Author name: davidswanson

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, March 22, 2022

I’ve just become aware of and read the 2020 book by Ned Dobos, Ethics, Security, and The War-Machine: The True Cost of the Military. It makes a pretty strong case for the abolition of militaries, even while concluding that it may or may not have done so, that the matter should be taken on a case-by-case basis.

Dobos sets aside the question of whether any war can be justified, arguing instead that “there may be cases where the costs and read more

Last week I spoke to a very smart class of high school seniors in Washington DC. They knew more and had better questions for me than your average group at any age. But when I asked them to think of a war that was possibly justifiable, the first one somebody said was the U.S. Civil War. It later came out of course that at least some of them also thought Ukraine was justified in waging war right now. Yet, when I asked how slavery had been ended in Washington DC, not a single person in the room had read more

Di David Swanson, World BEYOND War, il 16 di marzo 2022

Il pericolo di un’apocalisse nucleare è più alto di quanto non lo sia mai stato. Non esisterebbe senza militari.

Il pericolo dell’apocalisse climatica è più alto di quanto non lo sia mai stato, se non è già garantito. Senza le forze armate sarebbe notevolmente diminuito e ci sarebbero finanziamenti quasi inimmaginabili con cui cercare di prevenirlo.

Ho pensieri molto affettuosi sull’Italia. È uno dei motivi per cui mi read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, March 15, 2022

The war-or-nothing disease has a firm grip. People literally can’t imagine anything else — people on both sides of the same war.

Every time I suggest that Russia might have done anything nonviolent to resist NATO expansion and the militarization of its border or that Ukraine might do anything nonviolent right now, my inbox fills up in almost exactly equal measure with rather angry missives denouncing the idea that there was or is anything that read more

By David Swanson

For decades, the U.S. public seemed largely indifferent to most of the horrible suffering of war. The corporate media outlets mostly avoided it, made war look like a video game, occasionally mentioned suffering U.S. troops, and once in a blue moon touched on the deaths of a handful of local civilians as if their killing were some sort of aberration. The U.S. public funded and either cheered for or tolerated years and years of bloody wars, and came out managing to believe falsely read more

By Ahimsa Conversations, March 13, 2022

The notion that war is normal and we have to struggle for peace is a fundamental lie. Actually, every war is the consequence of a long, concerted and diligent effort to avoid peace. David Swanson, co-founder of the network World BEYOND War, unravels the lies that accompany most wars – that it is defensive, necessary, humanitarian. The common claim that history is full of wars is misleading because read more

By David Swanson

Bruce Levine’s books have been getting more and more thorough in their debunkings of the claims of psychiatry. His latest is A Profession Without Reason.

Some mental illnesses that have been eliminated include drapetomania, or the mental illness causing enslaved people to try to escape; and homosexuality, or the mental illness causing people to love people that somebody else might wish they wouldn’t. These mental illnesses have been eliminated by ceasing to call them read more