A People’s Hymn
By David Swanson

From the Capitol in Madison
To the shores of Tripoli
We will fight the people’s battles
And we’ll fight them peacefully;
First we learn nonviolent tactics,
And we train before we start.
For our fight will be relentless,
We commit with all our heart.

Our flags unfurl to every breeze
From dawn to setting sun;
We will fight in every clime and place
And we’ll never touch a gun.
In the snow of far-off Northern lands
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From Afghanistan: We Support the People of Wisconsin and the World

We Afghans Are All Bouazizi
By Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers

Afghan youth are quietly encouraged by the Egyptian uprising because the people of Afghanistan want what the people of Egypt want.

We are all Bouazizi.

We want dignified livelihoods.

Dare any scientist prove to us that 30 years of wars and more to come will successfully bring us decent livelihoods? Dare any human being prove to us that mutual killings somehow bring men and read more

The idea that wars are waged out of humanitarian concern may not at first appear even worthy of response. Wars kill humans. What can be humanitarian about that? But look at the sort of rhetoric that successfully sells new wars:

“This conflict started Aug. 2, when the dictator of Iraq invaded a small and helpless neighbor. Kuwait, a member of the Arab League and a member of the United Nations, was crushed, its people brutalized. Five months ago, Saddam Hussein started this cruel war against read more

That was the argument made in a U.S. bestseller in 2009 written by a WWII historian whose father had raised the US flag on Iwo Jima. And the Roosevelt he had in mind was Teddy, not Franklin.

Needless to say, although countless people will say it quite angrily in my Email inbox in response to this article, you cannot simply blame an event on actions that occurred years before. A war is started by the people who start that war, in that instant, and there is no way for them to wiggle out of that read more

Michael Nagler tells this story:

“One of my close friends, David Hartsough, who is white, was sitting in with a small group of civil rights activists at a segregated lunch counter in Virginia in the early sixties. They had been sitting there without getting service for close to two days, harassed almost without letup by an increasingly angry crowd. As neither the sitters nor the proprietors backed down, tension increased. Suddenly David was jerked back off his stool and spun around by read more

When a satirist published a phony U.S. government report in 1967 that recommended against allowing peace to ever break out, most people seemed to fall for the prank. Members of the news media were either in on the joke or victims. The copy I have is marked up with a yellow highlighter by someone who grew angrier and angrier through the book’s pages. Toward the end, when the authors of the “report” advocated reviving slavery, the previous owner of my copy scrawled “BULL read more

Speaking of Sex: An interview with Christopher Ryan
by Barry F. Seidman and Arnell Dowret
The psychologist and co-author of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality looks at what the evidence says about humans’ “natural” state.

SPECIAL BOOK EXCERPT: War is A Lie
by David Swanson
“There has probably never been a war that hasn’t been explained as an absolutely necessary, inevitable, and unavoidable last resort.”

Making read more

If Bradley Manning turns out to be the hero he appears to be, he will not be the first “detained” at Quantico.

In fact, Quantico once locked up the most decorated Marine in history, a Marine who would have been running the Marine Corps rather than getting locked up by it if he had known how to brown-nose the swivel-chair commanders as he called them, a Marine who had helped create Quantico years before, the first senior officer in the U.S. military to be arrested in the 65 years following read more

David Swanson on military budget, Aram Roston on Bloomberg

CounterSpin (2/18/11-2/24/11)
 

Listen: [mp3] [RealAudio not avalailable] Note: Please feel free to download the mp3 by right-clicking the mp3 link and choose the “Save Target As” function. This week on CounterSpin: The federal budget is big news this week, but while your hearing all the calls for cuts, cuts and more cuts, ask yourself, what isn’t considered an acceptable target for substantive reductions? Here’s a hint: it accounts for more than half of the country’s public spending. We’ll talk about the budget with activist and author David Swanson.

Also on CounterSpin today, public interest groups and media activists of all stripes lined up to oppose the Comcast-NBC merger. And among the coalition of anti-merger activists was… Bloomberg, the media company owned by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. So what did they want? And did they get it? Journalist Aram Roston took a read more

In the wake of WMD-liar Curveball’s videotaped confession, Colin Powell is demanding to know why nobody warned him about Curveball’s unreliability. The trouble is, they did.

Can you imagine having an opportunity to address the United Nations Security Council about a matter of great global importance, with all the world’s media watching, and using it to… well, to make shit up – to lie with a straight face, and with a CIA director propped up behind you, I mean to spew one world-class, read more