Search Results for: Russia

It takes two sides, each blaming the other entirely, and each refusing to recognize its own actions, to start a war. If NATO expansion, U.S. State Department interference, Western financial pressures and weapons basing plans are erased from recent history, trouble in the Ukraine can more easily all be blamed on Russia. We must face facts and hold accountable the government over which we have some control. We stopped missiles into Syria. We stopped a push for war on Iran. We can and must stop this read more

War activists, like peace activists, push for an agenda.  We don’t think of them as activists because they rotate in and out of government positions, receive huge amounts of funding, have access to big media, and get meetings with top officials just by asking — without having to generate a protest first. 

They also display great contempt for the public and openly discuss ways to manipulate people through fear and nationalism — further shifting their image away from that read more

Accepted wisdom in U.S. culture, despite overwhelming evidence, holds that the two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan shortened World War II and saved more lives than the some 200,000 lives they took away.

And yet, weeks before the first bomb was dropped, on July 13, 1945, Japan sent a telegram to the Soviet Union expressing its desire to surrender and end the war. The United States had broken Japan’s codes and read the telegram. U.S. President Harry Truman referred in his diary to “the read more

People from Yemen and Pakistan and elsewhere have told me, and have testified in the U.S. Congress, that they have a hard time convincing their neighbors that everyone in the United States doesn’t hate them.  There are buzzing killer robots flying over their houses night and day and every now and then blowing a bunch of people up with a missile with very little rhyme or reason that anyone nearby can decipher.  They don’t know where to go or not go, what to do or not do, to read more

It is absolutely appropriate to condem Russian militarism in the Crimea. I recently did so on Russian TV and was yelled at for my trouble. But it must be noted that:
 
1. The United States promised Russia years ago that NATO would not expand “an inch” eastward (see account by President Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the USSR in the New York Times of April 20, 1999);

2. NATO has rapidly expanded eastward (having already added the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, read more

I’ve been asked to debate Danny Postel on the question of Syria, and so have read the op-ed he co-authored with Nader Hashemi, “Use Force to Save Starving Syrians.”  Excellent responses have been published by Coleen Rowley and Rob read more

Annie Jacobsen’s new book is called Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program That Brought Nazi Scientists to America.  It isn’t terribly secret anymore, of course, and it was never very intelligent.  Jacobsen has added some details, and the U.S. government is still hiding many more.  But the basic facts have been available; they’re just left out of most U.S. history books, movies, and television programs.

After World War II, the U.S. military hired sixteen read more

Originally published by the Times Record
http://www.timesrecord.com/news/2014-02-07/Commentary/Do_more_to_prevent_war.html

BY DAVID SWANSON, GUEST COLUMN

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There exists, I suppose, some slight chance of this one making it into the State of the Union address, no doubt in a distorted, bellicose, and xenophobic disguise.  Typically, there’s no chance of any announcement at all. 

We’re stopping another war.

There are a million qualifications that need to be put on that statement.  None of them render it false.  A bill looked likely to move through Congress that would have imposed new sanctions on Iran, shredded the negotiated read more