War Abolition and the Ukraine Problem

Remarks at The Columbus Free Press Annual Awards Dinner, November 9, 2023
Remarks at The Columbus Free Press Annual Awards Dinner, November 9, 2023
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, September 9, 2023
Remarks for second session of Kateri Peace Conference, September 9, 2023
Two hundred years ago this coming December, a local boy from my town gave a speech. In the years that followed pundits and politicians took an excerpt of that speech, carved it in marble, lit it with eternal white phosphorus bombs, and prayed to it before every shareholders meeting. They named it the Monroe Doctrine. It created the model, used ever more frequently up to
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, February 5, 2023
David Swanson is the author of the new book The Monroe Doctrine at 200 and What to Replace It With.
The Monroe Doctrine was first discussed under that name as justification for the U.S. war on Mexico that moved the western U.S. border south, swallowing up the present-day states of California, Nevada, and Utah, most of New Mexico, Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming. By no means was that as far south as some
The task before the United States is to end its Monroe Doctrine, and to end it not only in Latin America but globally, and to not only end it but to replace it with the positive actions of joining the world as a law-abiding member.
The Jan. 6 hearings are clearly running over a month. Let’s call it a month. There are many countries in which the U.S. has organized, facilitated, or supported one or more coup attempts. Let’s count each country just once. And let’s go back only to the year 2000. Here’s a list of countries and the dates of attempted or successful overthrows. An asterick indicates success:
Yugoslavia 1999-2000 *
Ecuador 2000 *
Afghanistan 2001 *
Venezuela 2002 * and 2018,
Supposedly the election of Joe Biden to the White House was the first U.S. election marred in any serious way — marred by Republicans, members of the military, and clownish rioters at the Capitol. While I wish Democrats also cared about keeping any of the promises they were elected on, I don’t think they take what happened on and about January 6, 2021, too seriously — quite the reverse. But I don’t think there was a pristine election system to be marred.
Democrats themselves
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, December 28, 2021
Thom Hartmann has written an enormous number of great books, and the latest is no exception. It’s called The Hidden History of Big Brother in America: How the Death of Privacy and the Rise of Surveillance Threaten Us and Our Democracy. Thom is not the least bit xenophobic, paranoid, or war-inclined. He dishes out criticism — most of it clearly well-merited — to numerous governments including the one in Washington, D.C. Yet I think
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, December 17, 2021
I’ve been reading a book called Whistleblowing for Change, edited by Tatiana Bazzichelli, a beautifully put-together volume with numerous articles about whistleblowing, about art and whistleblowing, and about building a culture of whistleblowing: of supporting whistleblowers, and of making better known the outrages they’ve blown the whistle on. I want to focus here on the sections of this book written by whistleblowers (or in one
By David Swanson, Remarks on Free Press Webinar on December 11, 2021
The glory of Pearl Harbor Day still lingered yesterday on Human Rights Day with a Democracy Summit wrapping up and Nobel So-Called Peace Prize laureates talking about U.S. government-approved and -funded journalism.
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, December 2, 2021
The exclusion of certain countries from the U.S. “democracy summit” is not a side issue. It is the very purpose of the summit. And excluded countries have not been excluded for failing to meet the standards of behavior of those that were invited or the one doing the inviting. Invitees didn’t even have to be countries, as even a U.S. backed failed coup leader from Venezuela has been invited. So have representatives of Israel, Iraq, Pakistan,