Peace and War

Chris Woods’ excellent new book is called Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone Wars. The title comes from a claim that then-President George W. Bush made for drone wars. The book actually tells a story of gradual injustice. The path from a U.S. government that condemned as criminal the type of murder that drones are used for to one that treats such killings as perfectly legal and routine has been a very gradual and completely extra-legal process.

Drone murders started in October 2001 read more

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Blackwater guards are in one incident at least finally being sentenced to prison for murder today. But their boss will be speaking at the University of Virginia on Wednesday.

Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater, visited Charlottesville 8 years ago and explained some of what’s wrong with private mercenaries.

He said that the Pentagon is useless to politicians because it doesn’t make campaign “contributions”. But when you take a big chunk of that enormous military budget and read more

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Remarks at Michigan Pax Christi annual state conference, April 11, 2015.

Video.

How might we get to a world that doesn’t plan and produce wars but lives at peace economically, environmentally, culturally, and legally? How might we switch to systems that avoid conflicts and settle unavoidable conflicts nonviolently?

World Beyond War, one project that I’m working on, intends to accelerate the movement toward ending war and
establishing a peace system in two ways: massive education, read more

There’s a popular movement in Sicily called No MUOS. MUOS means Mobile User Objective System. It’s a satellite communications system created by the U.S. Navy. The primary contractor and profiteer building the satellite equipment at the U.S. Navy base in the desert in Sicily is Lockheed Martin Space Systems. This is one of four read more

Joy First reports from Mauston, Wisc., that Bonnie Block, a Madison grandmother and long-time peace activist, was found guilty of trespassing in a jury trial in the Juneau County Courthouse on Wednesday, April 1, 2015, and sent to jail.

Sadly, this is not an April Fool’s joke. Block, pictured at right, was compelled to either pay $232 or spend 5 days in the Juneau County Jail. Faced with that choice, Block said in court:

“Your Honor, I asked for a jury trial in this matter so I could read more

By David Swanson and Robert Fantina

Oh Canada, to thine own self be true, not to thine heavily militarized neighbor. Robin Williams called you a nice apartment over a meth lab for a reason, and now you’re bringing the drugs upstairs.

We write to you as two U.S. citizens, one of whom moved to Canada when George W. Bush became U.S. president. Every wise observer in Texas had warned this country about their Governor Bush, but the message hadn’t gotten through.

We need the message to reach read more

The image and caption at right are from the University of Virginia Magazine which wants you to know that Dr. Who has landed in Charlottesville.

Oh, and he brought along George Orwell. Now private employees of war-and-prisons-profiteer G4S — and possibly the very same people who serve the food and mow the grass and pick up the trash at UVa, all of whom need more than one fulltime job to make a living — will serve as “ambassadors” from the world of corporate Homeland population read more

10. This sort of argument for debunking Islam in the media as the best way to “defeat” ISIS/ISIL misses the fact that ISIS recruits from the United States make up almost certainly much less than 1% of recruits, so that 99% of the problem, even on its own terms, remains completely unsolved.

9. Even if failure to expose Islam and other religions as ancient myths lacking basis in reality were a significant cause of people joining ISIS, it would not approach the primary read more