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

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 10, 2023

It’s so inspiring that the Canadian military asked the public what it could change to get people to be willing to join. The obvious U.S. answer of poverty and grotesque prices for education probably won’t work — or at least may not be sufficient in the near term. And people would probably read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 5, 2023

The Golden Rule is a beautiful boat. I’ve been on it in San Diego. It’s also an important boat. It set sail in 1958 to stop nuclear testing in the atmosphere, and inspired many peace makers and peace ships that followed. The restored Golden Rule is voyaging once more, sailed by Veterans For Peace, to show that a nuclear peace is possible, and that bravery and tenacity can overcome militarism.

I’m planning to greet the Golden Rule and read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 5, 2023

Remarks from May 4th webinar with Green Party Peace Action Committee; Peoples Network for Planet, Justice & Peace; Green Party of Ohio 

I’m going to be brief and generalize and give some tentative conclusions in order to fit into 10 minutes what I think happened in Vietnam and what I think are some of the key lessons for peacemaking now from peacemaking at the time of what the Vietnamese call the American War.

I think that the U.S. public has read more

By David Swanson, May 2, 2023

Can you test yourself with this quick quiz?

A picture can be worth a trillion words — or a couple of trillion dollars when it’s a picture of military spending.

We’ve just published a new collection of maps for Mapping Militarism 2023. As always, they are at worldbeyondwar.org/militarism-mapped and available read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 1, 2023

Much of the southern half of the world is a nuclear-free zone. But what if you live in the northern half and under a national government that adores militarism and couldn’t possibly care less what you think?

Well, you can make your town or county or city a nuclear-free zone.

Tom Charles of Veterans For Peace, Chapter #35, in Spokane, Washington reports:

“On Nov. 7, 2022, our City Council passed an Ordinance that made our city nuclear-free read more

Orbis Books has published a short book called Ukraine Diary by Henri J.M. Nouwen with an introduction by Borys Gudziak, a preface by Robert Ellsberg, and an afterword by Laurent Nouwen. The diary itself was written in the 1990s and deemed unworthy of publication. Now Ukraine is a hot news story. The preface, introduction, and afterword were written just recently and all in perfect harmony with the Western propaganda in which all that is wrong with the world emanates from Russia. The book read more