Author name: davidswanson

And this year’s peace prize goes to . . . . next year’s war!

For any supposed case where good intelligent people should supposedly side with massive violence, one has to consider five questions.

1) Is it worth the support being given in the longterm to the war machine? Supporting the war machine when there are alternatives to doing so means gratuitously supporting the single biggest impediment to global cooperation, the single biggest waste of badly needed resources, the single biggest destroyer of the natural environment, the cause of the nuclear threat, read more

The Nobel Committee has frequently given the peace prize to major war makers, and frequently to do-gooders whose work in a variety of fields has been unrelated to abolishing war. It has also often given the prize to opponents and victims of the targets of Western empire. But it has never given the prize to open advocates of war and fascistic government. Trump was never going to be given the prize directly.

Trump is not the right type of warmonger. Nobody could do it with a straight face. Zelensky read more

“Abolition” isn’t just a fun word to say.

“I want to abolish prisons,” doesn’t just mean that you think there are too many prisons and they are too horrible. “Abolish the police” isn’t just a hip way to say “I’m angry at abuse by police.” Abolishing something means eliminating it entirely, which often also means creating very different institutions that do things very differently.

Entirely means every last speck.

Abolishing war, and preparations for war, and weapons of war, read more

Two U.S. military veterans allegedly shot and killed at least three people each this past weekend, Thomas Jacob Sanford in Michigan, and Nigel Max Edge in North Carolina. So, it is a safe bet that they will both be added (with, almost certainly, no mention of their status as veterans) to the database maintained by Mother Jones that I have for years been using as a starting point to track statistics on mass shootings.

It’s been almost two years since I posted an update. In that time, Mother read more

We should absolutely not count any chickens before they are hatched. This is a country that is absolutely mad for slaughtering chickens, with a communications system perfectly capable of convincing most people that chickens never existed. The first thing to do right now is to help Zohran Mamdani close out the victory and become mayor of New York City, despite oligarchs’ efforts to buy out other candidates, and media efforts to, among other read more

All those courageous United Nation delegates triumphantly walking out (gasp!) on a Netanyahu speech on Friday actually had a legal obligation to arrest him and deliver him to the International Criminal Court which has long since issued a warrant for his arrest.

Those heroic governments of Italy and Spain that are making a show of responding to public pressure against their complicity in genocide should be prosecuting Israelis under universal jurisdiction; establishing a complete embargo on weapons read more

It’s a crowded field, I know. Soldiers are proudly publishing videos of their own gruesome crimes. Prime Ministers are touring the world in defiance of arrest warrants. But I want to make sure we’re aware of one prominent member of the list of individuals responsible for the crime of war: U.S. House Speaker Mike Johnson (Republican from the state of total submission to Trump).

War read more

The hunt for the political ideology driving each murder that makes the news obscures some key points.

One is that the shooter is almost always a man, even though women are equally capable of shooting, meaning that the ideology is one of masculinism.

Another is that the shooter, more often than not, shoots himself (and it may not make the news, but most often a shooter shoots only himself), which blows a rather large hole in the idea that he is working to advance some subgroup of people or some desired read more

Every once in a while I come across mention of something that I proceed to forget again, which is that a copy of La Rotonda exists in the West Bank. That is, a near reproduction of a famous Renaissance villa sits on a hill in Palestine. It’s in the bottom right of the image above.

My first thought, when I remember this, is sadness that the U.S.-Israeli war machine will probably blow this building up.

My second thought is that poor Palestine is afflicted, on top of everything else, with billionaires read more

For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us;

And he will never advance beyond the emotional control of a Small Child;

And the government will rest on His shoulders;

For the lawmakers shall become as Court Jesters;

And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,

Eternal Father, Prince of Peace!

For He shall multiply war spending many fold, create a personal army, blow up random victims in the far reaches of the Earth, normalize genocide, return unto the War Department its proper read more

This was what the President of the United States initially lied:

“Earlier this morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists in the SOUTHCOM area of responsibility. TDA is a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization, operating under the control of Nicolas Maduro, responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States and Western Hemisphere. The read more

The European Commission, far from eager to restore the non-Orwellian name to departments of war — long since rebranded as departments of “defense” — is pushing to get deadly weapons categorized as especially ethical “investments” meeting Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria. Specifically, the tools of war, according to the European Commission, advance the cause of peace.

Those who buy most seriously into the war-makes-peace propaganda have reservations read more

Making demands for basic moral actions of governments unlikely to do most of them anytime soon can be a useful educational and long-term activity.

Here are some demands for governments of the world that many of us have been making, with some variations, but only the beginnings of success, for years now.

1. Arrest Israeli or any other officials facing arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court.
2. Prosecute Israeli criminals under universal jurisdiction.
3. Establish a complete embargo on weapons or weapons parts to or from Israel and to or from any nation not upholding such an arms embargo on Israel.
4. End diplomatic relations with Israel.
5. End financial transactions, trade, and travel to and from Israel.
6. Train and send unarmed civilian defense teams, food, medicine, doctors, and aid workers to Palestine.
7. Develop a major public educational campaign about the genocide in Gaza and the propaganda that has facilitated it.
8. Support a Uniting for Peace action through the UN General Assembly to implement worldwide numbers 3-7 above and to do steps 9-12 below:
9. Economically sanction Israeli war criminals.
10. Expel Israel from the United Nations.
11. Recognize the nation of Palestine.
12. Move UN meetings and headquarters out of the United States.
13. Break off military relations with and expel from your nation troops belonging to any government that is not upholding an arms embargo on Israel.
14. Halt membership or support for weapons-dealing institutions that do not uphold an arms embargo on Israel: the Abraham Accords, NATO, etc.

Now here’s an even less likely demand than any of those to be met anytime soon by any government, much less by two-thirds of a UN General Assembly:

1. Send armed ships and troops to Gaza.

The unlikelihood of its happening does not read more