Author name: davidswanson

Remarks via zoom to conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, on September 21, 2024.

It’s wonderful to be joining you even virtually in St. Petersburg, which I am informed is even more beautiful than Moscow, which I was fortunate enough to visit seven years ago — Moscow is a wonderful city 20 times the size of Washington, D.C. Just the long hours of sunlight were amazing to me. I met a lot of wonderful people when I was there. I didn’t agree with every one of them on everything, but I’ve never read more

Yes, I’m going to say this again. I’ve heard not the slightest hint of a refutation or objection to it, and yet so many, many people ignore it.

For the love of all that is decent, immediately stop the self-defeating idiocy of calling every goddamned war “not a war.”

Please. With all due respect.

“It’s not a war. It’s terrorism.” “It’s not a war. It’s genocide.” “It’s not a war. It’s an occupation.” “It’s not a war. It’s ethnic cleansing.”

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The great portraitist Robert Shetterly has a new collection out in a book titled Portraits of Peacemakers: Americans Who Tell the Truth.

The first thing we need to obtain and maintain peace is investment in the education and activism that prevents wars and that ends occupation and misgovernance without making use of wars.

One of the most impressive things about U.S. elections always appears to be the way in which the 96% of humanity outside of the United States consents to doing nothing at all for the better part of a year, so that U.S. media outlets can focus fulltime on the election. Of course, it could be that this, like much else in U.S. elections, is a bit of an illusion.

The highlights of the recent debate would seem to be, from the discussion that has followed:

1. an aging fascist buffoon falsely claiming that a group of people he’s demonizing wants to eat your pets — the wrong kind of animals, you should be serving the livestock industry that is helping render the Earth uninhabitable — and
2. the same racist nitwit fumbling around about having “concepts of a plan” for healthcare — but please pay no attention to the healthcare solution long since found by every other wealthy nation on the planet and shunned by both major political cartels in Washington.

And yet, the most significant bit of the debate read more

Rotary and World BEYOND War have together been offering an online course called Ending War 101. You can take it here.

We recommend first doing the course and then joining us on September 27 for a live webinar on the general topic of “So, now what do we do?”

The webinar is free and open to all.

Register here.

By Santita Jackson Show, September 5, 2024

David Swanson, Ariel Gold, and other guests discuss gun violence and militarism following yet another mass shooting in the United States.