Peace and War

Yes, I’m going to tell you what’s missing from this film without watching the film. Trump has, as promised, made me so sick of winning that I really could enjoy watching a defeat film, but I think I’ll pass. If I’m wrong about what’s missing from it (I mean one of the many things that are, no doubt, missing from it), I promise that I will eat an entire plan for victory in Afghanistan annually for the next decade.

One of the oddest things about World War II is how it read more

Donald Trump uses backdrops formed by crowds of boy scouts or soldiers. Progressive Democrats use documents called #People’sPlatform endorsed by numerous quasi-grassroots organizations.

Neither remotely approaches the far more desirable governance that one would get using direct democracy, governance by opinion poll. The reason for the pretense of populism is clear: people are wiser, even laboring under today’s relentless sewer of propaganda, than any contingent in either mega-party. read more

On Friday the United Nations concluded the creation of the first multilateral nuclear disarmament treaty in over 20 years, and the first treaty ever to ban all nuclear weapons. While 122 nations voted yes, the Netherlands voted no, Singapore abstained, and numerous nations didn’t show up at all.

The Netherlands, I’m told by Alice Slater, was compelled by public pressure on its parliament to show up. I don’t know what Singapore’s problem is. But the world’s nine nuclear nations, various read more

Last Thursday the U.S. House Appropriations Committee unanimously passed an amendment that would — if passed by the full Congress — repeal, after an 8-month delay, the Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) passed by Congress just after September 11, 2001, and used as a justification for wars ever since.

Also last week, the U.S. Conference of Mayors unanimously passed three resolutions strongly urging Congress to move funding read more

Submitted to the July 2, 2017, conference “United States, Human Rights and Discourse of Domination,” hosted by the University of Tehran and the Iranian World Studies Association.

I’m very sorry not to be there in person and am grateful to Foad Izadi for allowing me to submit this instead. I’m a critic of the institution of war and of all military violence, as well as of all antidemocratic government and all violation of civil liberties. People in Iran, the United States, read more

Originally published in Counterpunch Volume 24 Number 3

The idea that the United States has a problem with war propaganda is typically scratched in a bad-apples manner with a story that the U.S. has set up a new propaganda agency, such as the Global Engagement Center, or hired a company, such as the Lincoln Group, to plant articles in foreign media. Or we’ll read a report that former generals are secretly picking up their talking points from the Pentagon and their income from weapons companies read more