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

Al Mytty in Illinois during webinar for which these remarks were prepared.

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 12, 2023

We very much need World BEYOND War educational and activist events and campaigns in Illinois (and every other location). We also need the people of Illinois (and every other location on Earth) as part of the global movement to end war.

I say that having been in Chicago many times and at least once to Carbondale. Interstate 64 which comes by my house also cuts through Illinois, read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 11, 2023

“Putting aside all the fancy words and academic doubletalk, the basic reason for having a military is to do two jobs — to kill people and to destroy.” — Thomas S. Power

The photo above was taken yesterday. The flowers are in bloom in the mountain pastures of Sinjajevina. And the U.S. military is on its way to trample them and practice destroying things. What did these beautiful sheep-herding families in this European mountain paradise do to read more

It’s been two years since I wrote on this topic. At that time, at least 36% of U.S. mass shooters had been trained by the U.S. military. Since then, a grand total of nobody at all has written on the topic.

I’m picking it up again, because people have started asking about it, prompted by a former Marine using apparently trained skills to murder a subway rider in New York, and shooters in Atlanta and Texas actually being identified as veterans in news reports — an extreme rarity.

However, read more