Author name: davidswanson

In this 1.5 hour friendly debate, moderated by Marcy Winograd (coordinator of CODEPINK Congress and co-chair of the Peace in Ukraine Coalition), we hear 3 perspectives debated: 1) Russia had no choice but to invade Ukraine, argued by former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, 2) Ukraine had no choice but to fight Russia, argued by journalist Jim Brooke who works as the Ukraine/Russia columnist for The New York Sun, and 3) Russia and Ukraine both had options better than war, argued by WBW Executive Director read more

Finally someone who’s willing to run for president who’s qualified!

There is the problem of U.S. citizenship, but if you can toss out treaties and Congressional war powers and the First Amendment and the Fourth Amendment, if you can rig the Democratic Primaries, blame the people who revealed what you were doing, and then effectively eliminate those primaries altogether while still seeking to extradite a journalist for prosecution, then I say go ahead and let everyone who lives near read more

Watch this video of Rand Paul.

As with every single other elected official in Washington, D.C., Senator Rand Paul is someone with whom I passionately disagree on almost everything. Ceasing to send weapons to Ukraine is not one of those things.

Paul calls it “aid” and does not distinguish piles of deadly weapons from the possibility of sending purely humanitarian aid. He’s against sending anything at all. But he’s right that this “aid” is meant to perpetuate a read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, September 19, 2023

I confess to not having been aware that Sylvester Stallone had been in a movie in which all wasn’t solved by punching somebody, stabbing somebody, shooting somebody, or blowing somebody up.

Times change, apparently.

Stallone’s first serious movie was made in 1973 and set in 1969. The director, Robert Schnitzer, has now created a Director’s Cut version to show in theaters, beginning with the Lumiere read more

Think about somebody you love. Are you doing it?

Now think about them on fire, and you’re holding a bucket of water. Your course of action is easy and obvious.

Now think about 1,000 people on fire and 1,000 other people holding buckets of water. You use yours and yell for others to do the same, but for some bizarre collection of reasons many of them don’t. People fight over and spill some of the buckets, etc.

Now think about four billion people on fire and 4 billion other people with read more

By Kateri Peace Conference, September 14, 2023

Debra Sweet

Nick Mottern

Kathy Kelly

Gloria Caballero-Roca

David Swanson

For more information see https://kateripeaceconference.org

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, September 14, 2023

We’ve just learned that the office of the prosecutor and the “security service” of Ukraine have published press releases claiming to have put a stop to the activities of the “vicious Russian propagandist Yurii Sheliazhenko.”

This is, of course, very strange because Yurii, a Board Member of World BEYOND War, has — like World BEYOND War — denounced and opposed Russian warmaking from Day 1.

Yurii Sheliazhenko read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, September 13, 2023

Since the day Russia dramatically escalated the war in Ukraine there have been odd conversational confusions. Two people who both claim to oppose the war discover that they oppose opposite sides of the war. Or they discover that one of them opposes both sides of the war (true story, it actually exists, I’m one of them) while the other believes that only Russia is waging war at all, while Ukraine is waging something else entirely.

Since read more