The Myths of NATO by Tim Kelly, May 30, 2012 The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was cast into the national spotlight last week when the 63-year-old alliance held its 25th summit in Chicago. While the thousands of anti-NATO protesters and the government’s heavy-handed security measures attracted most of the [...]
The Corruption of a Papal Benediction by Rev. dan vojir THE BUTLER DID NOT DO IT A tell-all book, leaked documents, billions in favorable contracts, money laundering, sexual terrorism … and possibly murder. With St. Peter’s in the background, it all sounds like a Dan Brown thriller. But in this mystery, the butler did not do [...]
The Special Loophole in Hell for War Lawyers By David Swanson http://warisacrime.org/content/special-loophole-hell-war-lawyers The strict rule of law is an ideal and a fantasy. Conflicting and archaic words must be interpreted, and doing so is an art, not a science. But there is an enormous chasm between honest attempts to [...]
You may be finding it interesting to read the ‘solutions’ being pushed to the economic ills of various ountries. Austerity once all the rage seems to be getting replaced by a rapid expansion in money supply an alleged parallel increase in jobs and credit and the stage is set for [...]
. Britain: Germany Needs to ‘Get Over WW2,’ Fight in More Wars ‘Huge Potential’ for Germany to Fight Massive Wars by Jason Ditz, May 02, 2012 Print This | Share This Speaking today in Berlin, Britain’s Defense Secretary Philip Hammond said he believesGermany has a [...]
Brewing a Conflict with China By Paul Craig Roberts May 01, 2012 “Information Clearing House” – Washington has pressured the Philippines, whose government it owns, into conducting joint military exercises in the South China Sea. Washington’s excuse is that China has territorial disputes with the Philippines, Indonesia, and other countries concerning island [...]
Is Peace Getting in the Way of Our War Plans? By David Swanson http://warisacrime.org/content/peace-getting-way-our-war-plans What a bizarre circumstance this is. The irrational Iranians are behaving too reasonably. The unmovable Iranians seem to be compromising too readily. This past weekend, the United States and other major nations finally spoke with Iran. In [...]
Deborah James. (Photo: Other Worlds)”Rather than having these people inside the Beltway be the experts on the issue… we ask: How can we empower the people who are actually affected by the issues to be the spokespeople?” – Deborah James Rewriting the Rules of the Global Economy – Creating Economics That Improve People’s [...]
privat German historian Moritz Pfeiffer asked his granddad what he did in World War II, and then fact-checked the testimony. His findings in a new book shed light on a dying generation that remains outwardly unrepentant, but is increasingly willing to break decades of silence on how, and why, it followed Hitler. Germany has won [...]
. The United Nations buildings Time to Dismantle the UN Security Council by Arun Elhance The time has come for an urgent and complete overhaul of the organizational structure of the United Nations in the field of peace and security. To dismantle the UN Security Council would be the boldest but also the most enlightened step [...]
Imperial Ignorance By Aijaz Zaka Syed March 26, 2012 “The News” — So this is how the cookie crumbles. From burning books to butchering babies, it seems everything is fair game as the victors near their tether. Four years after Barack Hussein Obama offered a “new way forward”; the gulf [...]
ANATOMY OF WAR March 20, 2012 Posted by wmmbb in Modern History, Peace. trackback Chris Hedges article at Truthdig is summarized by the headline: “Murder is not an Anomaly in War”. The context of this article is the alleged murderous rampage of the “deranged” American soldier, Robert Bales. The facts of the case may not be as reported, but [...]
Why Do We Protest the NATO Summit? Saturday, 24 March 2012 12:59By Buddy Bell, Voices for Creative Nonviolence | Op-Ed After the end of World War II, a group of nations in the north Atlantic established NATO to impede Russian influence over the reconstruction of Europe and to facilitate their own. The economic blueprint [...]
The Shifting Strategies of Empire By David Swanson http://warisacrime.org/content/shifting-strategies-empire Remarks at the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) Conference: President Obama this week declared the war on Iraq to be an honorable success that has given us a brighter future. Are you fired up? Ready to go? Eric Holder this month explained [...]
Both Vietnam and Afghanistan were lost wars from the very beginning, critics say [GALLO/GETTY] He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you - Friedrich Nietzsche San Pedro, CA - I immediately thought of the [...]
Former chief economist of the World Bank Joseph Stiglitz has also tied income inequality with microeconomic theory [GALLO/GETTY] Washington, DC - As evidence mounts that income inequality is increasing in many parts of the world, the problem has received growing attention from academics and policymakers. In the United States, for example, the income share of [...]
