Leslie Cockburn’s 8-Minute View of the World

Our VA-05 Democratic Party nominee for Congress Leslie Cockburn has a website that does not admit to the existence of the world, mention foreign policy, outline a basic budget, oppose or support any wars, or propose or denounce any treaties, international bodies, acts of diplomacy or aid. Her campaign has declined to answer any questions related to the 60% or so of the budget she wants to oversee that currently goes to militarism.

But she spoke publicly on Tuesday, together with Larry Wilkerson, read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Debate on Is War Ever Justified PART II

A Debate: Is War Ever Justifiable?

Pete Kilner and David Swanson

Pete Kilner is a writer and military ethicist who served more than 28 years in the Army as an infantryman and professor at the U.S. Military Academy. He deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan to conduct research on combat leadership. A graduate of West Point, he holds an MA in Philosophy from Virginia Tech and a Ph.D. in Education from Penn State.

David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Debate on Is War Ever Justified

A Debate: Is War Ever Justifiable?

Pete Kilner and David Swanson

Pete Kilner is a writer and military ethicist who served more than 28 years in the Army as an infantryman and professor at the U.S. Military Academy. He deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan to conduct research on combat leadership. A graduate of West Point, he holds an MA in Philosophy from Virginia Tech and a Ph.D. in Education from Penn State.

David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio read more

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Murder Incorporated

Murder Incorporated is a three-book series by Mumia Abu Jamal and Stephen Vittoria, which I can highly recommend based on the first book. The other two are not out yet.

Book One, “Dreaming of Empire,” is a critique of U.S. imperialism, a debunking of U.S. nationalist myths, a corrective or alternative history of the U.S. nation. Politically, a book like this would never be permitted in U.S. schools, and it’s clearly not aimed at clearing that hurdle. It uses curse words, which read more

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Why Are the Poor Patriotic?

We should be very grateful to Francesco Duina for his new book, Broke and Patriotic: Why Poor Americans Love Their Country. He begins with the following dilemma. The poor in the United States are in many ways worse off than in other wealthy countries, but they are more patriotic than are the poor in those other countries and even more patriotic than are wealthier people in their own country. Their country is (among wealthy countries) tops in inequality, and bottoms in social support, read more

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What Else Canadians Should Be Sorry For — Besides Burning the White House

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War

Six-years after the British landing at Jamestown, with the settlers struggling to survive and hardly managing to get their own local genocide underway, these new Virginians hired mercenaries to attack Acadia and (fail to) drive the French out of what they considered their continent.

The colonies that would become the United States decided to take over Canada in 1690 (and failed, again).

They got the British to help them in 1711 (and failed, yet again).

General Braddock read more

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Sweden’s Military Madness

The government of Sweden has reinstated the military draft and sent a war propaganda brochure to all Swedes promoting fear, Russophobia, and warlike thinking.

While my last name comes from Sweden, I’m writing this in the United States and will no doubt be obliged to acknowledge that the militarist threat from tiny Sweden hardly compares with that of the Pentagon. While Sweden is fifth in dealing weaponry to poor countries and ninth in dealing read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Thomas Linzey on the Rights of Ecosystems vs. the Rights of Corporations

Thomas Linzey is an attorney and the Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF) – a nonprofit law firm that has provided free legal services to over five hundred local governments and nonprofit organizations since 1995. He is a cum laude graduate of Widener Law School and a three-time recipient of the law school’s public interest law award. He has been a finalist for the Ford Foundation’s Leadership for a Changing World Award, and is a recipient of the Pennsylvania read more

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Let’s Continue Progress Toward Peace in Korea

Less than a year ago, President Donald Trump was threatening North Korea with “fire and fury.”

Today such threats are completely absent from his remarks and tweets.

Today Trump said, “We will be stopping the war games . . . I think it’s very provocative.” This move has been a central proposal in the People’s Peace Treaty and other petitions read more

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The World According to Seymour Hersh

Seymour Hersh’s new memoir, Reporter: A Memoir, occasionally notes the failure of the exposure of wrong-doing to result in accountability or policy reforms. That’s the closest the book generally comes to touching on any motivation behind Hersh’s work related to ending war or torture or any other evil. The exception is the bit about Hersh’s time working for Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign. In 1960, in Chapter 3, Hersh joins the U.S. Army without one read more

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