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Tolstoy said the Doukhobors belonged to the 25th century. He was talking about a group of people who have traditions of refusing to take part in war, refusing to eat or harm animals or put animals to work, engaging in communal sharing of resources and communal approaches to work, gender equality, and letting deeds speak in place of words — not to mention using nudity as a form of nonviolent protest.

You can see how such people might have run into trouble in a Russian empire or the read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, January 17, 2022

In a new, very U.S., very academic book by Alexander Downes called Catastrophic Success: Why Foreign Imposed Regime Change Goes Wrong, the immorality of overthrowing other people’s governments cannot be found. The illegality of it seemingly does not exist. The fact that attempted overthrows often fail, and that those failures can have catastrophic results, doesn’t enter into it. But successful government overthrows — the focus read more

I think millions of people who identify as Democrats mean well. I think a number of Congressional progressive Democrats generally do their best in the system they’re working in. I think identifying as a Republican is even more inexcusably immoral than ever. I also think the central excuses used by the leadership of the Democratic Party for its failure over the past year to do most of what it campaigned on in 2020 are as believable as the existence of Iraq’s WMDs or Trump’s pee read more

By David Swanson

The full extent of Russia’s lunacy is hidden from us by a considerate Western press careful of our delicate sensibilities. The demands that Russia made back in December read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, January 10, 2022

You’d hardly guess it from all the silent acceptance of war as a legal enterprise and all the chatter about ways to supposedly keep war legal through the reform of particular atrocities, but there are international treaties that make wars and even the threat of war illegal, national constitutions that make wars and various activities that facilitate wars illegal, and laws that make killing illegal with no exceptions for the use of missiles read more

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 read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, December 14, 20

Ya gotta love how the U.S. media annually freaks out about a “war on Christmas” by which it means something completely unrelated to any wars, while the U.S. military always has several actual wars going on Christmas, the same as every other day. Perhaps especially on Christmas, as George Washington’s slaughter of drunk and sleeping British soldiers on Christmas 1776 has been rendered so “special” that it’s claimed read more

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. read more

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, read more

Image from Mapping Militarism.

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, November 2, 2021

U.S. presidential election campaigns have been known to focus on the slogan “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Efforts to explain the behavior of the U.S. government ought to put a little more focus on a different slogan, found in the headline above.

Andrew Cockburn’s fantastic new book, The Spoils of War: Power, Profit, and the American War Machine, builds a case that U.S. foreign policy read more