Search Results for: Israel

Wars Cannot Be Both Planned and Avoided

Congress held an emergency meeting to defund NPR, and then did nothing as the President spent vastly more money on bombing Libya. President Obama didn’t have to ask for the funding, because the Pentagon had enough lying around for just such an occasion.

A fundamental lie that keeps war going is the idea that we avoid war by preparing for it. “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” said Theodore Roosevelt, who favored building a big military just in case, but of course not actually read more

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War Is Illegal – Even in Libya

It’s a simple point, but an important one, and one that gets overlooked. Whether or not you think a particular war is moral and good, the fact remains that war is illegal. Actual defense by a country when attacked is legal, but that only occurs once another country has actually attacked, and it must not be used as a loophole to excuse wider war that is not employed in actual defense.

Needless to say, a strong moral argument can be made for preferring the rule of law to the law of rulers. read more

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Clinton Wants More Propaganda; I Want Less

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has declared that other nations are doing a better job of propagandizing the world and that the United States needs to do more. However, we already invest far more in foreign propaganda than in domestic public media, and virtually nothing in domestic media trust busting. The distinction between our domestic and foreign public media is part of what makes them both so weak in credibility (the other part is the size of the lies they tell), and Bob McChesney is read more

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Why Wars Really Happen

Many discussions of lies that launch wars quickly come around to the question “Well then why did they want the war?” There is usually more than one single motive involved, but the motives are not terribly hard to find.

Unlike many soldiers who have been lied to, most of the key war deciders, the masters of war who determine whether or not wars happen, do not in any sense have noble motives for what they do. Though noble motives can be found in the reasoning of some of those involved, read more

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Humanitarian War vs. Humanity

The idea that wars are waged out of humanitarian concern may not at first appear even worthy of response. Wars kill humans. What can be humanitarian about that? But look at the sort of rhetoric that successfully sells new wars:

“This conflict started Aug. 2, when the dictator of Iraq invaded a small and helpless neighbor. Kuwait, a member of the Arab League and a member of the United Nations, was crushed, its people brutalized. Five months ago, Saddam Hussein started this cruel war against read more

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Nonviolent Activism Is Middle Eastern

Muslims can look back to the classic nonviolent struggle against British empire waged by the Pashtuns from 1930-1934 in what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan. The leadership of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan and the Khudai Khidmatgar movement makes every list of campaigns chronicling the development of modern nonviolent activism.

Nonviolence is also the dominant tool of resistance in the Middle East — resistance to local corruption and to foreign occupation alike. Nonviolence doesn’t make read more

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At Stake in Egypt: Reading Gaza Mom

The danger of permitting the Egyptians democracy, rather than replacing a dictator with his (and our) torturer lies, let us be honest, not in the possibility that Egyptian politics will approach the religiosity of our own Republican Party, and not in the possibility that the civil liberties we have helped deny Egyptians for decades won’t all be immediately established, and certainly not in the possibility that the Egyptians would commit collective suicide by attempting to attack the United read more

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Connect the Dots With David Swanson, Bob Edgar, Jeff Halper

CONNECT THE DOTS
Host: Lila Garrett
Monday morning 7AM to 8AM
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David Swanson, author of WAR IS A LIE brings us up to date on Bradley Manning, the 23 yr old Am. soldier who is still being tortured and held in solitary by the Marines for revealing American killings of innocent civilians. Is Bush’s secret government still in place?

Bob Edgar, President of Common Cause read more

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150 Leading Activists Oppose Obama for Democratic Nomination

Over 150 prominent activists, authors, and academics have launched a petition with a statement that begins:

“We the undersigned share with nearly two-thirds of our fellow Americans the conviction that our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should be ended and that overall military spending should be dramatically reduced.  This has been our position for years and will continue to be, and we take it seriously.  We vow not to support President Barack Obama for read more

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