Let's Try Democracy

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 25, 2023

Yesterday I published Dear Russia-Had-No-Choice Friends, an attempt to correct what I see as the mistaken idea that the Russian government simply had no possible choice other than to invade Ukraine.

Of course, it is equally mistaken that Ukraine had no choice but to wage this war. I say “of course” only because I and many others have been repeating ourselves ad read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 24, 2023

Here’s a terrible “syllogism” from a wonderful person, Ray McGovern, longtime CIA employee, then longtime peace activist, and now year-long contender that Russia had no choice but to attack Ukraine.

“The Russians had other options to invading Ukraine.
They attacked Ukraine in a ‘war of choice’; also threaten NATO.
Ergo, the West must arm Ukraine to the teeth, risking wider war.”

This is supposedly an explanation of the thinking of we read more

Hey, Montenegro has a new flag, and few people in the U.S. could find Montenegro on a map. What’s wrong with this picture?

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 23, 2023

According to the following tweets by the Montenegran military, the Maine National Guard and Brigadier General Dean A. Preston are not “guarding” Maine or the nation Maine is in. The Maine National Guard is not even anywhere near the United States.

Instead, the Maine National Guard is helping to turn a beautiful read more

Remarks in New York City, May 21, 2023

About a year-and-a-half before I was born down in midtown, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech up at Riverside Church called Beyond Vietnam. “A nation that continues year after year,” he said, “to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.” He was well aware that the military was not being used in defense, but the language of war acceptance was by that point well-established. read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 20, 2023

Remarks at Liberty State Park in New Jersey on May 20, 2023, with Veterans For Peace’s The Golden Rule and Pax Christi New Jersey.

A lot of things go wrong, but sometimes things go right.

The Statue of Liberty is an example of things going right. Not because there was ever a golden age of perfect kindness and intelligence that wasn’t chock full of bigotry and hypocrisy, but because such a statue with such words on it could not be created today. read more

Go to 1:07:44.

I discussed counting war dead with Ted Rall and Manila Chan on The Final Countdown on Sputnik.

Of course I can only touch on one aspect of recent history here.

I’m looking at the new report from Costs of War.

Five years ago, I think Nicolas Davies credibly and conservatively estimated 6 million people directly killed in U.S. wars since 2001 in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and Somalia.

What Costs of War has now done is to go with the highly dubious but corporate-respectable estimate of 900,000 directly killed in all of those wars, but leaving out Libya and Somalia. read more