Search Results for: russiagate

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 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. U.S. media is dominated by Donald Trump and how he’s out of power at the moment. All is just going swimmingly in the steady march of freedom and goodness. If you pay no attention to the little man behind the 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

The most well-known problem with lesser-evil, two-party, winner-take-all elections, at least in a system of legalized bribery and corporate-state media, is the absence of virtually any really good candidates. Naturally this results in (or is at least one major cause of) the tendency of many to not vote at all — with the United States claiming a lower voter turnout than many other countries it loves to look down on.

But the most serious problem is the tendency of those voters who do vote to read more

By David Swanson, Remarks for Peace and Justice Works, June 24, 2021

Thank you for inviting me. I’d like to speak briefly and spend a good deal of time on Q&A. I’d like to start by considering this question: If it’s true that madness is more common in societies than individuals, and if the society we live in is aggressively hastening (as I think is well-established) climate collapse, ecosystem devastation, wealth inequality, and institutional corruption (in other words, processes read more

By David Swanson, March 21, 2021
Remarks at the Cold War Truth Commission

The Cold War didn’t have a hard and fast beginning that transformed the world or that turned heroic anti-Nazi Soviets into Satanic Commies on a particular afternoon.

The rise of Nazism had been facilitated in part by Western governments’ pre-existing enmity for the USSR. That same enmity was a factor in the delay of D-Day by 2.5 years. The destruction of Dresden was a message originally scheduled for the same day read more

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, February 26, 2021

The USA Today, drawing on the work of the Cost of War Project, Quincy Institute, David Vine, William Hartung, and others, has gone beyond the limits of every other big corporate U.S. media outlet, and beyond what any member of the U.S. Congress has done, in a big new series of articles on wars, bases, and militarism.

There are significant shortcomings, some of them (such as absurdly low estimates of deaths and financial costs) originating with read more

There’s a webinar on these topics tonight. Join in.

1. Victories that are only partial are not fictional.

When a ruler, like Biden, finally announces the end of a war, like the war on Yemen, it is as important to recognize what it does mean as what it doesn’t. It doesn’t mean the U.S. military and U.S.-made weapons will vanish from the region or be replaced by actual aid or reparations (as opposed to “lethal aid” — a product that’s usually high on people’s read more

One of the many things we must rightly demand of the incoming U.S. government is the abandonment of rogue status, the serious participation in treaties, a cooperative and productive relationship with the rest of the world.

We’ve all heard about the Iran agreement, which ought to be re-joined and made into a treaty — and sanctions ought to be ended. Biden can do this alone, except for the ending sanctions part.

We’ve all heard about the Paris climate agreement, which ought to be read more

A report by David Swanson for RootsAction.org

November 24, 2020

In 2020 Congressional elections, 78 percent of Democratic candidates’ campaign websites informed the visitor of some sort of policy platform. These varied in length and depth, but many contained substantive proposals on dozens of issues. However, only 29 percent included foreign policy as one of the topics discussed. While militarism alone takes up over read more