We’re hearing a lot about U.S. veterans being deported, just as we hear about healthcare and retirement and homelessness and countless other topics as impacting veterans in particular. The implication, and often the explicit assertion, is that we should especially care about injustice when it hurts veterans, because they’ve especially earned the right to be treated decently, by participating in the greatest mass-murdering crime sprees of recent decades — the wars that most of read more

Here’s what the New York Post has to say about my new book, Curing Exceptionalism:

“Exceptional idiocy

“David Swanson touts his book, ‘Curing Exceptionalism,’ in a press release where he claims American Exceptionalism is ‘no less harmful than racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry. The purpose of this book is to persuade you of that statement.’

“No thanks.”

“

In forming his opinion prior to reading the book, using “no thanks” read more

The U.S. Senate voted down, 55 to 44, a bill co-sponsored by Bernie Sanders that would have ended U.S. involvement in the Saudi Arabia-led war against Yemen. However, veteran anti-war activist David Swanson saw the action as a sign of progress, given that the Senate has never conducted such a vote based on the War Powers Act. Swanson, publisher of the influential web site WarIsACrime.org and director of World Beyond War, has found that Americans “around the country think that read more

It’s hard not to focus on the fact that Trump has picked the 100th anniversary of the first Armistice Day celebration for his weaponry parade (more on that below). But there was another parade a month and a half before the armistice that cries out for comparison because of its remarkable stupidity. I’m thinking of the Liberty Loan Parade in Philadelphia:

This was a parade to squeeze more money out of people to pay for war, to celebrate patrioti-nationali-militarism, and to reject fake news. read more

“Imagining that Donald Trump can’t do something worse each day than the day before has been doomed to failure since long before John Bolton’s appointment,” said David Swanson, director of World BEYOND War. “But this one is stunning. Trump just nominated an advocate of overthrows, religious wars, and strenuous avoidance of peace to head the State Department, and simultaneously found someone even worse, a sadistic torturer, to nominate for the top job at the CIA. How do you top that? With read more

Tuesday’s debate and vote in the U.S. Senate on whether to end (technically whether or not to vote on whether to end) U.S. participation in the war on Yemen can certainly be presented as a step forward. While 55 U.S. Senators voted to keep the war rolling along, 44 voted read more

Exactly at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, in 1918, people across Europe suddenly stopped shooting guns at each other. Up until that moment, they were killing and taking bullets, falling and screaming, moaning and dying. Then they stopped, on schedule. It wasn’t that they’d gotten tired or come to their senses. Both before and after 11 o’clock they were simply following orders. The Armistice agreement that ended World War I had set 11 o’clock as quitting time. Henry Nicholas read more