Author name: davidswanson

On Monday evening, the City Council of Charlottesville passed a ceasefire in Gaza resolution by a vote of 3 to 1 with 1 abstention, after having voted it down two weeks prior by a vote of 2 to 3. The difference was Council Member Brian Pinkston, to his credit, having the decency to change his mind. Unchanged was the public pressure, as people were committed to fill every council meeting until they got read more

The latest architectural detail added to the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., is simply stunning. The Defense of Israel Window, revealed on Easter Sunday in the War Memorial Chapel has a great deal of detail. In the center, in fiery reds and oranges an MK84 bomb falls, and then impacts, with huge chunks of buildings, bodies, and limbs, flying out in all directions. Around the sides, bleeding children crawl and wail.

Skeletal people look to the skies and the seas for blue and green humanitarian read more

As World BEYOND War is steadily reporting on, the U.S. military is constantly adding more military bases outside the borders of the United States, and sometimes being blocked in its plans, and sometimes being ordered to leave.

With the help of numerous informants around the globe, World BEYOND War is tracking the ever-changing global archipelago of U.S. military outposts with an online tool that allows you to spin the globe, zoom in on a base, and see images and information about it.

We’ve also read more

More information and what to do about it: https://nonatoyespeace.org

The first reason I’d like the United States to drop the whole ordeal of changing clocks twice a year is that it causes endless confusion and missed meetings for groups, organizations, and events that are not contained within the little 4% of humanity that lives in the United States. To make cross-border zoom meetings work, you have to either get people in the United States to learn what Coordinated Universal Time is, or make 96% of the world change their meeting times because the United States read more

Monday night (video here), three of five City Council Members in Charlottesville, Virginia, voted No on a resolution (in agenda packet here) in support of a ceasefire in Gaza.

Council Members Michael Payne and Natalie Oschrin put the resolution on the agenda and spoke well in support of it.

But Council Members Lloyd Snook, Brian Pinkston, and Juandiego Wade voted No.

Snook claimed to have no competence in foreign policy, spreading what is a pernicious idea in a supposedly self-governing land, namely read more

Should we be more or less worried that the corporate media cannot see that, that it seems to have deluded itself, rather than its consumers?

It’s been a long and ciruitous search to find the handful of words that can end all warfare on Earth.

Living in the United States I was long tripped up by the “Excuse me, but WHAT ABOUT HITLER?” question.

I tried pointing out that the U.S. and British governments refused to rescue Nazis’ victims because they simply didn’t want them as immigrants, that the war could have been avoided, that Nazism could have been avoided, that the U.S. didn’t need to develop and promote the dangerous bunk read more

Some acts of truth-telling about war and peace are easy, and some involve extreme risk. Some are simple, and some require great strategic planning. Some involve facts, some analysis, and some storytelling.

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, March 6, 2024

At World BEYOND War and other groups that I work for and work with we often flood elected officials with emails or phone calls — or bodies in their offices — with very urgent and specific demands to stop killing particular populations. At the same time, at the height of crises and otherwise, we find it valuable to press in a different direction. We don’t want one nation saved and some other nation bombed. We don’t want the read more

By World BEYOND War, March 4, 2024

We don’t need a “Rules-Based Order.” We need a U.S. government that obeys laws.

The Problem

The Vetoes

Since 1972, the U.S. government has been far and away the leading user of the veto in the UN Security Council, often blocking the will of every or nearly every other national government on Earth. It has vetoed U.N. condemnation of South African apartheid, Israel’s wars and occupations, chemical and biological weapons, nuclear weapons proliferation and first use and use against non-nuclear nations, U.S. wars in Nicaragua and Grenada and Panama, the read more

There’s a guide at wordsaboutwar.org to some of the standard war language used for big bucks by professional propagandists and for free by almost everyone else who has normalized it and not given it another thought. Manufacturing tools for mass murder is called “the defense industry,” those murdered are called “collateral damage,” the purpose is labeled “the national interest,” etc.

The trouble with talking like the Pentagon or CNN is not just that it helps to — in the words of read more

We asked people to sign this petition and add comments. Here are some of the comments they added:

Stop the weapons shipments, and replace them with diplomacy and a new focus on the human and environmental crises that these wars defund, distract from, and exacerbate.

The arms trade is negative value production that adversely impacts on international currencies as well as life, living standards, and the natural world.

“Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.” — John read more

But when the father of peace studies Johan Galtung died, not a single corporate media outlet said a single word. Not even an obituary. Not even a paragraph. And even decent people said and knew nothing.