Peace and War

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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Hey Kids! Try Collateral Damage at Home

One day a couple of weeks ago I was reading Saint Augustine while driving to the local convenience store, and I accidentally drove right through the front glass wall of the store, smashing up some shelves of junk food. After I’d made my purchases, a police officer stopped me and asked if I’d intended to drive into the store. “Oh, not at all,” I replied. “I intended to get here as quickly as possible while also educating myself as quickly as possible. I knew I might read more

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Obama is not first president at permanent war

The New York Times recently claimed, and peace advocates repeated, that President Barack Obama will be the first U.S. president to have been at war for two complete four-year terms. It’s also become common to refer to the current U.S. war on Afghanistan as the longest U.S. war ever. These ideas fit well with the universal activist demand that we return to the time of peace or the age of justice or the wisdom of the Founding Fathers or the era before superdelegates.

This is all based on a read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: U.S. Was Always at War

  https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-roxanne-dunbar-ortiz-us-was-always-at-war

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has taught in the Native American Studies Program at California State University, Hayward, and helped found the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. Her 1977 book The Great Sioux Nation was the fundamental document at the first international conference on Indigenous peoples of the Americas, held at the United Nations’ read more

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Let's Back All Moderates in Syria and the World

I’ve come around in favor of backing all moderates. The question appeared to me for a long time as a difficult one. Should one give anti-aircraft weaponry, for example, to al Qaeda fighters in Syria in order to better combat ISIS (which could some day develop the airplane)?

The answer is yes, if, and only if, those fighters are moderates.

Now, who’s a moderate? Some people get confused on this part, but it’s not really that difficult to get straight. Fighters who want to blow up read more

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United States Wants War With Russia

By David Swanson, American Herald Tribune

After provoking Russia for decades, the United States government has apparently concluded that the Russians are all saints and decided to escalate the provocations with confidence that nothing will go wrong, or go nuclear. Either that or the U.S. government truly wants World War III.

I wouldn’t treat a diseased rat the way the United States treats Russia. The Russian government has exercised such incredible restraint that the United States has apparently read more

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Talk Nation Radio: Meike Capps-Schubert on U.S. Military Resistance in Germany

  https://soundcloud.com/davidcnswanson/talk-nation-radio-meike-capps-schubert-on-us-military-resistance-in-germany

Meike Capps-Schubert is the co-founder and current manager of The Clearing Barrel GI-Coffeehouse in Kaiserslautern next to Ramstein Airbase, Germany, the only GI-coffeehouse outside the United States. A long-time peace and justice activist in Germany, Meike is a counselor with the Military Counseling Network e.V. — the German branch of the GI-rights-hotline, which provides read more

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Just War Lies

With the Catholic Church, of all things, turning against the doctrine that maintains there can be a “just war,” it’s worth taking a serious look at the thinking behind this medieval doctrine, originally based in the divine powers of kings, concocted by a saint who actually opposed self-defense but supported slavery and believed killing pagans was good for the pagans — an anachronistic doctrine that to this day still outlines its key terms in Latin.

Laurie Calhoun’s read more

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Bush-Obama Powers Will Pass to Next President

Remember when coups and assassinations were secretive, when presidents were obliged to go to Congress and tell lies and ask permission for wars, when torture, spying, and lawless imprisonment were illicit, when re-writing laws with signing statements and shutting down legal cases by yelling “state secrets!” was abusive, and when the idea of a president going through a list of men, women, and children on Tuesdays to pick whom to have murdered would have been deemed an outrage?

All such read more

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How to Oppose the Draft for Women and Not Be Sexist

For the majority of people in the United States who have no idea, yes, draft registration still exists, but only for males. However, the U.S. House of Representatives is interested in adding young women to the rolls. In fact the House Armed “Services” Committee passed such a measure in April, and it is now part of the National “Defense” Authorization Act pending review, amendment, debate, and passage.

An amendment proposed by Congressman Pete Sessions would undo this “progressive” 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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Corruption in the Time of Cholera

In 2004, the United States, which had previously occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, kidnapped the president of Haiti, overthrew his government, and sent in United Nations “peace keepers.” In 2010, an outbreak of cholera hit Haiti for the first time ever. The disease had previously been unknown in the country.

The UN had sent in soldiers from Nepal where cholera had just broken out. It hadn’t tested the soldiers for the disease. At the soldiers’ camp in Haiti, a truck picked read more

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Three Centuries of U.S. Writing Against War

Every student of peace, sanity, or survival, every person interested in the possibility of the United States making its current wars its last seven wars, every believer in the value of wisdom and the written word should pick up a copy of Lawrence Rosendwald’s 768-page collection, War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar and Peace Writing.

Looking for ways to improve the Pentagon that $600 billion a year just can’t buy? Did you know that Benjamin Rush not only signed the Declaration read more

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The United States Just Bombed Germany

If the bombing occurs when the bombs that have been dropped from U.S. airplanes explode, then the United States just bombed Germany and has been bombing Germany every year for over 70 years.

There are still over 100,000 yet-to-explode U.S. and British bombs from World War II lying hidden in the ground in Germany. Notes the Smithsonian Magazine:

“Before any construction project begins in Germany, from the extension of a home to track-laying by the national railroad authority, the ground must 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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