Search Results for: ukraine

(a current image of the house that the McNamara’s lived in in Washington DC)

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, June 15, 2022

Pretty much anything that complicates the story of a person is a good corrective to the tendency to simplify and caricature. So, one has to welcome Craig McNamara’s book, Because Our Fathers Lied: A Memoir of Truth and Family, from Vietnam to Today. Craig’s father, Robert McNamara was Secretary of War (“Defense”) for much of the war on Vietnam. He’d read more

1. Nukes are the “tough on crime” of foreign policy

Investing in children’s welfare and education costs less and reduces more crime than “tough on crime” policies which are often counterproductive, but voters in San Francisco just obeyed a bunch of corporate advertising and recalled a District Attorney because he had reduced crime rather than being “tough on crime.” Nuclear weapons cost tens of billions of dollars a year, plus the costs of the airplanes, read more

Spain, Thailand, Germany, Japan, Netherlands — The word has gone out that every government can buy a lot more weapons with either no debate at all or with all debate shut down by a single word: Russia. Do a web search for “weapons buying” and you’ll find story after story about U.S. residents solving their personal problems the way their government does. But search for the secret code words “defense spending” and the headlines look like a united global community of nations each doing read more

By David Swanson

Everyone should get in the streets of Washington DC for the event planned by the Poor People’s Campaign on June 18 — if not sooner.

In a normal country, the streets would long since have been packed, government offices surrounded, public squares occupied, and change demanded. The U.S. — and the world with it — is suffering severely from unrepresentative government, the hoarding of wealth by a tiny group of overlords, the devastation of the Earth’s climate read more

By David Swanson

Public support for the obliteration of all life on Earth is growing despite every effort of the corrupt liberal media.

According to Pew, 36% of Republicans and 35% of Democrats favor U.S. warmaking even if it risks nuclear war with Russia. Obviously the main conclusion from such numbers needs to be that Republicans are the entire problem. But, read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 20, 2022

I know I should consider myself lucky to have located anybody at all in the United States who opposes the latest $40 billion “for Ukraine.” But from both the right and the left, those who oppose it almost universally express resentment of spending money “on Ukraine” instead of keeping that money in the US of A or spending it on “Americans.”

The first problem with this is a factual one. The vast majority of that money will never leave the read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 6, 2022

When we doubt that swift and dramatic change is possible, what we really mean is that we haven’t seen much swift and dramatic change for the better lately. There’s actually no disputing that massive and almost instant change is perfectly possible. For example, in a matter of days, the unified voices of virtually every television network, newspaper, news website, and entertainment outlet in the United States took millions of people without a thought read more

By David Swanson

I set out to meet people where they are. But where are they?

I found some of them at the nearby organic vegan fairtrade coffeeshop. I asked them what they thought of Ukraine. We exchanged ideas and outraged lamentations for a few cappuccini, and came up with a short statement that we thought we could all agree with and that was more peaceful than they would have proposed on their own. I offer it here as a model for peace groups to consider:

“The maximum possible quantity and read more

The madness of militarism is a collective madness. Nobody catches it from a single exposure. The repetition that makes anything else unthinkable makes the insane acceptable — and not just acceptable but righteous.

The Poor People’s Campaign sent around an email on Saturday with language that could have been churned out by anyone anywhere on the U.S. political spectrum, from the most extreme rightwing warmongers to the warmongers of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. It was signed read more