Targeted Killings: US and Israeli Specialties By Stephen Lendman March 15, 2012 “Information Clearing House” — International law permits justifiable self-defense. Targeted killings are prohibited, especially premeditated ones like America and Israel repeatedly commit for reasons other than claimed. These incidents constitute cold-blooded murder. US drone killings and rampaging death squads, [...]
American Massacres Have Been Common for Centuries By Jack D. Douglas March 14, 2012 “Information Clearing House” — For hundreds of years Americans have been committing massacres of women and children, old men and sometimes even young men, mostly unarmed or armed only with primitive weapons. The early massacres [...]
FIDEL WITH MEMBERS OF THE PEACE BOAT DELEGATION “We are obliged to win the battle for survival” ARLEEN RODRÍGUEZ DERIVET and ROSA MÍRIAM ELIZALDE IT will be difficult to forget the image which closed the meeting. Fidel standing, with a kimono over his sports jacket, very serious and surrounded by 10 hibakusha, as survivors of the atomic bombs [...]
Refugees often have their passports confiscated, making citizenship verification difficult [EPA] Tripoli, Libya - At the battered terminal of Tripoli’s tiny Mitiga Airport, over 150 young men and women jostle to be repatriated home to Nigeria on Libya‘s Buraq airlines. This journey to Lagos is one of hundreds the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), that has [...]
Who Are the ‘Terrorists’? The pattern of American atrocities in wartime by Justin Raimondo, March 12, 2012 | Print This | Share This | Antiwar Forum In the early morning hours of March 11, a US soldier assigned to “special ops” in Afghanistan, stationed near Kandahar, went into a local village and gunned down 16 people – including [...]
Let Your Life Be a Friction to Stop the Machine Nightmare and insanity are akin: mysterious and involuntary states that skew and distort objective reality. One wakens from nightmare; from insanity there is no awakening. Whether Americans live in the one state or the other is the paramount question of [...]
How I Left My Ultra-Orthodox, Ultra-Repressed Hasidic Community Deborah Feldman grew up in Brooklyn‘s Satmar Hasidic Jewish community, then secretly enrolled in college, left her husband and her family, and became a feminist blogger. March 4, 2012 | Today Deborah Feldman is a model of modern, independent young womanhood: the 25-year-old single mother of a 6-year-old [...]
Towards Tamil Eelam London Speech by Ron Ridenour / March 7th, 2012 This speech has been unusually difficult for me to prepare, because I am so angry with the whole world, and most of the people in it, including many of the victims of oppression. I will explain underway. I [...]
THE DEATH OF SDS by Mark Rudd It’s probably not a great idea to pursue an hallucination all the way to the end. Most likely the results will not be what you thought they would be, but 35 years ago we weren’t playing the probabilities. There was this beautiful hallucination back then, roughly [...]
Lisette Talate died the other day. I remember a wiry, fiercely intelligent woman who masked her grief with a determination that was a presence. She was the embodiment of people’s resistance to the war on democracy. I first glimpsed her in a 1950s Colonial Office film about the Chagos islanders, a tiny creole nation [...]
Thies, Senegal - Pronounced as “chess” and known as “the city of the train”, Thies, with no more than 400,000 people is not your average sleepy hollow. The town, considered Senegal’s second city, and a mere 60km from the capital, sits in an area considered to be among the most developed in the country, and is [...]
Fifty years ago, John F Kennedy decided to invade South Vietnam – which would leave millions dead [GALLO/GETTY] Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated – Japan’s attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example. Others are ignored, and we can often learn valuable lessons from them about what is likely to lie [...]
Parasites Lost by Doug Harvey I once asked a Native American if he thought whether North America was in any way in a post-colonial period. His response was, “Have they left yet?” Of the New World republics that came about as a result of colonization, the United States is going to have [...]
Resist U.S. Imperialist War Threats On Iran By Sara Flounders http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article30321.htm January 21, 2012 “IAC” — January 18, 2012 –There is growing apprehension that through miscalculation, deliberate provocation or a staged false flag operation, a U.S. war with Iran is [...]
The Big Lie Marches on Wednesday, December 28th, 2011 The war is over, sort of, but the Big Lie marches on: that democracy is flowering in Iraq, that America is stronger and more secure than ever, that doing what’s right is the prime motivator of all our military action. [...]
This article is about a person from the US military and his stance on war. It outlines the conclusion often reached that the only way war can be stopped is for soldiers to stop fighting. Any form of refusal to fight of course sends the military [...]
Never-ending growth, while not sustainable, seems to be the focus of economists [GALLO/GETTY] Cambridge, United Kingdom - Modern macroeconomics often seems to treat rapid and stable economic growth as the be-all and end-all of policy. That message is echoed in political debates, central-bank boardrooms and front-page headlines. But does it really make sense to take growth as the [...]
