuing arrest warrants for the very first time for war allies of the United States and Western militaries.

It took many, many inexcusable months for the prosecutor of the ICC to request the arrest warrants, and six more months for the court to issue them. The delays may be in part explained by the constant political read more