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Obama in Hiroshima Paints a Peace Sign on a Bomb

President Obama went to Hiroshima, did not apologize, did not state the facts of the matter (that there was no justification for the bombings there and in Nagasaki), and did not announce any steps to reverse his pro-nuke policies (building more nukes, putting more nukes in Europe, defying the nonproliferation treaty, opposing a ban treaty, upholding a first-strike policy, spreading nuclear energy far and wide, demonizing Iran and North Korea, antagonizing Russia, etc.).

Where Obama is usually credited read more

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"Looking Forward" Comes to Hiroshima

Never mind an apology, Obama should admit the truth

By David Swanson, TeleSUR

Since before he entered the White House, Barack Obama has proposed handling past crimes by powerful people and entities through a policy called “looking forward” — in other words, by ignoring them. While President Obama has targeted whistleblowers with retribution and more prosecutions than his predecessors, deported more immigrants, and kept the lights on in Guantanamo, anyone responsible for war or read more

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Will You Join Me in Voting for Neither Trump Nor Clinton?

I’m committing to not vote for Clinton or Trump, and you can do the same.

The Democratic Party’s undemocratic primaries are not over, and nobody has won them. It is entirely possible that Hillary Clinton will not be nominated for any office. That doesn’t prevent us from going ahead and committing to never vote for either her or Donald Trump for president of the United States.

Making this commitment could send a badly needed message to the world: There are people in the United States read more

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Top 12 Reasons the Good War Was Bad: Hiroshima in Context

By David Swanson, American Herald Tribune

Consider this a friendly reminder to President Obama on his way to Hiroshima.

No matter how many years one writes books, does interviews, publishes columns, and speaks at events, it remains virtually impossible to make it out the door of an event in the United States at which you’ve advocated abolishing war without somebody hitting you with the what-about-the-good-war question.

Of course this belief that there was a good war 75 years ago is what moves read more

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Building a War Abolition / Peace Movement

By David Swanson for Peace Fresno

At least ninety percent of humanity is represented by governments that wage war much less than the U.S. government. Over ninety-nine percent of people in the United States are not in the military. There has never been a single case of PTSD from war deprivation. The largest cause of death in members of the U.S. military is suicide. War supporters can try to claim that hunter-gatherers waged wars despite the lack of evidence, or that chimpanzees wage read more

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Seymour Hersh Erases Public's Role on Syria

By David Swanson, American Herald Tribune

We once again owe the great reporter Seymour Hersh a serious debt for his reporting, in this case for his London Review of Books articles on President Barack Obama’s war making, now published as a book called The Killing of Osama bin Laden. Despite the title, three of the four articles are about Syria.

But there is a shortcoming in how Hersh tells history, as in how many reporters do. I’ve watched Hersh do interviews about the topic on Democracy read more

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The Trump Doctrine

By David Swanson, American Herald Tribune

Here’s a condensed version of Donald Trump’s recent speech that I’m considering offering on gold-ish plating for $19.98:

Nationalism, World War II mythology, and militarism must go unquestioned. But when they’ve been used in the past 25 years the results have been disastrous. We’re all ready now to admit that Iraq was a horror, and we can do that more comfortably by lumping it with the horrors of Libya and Syria, and by pretending read more

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What Is a Global Citizen, and Can it Save Us?

Headlines this past week claimed that for the first time ever more than half of poll respondents around the world said they saw themselves more as a global citizen than as a citizen of a country. What did they mean in saying that?

Well, first of all, to lower the heart-rate of U.S. readers, we should state that they clearly did not mean that they were aware of a secret global government to which they had sworn loyalty until the Dark Side crushes all light from the Force, or until Mom, apple pie, read more

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A Pro- and Anti-War Dialogue

Anti-War Advocate: Is there a case that can be made for war?

Pro-War Advocate: Well, yes. In a word: Hitler!

Anti-War Advocate: Is “Hitler!” a case for future wars? Let me suggest some reasons why I think it isn’t. First, the world of the 1940s is gone, its colonialism and imperialism replaced by other varieties, its absence of nuclear weapons replaced by their ever-present threat. No matter how many people you call “Hitler,” none of them is Hitler, none of read more

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Psst. Slip This Onto Obama's Teleprompter in Hiroshima

Thank you. Thank you for welcoming me to this hallowed ground, given meaning like the fields of Gettysburg by those who died here, far more than any speech can pretend to add.

Those deaths, here and in Nagasaki, those hundreds of thousands of lives taken in a pair of fiery nuclear infernos, were the entire point. After 70 years of lying about this, let me be clear, the purpose of dropping the bombs was dropping the bombs. The more deaths the better. The bigger the explosion, the bigger the destruction, read more

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