This evening, February 9, 2015, a handful of visitors from the land to the north asked an assistant (or “instructional” which I take to be a step below “assistant”) professor of philosophy about his studies and his teaching experiences here in Cuba. One of our group made the mistake of asking whether this philosopher thought of Fidel as a philosopher. The result was an almost Fidel-length response that had little to do with philosophy and everything to do with criticizing
We arrived in Havana tonight, February 8, 2015, or year 56 of the revolution, 150 of us filling an entire airplane, a group of U.S. peace and justice activists organized by CODEPINK. The place is hot and beautiful despite the rain.
The buildings, the cars, the sidewalks look as if time stopped in 1959. The tour guide on the bus from the airport to the hotel brags that the municipality around the airport has a psychiatric hospital and a spaghetti factory. Both the billboards and the tour guide fit
I hope to travel to Cuba in February with CodePink and to report on U.S.-Cuban relations. To do so I need to raise the funds fast to pay for the trip. If the funds come in, I’ll go, and I’ll publish what I report in various outlets as well as at https://davidswanson.org
Please chip in what you can here http://bit.ly/1JXNGqQ
Please spread the word whether you can personally help or not, on Facebook and Twitter.
Thanks! Peace! Happier New Year Than the Last!
Send Me to Cuba to Report on U.S.-Cuba Relations Read More »
By World BEYOND War, March 4, 2024
Since 1972, the U.S. government has been far and away the leading user of the veto in the UN Security Council, often blocking the will of every or nearly every other national government on Earth. It has vetoed U.N. condemnation of South African apartheid, Israel’s wars and occupations, chemical and biological weapons, nuclear weapons proliferation and first use and use against non-nuclear nations, U.S. wars in Nicaragua and Grenada and Panama, the
BDS The U.S. — The World Must Hold the U.S. Government to the Rule of Law Read More »
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, January 26, 2024
The International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel must cease its warmaking in Gaza — cease committing and inciting genocidal acts — and that the case charging Israel with genocide must proceed.
DETAILS OF THE RULING:
This is Article 2 of the Genocide Convention:
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as
International Court of Justice Rules That Israel Must Stop Killing Palestinians Read More »
People’s willingness to get upset about evidence-free allegations of rapes by Hamas is not purely because people rightly condemn rape but also because the topic distracts from condemning open shameless public mass-murder which happens to be even worse than rape.
All the attention going to which idiots are supposedly protesting Jewish restaurants or murdering Palestinian college students is not due purely to wanting to place blame correctly but also to valuing any topic that’s not the
Pearl Harbor Goes on Killing and Will Until We Don’t Want It To Read More »
Many of us have called wars like those on Iraq and Afghanistan by the name “wars” or sometimes the name “occupation,” but the current war on Gaza by the name “genocide.” They’ve all been extremely one-sided slaughters of mostly civilians — thus far the latest violence in Gaza the least one-sided of those three. But two of them were U.S. wars and one of them an Israeli war that couldn’t happen without U.S. weapons, U.S. vetoes at the UN, etc. And those running the wars talk differently.
There Is No Right Side in War Read More »
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, November 12, 2023
AUDIO:
VIDEO:
TEXT:
Nothing in my lifetime has done more to increase the risk of nuclear apocalypse than the war in Ukraine. Nothing is doing more to impede global cooperation on climate, poverty, or homelessness. Few things are doing as much direct damage in those areas, devastating the environment, disrupting grain
Video of Debate on Ukraine in Madison Wisconsin on November 12 Read More »
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, November 11, 2023
Remarks at Veterans For Peace event in Iowa City, Iowa, November 11, 2023
On December 2nd the Monroe Doctrine will turn 200. That is, it will be 200 years from the day President James Monroe made a speech from which years later politicians and pundits excerpted some paragraphs and labeled them the Monroe Doctrine. If the purpose was to allow a privileged clique the power to lawlessly create policy and elevate it above all actual laws, it worked.
A Global Monroe Doctrine Needs a Global Armistice Read More »
By David Swanson, November 6, 2023
Remarks at Cambridge, Mass., November 6, 2023
If we think of the U.S. arming of genocidal colonial violence in Israel as an anachronistic throwback, we’re not wrong, but there’s something we’re missing. If we want to understand why a bill to fund four wars at once is likely to find less, rather than more, opposition in the U.S. Congress, there’s something we should understand about the past, about how we got here.
If we want to know how war
The Monroe Doctrine and the Roots of U.S. Hegemony Read More »
