Peace and War

Many of you know the dedicated peace and justice activist John Judge. He has had a stroke and is in the hospital in need of help.

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

Remarkably, the U.S. Army War College has published a report (PDF) that makes an overwhelming case against enlisting in the U.S. Army.  The report, called “Civilian Organizational Inhibitors to U.S. Army Recruiting and the Road Ahead,” identifies counter-recruitment organizations that effectively discourage young people from joining the military. 

This is the highest honor the Army could give these groups, including Quaker House, the Mennonite Central Committee, Iraq Veterans read more

David Swanson from the Coordinating Committee of WorldBeyondWar.org will be visiting London from the United States on July 2nd before heading up to speak in Northern England with CAAB.org.uk on the Fourth of July.  Swanson is an author whose books include: War No More: The Case for Abolition (2013), War Is A Lie (2010), When the World Outlawed War (2011), and The Military Industrial Complex at 50 (2012). See https://davidswanson.org

LONDON:
July 2, 2014, 8:00 p.m., Conway 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

Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus, who lived from October 27, 1466, to July 12, 1536, faced censorship in his day, and has never been as popular among the rich and powerful as has his contemporary Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli. But at a distance of half a millennium, we ought to be able to judge work on its merit — and we ought to have regular celebrations of Erasmus around the world.  Some of his ideas are catching on.  His name is familiar in Europe as that of the EU’s read more