Peace and War

I may soon have an opportunity to meet with nonviolent activists in Afghanistan, an area of the world we falsely imagine has earned the name “graveyard of empires” purely through violent resistance. I was educated in the United States and learned in some detail about the lives of several morally repulsive halfwits who happened to have “served” in various U.S. wars, assaults, and genocides. But I was never even taught the name Badshah Khan. Were you?

Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, read more

Congress held an emergency meeting to defund NPR, and then did nothing as the President spent vastly more money on bombing Libya. President Obama didn’t have to ask for the funding, because the Pentagon had enough lying around for just such an occasion.

A fundamental lie that keeps war going is the idea that we avoid war by preparing for it. “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” said Theodore Roosevelt, who favored building a big military just in case, but of course not actually read more

Letter to the Daily Progress:

Good for Congressman Hurt objecting to unconstitutional warmaking in Libya without Congressional authorization, and without proper compliance with the War Powers Act. Yet, how bizarre that he does not know how he would have voted had Congress been given that chance. Congressman Dennis Kucinich has introduced an amendment to block funding for war in Libya. Hurt is now compelled to choose: will he sponsor that amendment or not? I encourage him to do so.

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Usually “power couple” describes two plutocrats, but here is a young engaged (to be married) (and in the struggle for justice) couple with the power to move people against war, that leaves the audience asking them to speak in their schools. Wasfi is an Iraqi American who speaks of war from the point of view of its victims. Caputi is a US veteran of the current war on Iraq who describes the crimes he engaged in and the thinking that allows such acts, including what he describes as “reconnaissance read more

It’s a simple point, but an important one, and one that gets overlooked. Whether or not you think a particular war is moral and good, the fact remains that war is illegal. Actual defense by a country when attacked is legal, but that only occurs once another country has actually attacked, and it must not be used as a loophole to excuse wider war that is not employed in actual defense.

Needless to say, a strong moral argument can be made for preferring the rule of law to the law of rulers. read more

LISTEN.

Letter to Editor

Thanks for you excellent review of David Goldfield’s argument that the Civil War was unnecessary and pointing out that every other nation that ended slavery did it without a civil war. Goldfield is right that we must get our view of past wars right if we are to avoid future ones.

One way in which our views must change is away from the worldview that allowed you to print this sentence: “The Civil War is still the most costly war we’ve ever waged in terms of loss read more

Wouldn’t it be kind and generous of us to send the US or NATO or a UN-approved military into Libya to bloodlessly prevent the vicious slaughter of masses of people by a truly evil lunatic?

Would it?

In a study called “Why Civil Resistance Works,” Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth examined major uses of violence and nonviolence against tyrannical governments around the world between 1900 and 2006. They found that violence succeeded 26 percent of the time. I think they were taking read more

People are doing journalism and the Washington Post is pissed. How to respond? Apparently the answer arrived at by Post editors is to just give up on any Americans who have been informing themselves and target those Americans who believe anything that super important people say. How else to explain an op-ed full of documented lies and published last Friday over the byline of two Democratic senators, Carl Levin and Jack Reed?

The headline was “The Surge Afghanistan Still Needs.” read more

War is a crime.
Joining an ongoing war is a crime.
Joining on the side of a friendly lunatic dictator is an immoral tragedy.
Joining on the side of violent rebels who capture and expel British troops there to “help” is an immoral comedy.
Joining on the side of our own nation would be opposed by both of the existing sides plus our own nation.
Limited warfare is limited murder.
Limited warfare almost always traverses the limits.
The military read more

There’s a video available online that has created quite a scandal this week. It shows a fashion designer in Paris telling someone he loves Hitler and that their mothers and forefathers would have all been gassed to death.

I think the staying power of Hitlerian madness is more easily understood when we properly understand that Hitler and the Nazis didn’t invent it out of whole cloth but built on a deep tradition that had long dominated European and U.S. culture. I wrote about U.S. read more

A People’s Hymn
By David Swanson

From the Capitol in Madison
To the shores of Tripoli
We will fight the people’s battles
And we’ll fight them peacefully;
First we learn nonviolent tactics,
And we train before we start.
For our fight will be relentless,
We commit with all our heart.

Our flags unfurl to every breeze
From dawn to setting sun;
We will fight in every clime and place
And we’ll never touch a gun.
In the snow of far-off Northern lands
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From Afghanistan: We Support the People of Wisconsin and the World

We Afghans Are All Bouazizi
By Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers

Afghan youth are quietly encouraged by the Egyptian uprising because the people of Afghanistan want what the people of Egypt want.

We are all Bouazizi.

We want dignified livelihoods.

Dare any scientist prove to us that 30 years of wars and more to come will successfully bring us decent livelihoods? Dare any human being prove to us that mutual killings somehow bring men and read more

That was the argument made in a U.S. bestseller in 2009 written by a WWII historian whose father had raised the US flag on Iwo Jima. And the Roosevelt he had in mind was Teddy, not Franklin.

Needless to say, although countless people will say it quite angrily in my Email inbox in response to this article, you cannot simply blame an event on actions that occurred years before. A war is started by the people who start that war, in that instant, and there is no way for them to wiggle out of that read more

The idea that wars are waged out of humanitarian concern may not at first appear even worthy of response. Wars kill humans. What can be humanitarian about that? But look at the sort of rhetoric that successfully sells new wars:

“This conflict started Aug. 2, when the dictator of Iraq invaded a small and helpless neighbor. Kuwait, a member of the Arab League and a member of the United Nations, was crushed, its people brutalized. Five months ago, Saddam Hussein started this cruel war against read more

Michael Nagler tells this story:

“One of my close friends, David Hartsough, who is white, was sitting in with a small group of civil rights activists at a segregated lunch counter in Virginia in the early sixties. They had been sitting there without getting service for close to two days, harassed almost without letup by an increasingly angry crowd. As neither the sitters nor the proprietors backed down, tension increased. Suddenly David was jerked back off his stool and spun around by read more

Speaking of Sex: An interview with Christopher Ryan
by Barry F. Seidman and Arnell Dowret
The psychologist and co-author of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality looks at what the evidence says about humans’ “natural” state.

SPECIAL BOOK EXCERPT: War is A Lie
by David Swanson
“There has probably never been a war that hasn’t been explained as an absolutely necessary, inevitable, and unavoidable last resort.”

Making read more

When a satirist published a phony U.S. government report in 1967 that recommended against allowing peace to ever break out, most people seemed to fall for the prank. Members of the news media were either in on the joke or victims. The copy I have is marked up with a yellow highlighter by someone who grew angrier and angrier through the book’s pages. Toward the end, when the authors of the “report” advocated reviving slavery, the previous owner of my copy scrawled “BULL read more