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David Swanson is the author of "When the World Outlawed War," "War Is A Lie" and "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union." He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works for the online activist organization http://rootsaction.org
SHARE Saturday, June 28, 2025 The Radical Wisdom of Neutrality
Remarks at Neutrality Colloquium: A Call to Action for Active Neutrality & World Peace, June 26-27, 2025 in Geneva, Switzerland.
SHARE Tuesday, June 17, 2025 A U.S. Bank Closed Our Accounts Because I'd Visited Cuba Six Months Ago
For years, World BEYOND War and other peace groups from around the world had been attending peace conferences in Cuba. When I visited Cuba this past January it was with a visa for that purpose. I published here the remarks I made at the conference. We shouted as loudly as we could about January's conference in websites, social media, emails, and media interviews. The notion that there could be anything wrong with it . . .
SHARE Wednesday, June 11, 2025 The Warning That Was Charlottesville
I recommend reading Charlottesville: An American Story by Deborah Baker. It's an account, of course, not of all aspects of the city of Charlottesville, but principally of the Nazi-KKK-White Supremacist riot of 2017 that has taken on the name "Charlottesville" -- including in a movie. The book itself is the furthest thing from predictable. The majority of it is pre-riot, with countless illuminating tangents.
SHARE Wednesday, June 4, 2025 Law, Not Crime, Has Come From South of the Border
Not so much criminals as the foundations of the rule of law -- that is what has infiltrated the United States from Latin America. That seems to be a major thread running through Greg Grandin's wonderful new history of the hemisphere, America, Ame'rica: A New History of the New World. It's a book you can dive back into repeatedly, not to mention fantasize about someone compacting it into a short slideshow for Trump.
(2 comments) SHARE Monday, June 2, 2025 Watch This New Hollywood Movie About Gaza
Our society doesn't always stand out for its values, but damn well does for its production values. There may be nothing more powerful in the world than a film -- or even a commercial -- with high production values. So I'm deeply appreciative when a well-made movie actually says something that needed saying, when you can watch the closing credits feeling wiser, rather than dirtier . . .
SHARE Thursday, May 22, 2025 Trump's Golden Dome Is a Combover
It's one of those scientific research projects Trump loves to defund if they might succeed or do anyone any good.
SHARE Thursday, May 22, 2025 Domestic Violence Is Part of What War Creates
As Stacy Bannerman has been telling us for decades, the U.S. military has a domestic violence problem. So do some other -- and I strongly suspect all -- militaries.
SHARE Friday, May 9, 2025 Rahm, Hakeem, and Special Places in Hell
People sometimes get away with a certain kind of evil action precisely because most of us have a hard time imagining the levels of cruelty or cynicism involved.
(1 comments) SHARE Saturday, April 19, 2025 Unthinking, Apathy, and Genocide
A newly expanded book called The Evil of Banality by Elizabeth Minnich looks at how people come to do horrific things like genocides, but also how they allow horrible things to gradually develop.
SHARE Wednesday, April 16, 2025 Vietnam, Truth, and Reconciliation 50 Years Later
Approaching 50 years since the end of the American War, as the Vietnamese call it, and something over 70 years since the start of it, depending when you start the clock, truth and reconciliation remain incomplete.
SHARE Thursday, April 10, 2025 Fukushima World
Thomas A. Bass's new book, Return to Fukushima, makes an overwhelming case for the absolute idiocy of pursuing nuclear energy, reveals the disaster at Fukushima to be worse than you've probably heard, and disturbingly establishes the likelihood that many of us will eventually be living in Fukushimas if humanity doesn't get rid of the nukes.
(1 comments) SHARE Sunday, April 6, 2025 Why Are HANDS OFF Rallies Supporting NATO?
The rational and moral international piece of the Hands Off agenda should be to eliminate both NATO and the voracious militarism that threaten the future of life on this planet.
SHARE Wednesday, March 26, 2025 Police and Prisons Belong in Museums
I want to recommend three new books about abolishing police and prisons. And I want to recommend multi-issue abolitionism beyond those two institutions.
SHARE Monday, March 24, 2025 The World Has Lost a Champion of Peace in David Hartsough
David Hartsough, whom we have just lost to cancer at the age of 84, was a giant in the world of recent and not so recent peace activism and not just peace activism. While nobody focused more on highlighting and promoting the work of others, and on organizing and funding and supporting the work of others, David Hartsough's own story is one of the most remarkable to be found in the genre of lives lived to their fullest for the g
SHARE Thursday, March 20, 2025 Treaty on the Prohibition of Foreign Military Bases and Forces
Each state party undertakes never under any circumstances to allow on its territory or to impose on the territory of any other state a foreign military base or foreign military forces of any number, permanently or temporarily, for any number of days.
SHARE Wednesday, March 19, 2025 Chuck Him Out
You need to resign as leader of the Democrats in the Senate. Your aiding of the Republican agenda is not new, but the times have changed. The public is taking this thing seriously and carefully watching the pretenses. It is not enough right now to make a show of disagreeing. We need an actual opposition committed to halting Trump's destruction. Step aside.
SHARE Tuesday, March 18, 2025 Challenges for Peace in Trump Times
The challenge of the peace movement is to press in the direction of the good things that have been spoken without failing to confront the reality of what is actually being done.
SHARE Tuesday, March 11, 2025 Letter to Europe from an American
It's with a very heavy heart that I watch Europe imitate the militarism of the United States, moving massive resources from human and environmental needs to weapons, celebrating proposals from good liberal civic groups to steal money from Russia and dump it into more weapons, cutting deals to have the ingredients for more weapons dug out of your soil by a distant empire that routinely spits on your head...
SHARE Monday, March 10, 2025 Trump Buyers' Remorse is Just a Miniature Model
You voted for Trump and are being deported, or losing your job, or paying more for eggs. Now you're the subject of so-called journalism about your "buyer's remorse". This is an extremely weak version of the sort of transformation that is needed -- the sort of Saul-to-Paul awakening, forehead-slapping, I've-been-an-idiot, redemption-seeking metamorphosizing needed from millions of people, Trump voters and otherwise.
SHARE Sunday, March 9, 2025 The Five Excuses for Genocide
On Monday I interviewed a member of the Executive Committee of AIPAC. I asked him how he could defend and promote apartheid and genocide. He was not a legal witness; I could not order him not to change the subject. Still, he provided pretty clear (if very weak) excuses for genocide, which I think can be broken up into five types.