Author name: davidswanson

A television writer named Annie Jacobsen recently tweeted that she’d been “prophetic” when she wrote a real CIA scheme of attacking Venezuela into a fictional program, after which the U.S. government actually attacked Venezuela. Another word would be “propagandistic” — not in the sense of the direct, immediate lie, but in the sense of the long con. While there have been societies that could not imagine murder, and read more

We live in a world where feeding grain that could feed 10,000 people to captive animals in order to butcher those animals and eat their dead flesh, thereby feeding 1,000 people and devastating our ecosystems, is unquestionable, where grotesque levels of consumption based on climate and environmental destruction and human exploitation are just part of living, where locking huge numbers of people in cages is deemed a positive contribution to society, where maintaining nuclear weapons that accomplish read more

I discussed Venezuela with Santita Jackson:

What was defined at Nuremberg as the supreme international crime (one country attacking another one) is depicted by Trump and even the supposedly anti-Trump corporate media as some sort of law-enforcement. Bombing is liberating. Kidnapping is capturing. Murdering people on boats is “impeding the flow of drugs.”

Imagine if, say, Saudi Arabia or Norway or India were to impose deadly sanctions on the United States, attempt numerous comical coups, murder boaters off the U.S. coast, impose a no-fly-zone read more

Every single person in the United States, from those who’ve been most harmed to those who’ve been most privileged, would be better off if we had a normal government that put even a moderate effort into universally improving everyone’s lives. If we had a government that took trillions of dollars away from the war machine and the untaxed oligarchs and provided as a matter of basic rights for all

• economic welfare,
• education, preschool through college,
• healthcare,
• a clean and sustainable environment, and
• public transit,

then nobody would ever be denied an education or a job for any reason of hateful idiocy. Why should read more

Candidates for the U.S. Congress usually have websites, and often those websites include some minimal platform (what they would do if elected). Sometimes there’s none at all. Sometimes there’s a great deal of substance on numerous topics. But the vast majority of Congressional candidates have no foreign policy whatsoever. They want to be given a job to oversee a discretionary budget of which some 60 percent goes to militarism, yet they make zero mention of war, peace, diplomacy, weapons read more

I’ve shared the following with the five members of the City Council of Charlottesville, Virginia.

DRAFT RESOLUTION FOR CONSIDERATION BY THE CITY OF CHARLOTTESVILLE

In Opposition to President Donald Trump’s Threats and Acts of War Against Venezuela

Whereas the United Nations Charter makes it a crime to threaten war and a crime to wage war except in defense or by UN authorization, neither of which is the case here, and neither of which has even been alleged here;

Whereas the misdeeds of a government provide no legal basis for a foreign government to attempt to overthrow it;

Whereas the illegal drug trade, even where real, provides no legal read more

Trump has declared his support for the Monroe Doctrine in a document called “National Security Strategy of the United States of America – November 2025,” and labeled that expression of support his “corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine. This amounts basically to slapping the Trump name on what has long been understood as the (Theodore) Roosevelt Corollary of the Monroe read more

Lately I’ve been on shows with other guests who’ve expressed outrage and amazement that the U.S. government would blow up people on boats, exclaiming that they never could have imagined such a thing until this moment. A U.S. senator has said he finds video of one particular missile-murder the most disturbing thing he’s ever seen.

A couple of months into these boat killings, could anyone have imagined that corporate media outlets and Congress Members and boatloads of lawyers would read more

Trump is openly threatening war on Venezuela in blatant violation of the United Nations Charter, and has already for nearly three months been openly murdering everyone aboard numerous boats — a crime whether it’s murder or whether it’s war. The utter absence of the most basic morality from U.S. journalism is to be found in the worries over whether these murders are war, whether the possible war is approved by Congress, and whether a double-tap murder of two out of eleven people read more

In 2010, I wrote a book called War Is A Lie, with an updated edition in 2016. If I’m lucky and find time — and maybe if they ease up on the wars for a little while — I’ll get a new version out in 2026. But I can already apply the basic idea of the book to the threatened war on Venezuela.

The argument in the book is, of course, not that wars aren’t real, but rather that nothing that is commonly said to justify them is true. The book begins thus:

“Not a single read more