The Heads of State The Tyranny of Defense Inc. By ANDREW J. BACEVICH In 1961, Dwight Eisenhower famously identified the military-industrial complex, warning that the growing fusion between corporations and the armed forces posed a threat to democracy. Judged 50 years later, Ike’s frightening prophecy actually understates the scope of our modern [...]
Imperialism and the “Anti-Imperialism of the Fools” By James Petras January 01, 2012 “Information Clearing House” - One of the great paradoxes of history are the claims of imperialist politicians to be engaged in a great humanitarian crusade designed to liberate nations and peoples, while practicing the most barbaric conquests, destructive wars and large scale [...]
Ultra-Orthodox Jewish demonstrators look at a boy wearing a yellow Star of David inscribed with “Jude” [Reuters] Israeli Holocaust survivors and political leaders have expressed outrage over a Jerusalem demonstration in which ultra-Orthodox Jews donned yellow Star of David patches and uniforms similar to those Nazi Germany forced Jews to wear. Thousands of ultra-Orthodox Jews had gathered [...]
Each occupation is an attempt to be outside the ‘Spectacle‘, even as the Spectacle ‘encircles them, flatters them and tries to assimilate what they are doing and render it safe’ [GALLO/GETTY] In the years after the World War II, the US and Western Europe saw unprecedented rates of sustained economic growth. Food and accommodation were [...]
US soliders are the 1 per cent subjected by Washington to endless tours of duty in foreign wars [EPA] Williamsport, Pennsylvania – America’s wars are remote. They’re remote from us geographically, remote from us emotionally (unless you’re serving in the military or have a close relative or friend who serves), and remote from our major media outlets, which [...]
The Big Lie Marches On We must have an honest accounting of the Iraq War. by Robert C. Koehler The war is over, sort of, but the Big Lie marches on: that democracy is flowering in Iraq, that America is stronger and more secure than ever, that doing what’s right is the [...]
Indonesia‘s parliament has set an example by ratifying the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty [EPA] Stockholm/Mexico City - Indonesia’s parliament has just taken a historic step, one that makes the planet safer from the threat of nuclear weapons. The importance of Indonesia’s decision to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) cannot be overstated. This is a golden opportunity [...]
Recovering from Authoritarian Simpatico Syndrome (ASS): “Because the Cops Don’t Need You and Man They Expect the Same” by Phil Rockstroh Witnessing the acts and utterances of Republican presidential candidates can be regarded as a helpful psychological exercise, a type of “exposure therapy” involving the development of methods used to bear the presence of unbearable people [...]
Libertarianism Is Antiwar by Jacob H. Huebert, December 08, 2011 | Print This | Share This | Antiwar Forum [Chapter 9 of Libertarianism Today by Jacob Huebert. Reproduced with permission of ABC-CLIO, LLC, Santa Barbara, CA.] WHY LIBERTARIANS OPPOSE WAR Libertarianism and war are not compatible. One reason why should be obvious: In war, governments commit legalized mass-murder. In [...]
Want to See How Pearl Harbor Is Used to Sell Weapons, Start Wars, and Destroy the Economy? Open a Newspaper. By davidswanson - Posted on 07 December 2011 Start with this one. Pearl Harbor and World War II brought us together as a nation. We believed we could not be beaten. And we prevailed. But why is Congress now [...]
70 Years of Lying About Pearl Harbor By David Swanson http://warisacrime.org/content/70-years-lying-about-pearl-harbor British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s fervent hope for years was that Japan would attack the United States. This would permit the United States (not legally, but politically) to fully enter World War II in Europe, as its president wanted to do, as opposed to [...]
George W Bush invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq, loading a great burden on the US economy [EPA] Perhaps this article should be renamed or carry the theme that what is happening is an all out attempt to keep expenditure on defence going. Defence against what becomes the real question. The security talked about is actually [...]
When the World Outlawed War: An Interview with David Swanson AlterNet / By Bruce E. Levine For those who know war only through television, criminalizing it sounds like proposing to criminalize government. But there was a time when the masses made war illegal. David Swanson’s recently released book, When the World Outlawed War, tells the story of [...]
The Nurenberg trials allowed the US to try germans without reflecting on their own warfare [GALLO/GETTY] Princeton, NJ – Ever since German and Japanese surviving leaders were prosecuted after World War II at Nuremberg and Tokyo, there has been a wide abyss separating the drive for criminal accountability on the part of those who commit [...]
In his book on Anarcho-Syndicalism Rocker also includes a short piece on the anarchist movement that he was not only associated with but was one of its main exponents. You may remember the immense help and assistance that Rocker gave to the Jewish community in London and elsewhere around the times connected [...]
The US posessed unprecedented economic and military might at the end of the second World War [GALLO/GETTY] In every aspect of human existence, change is constant. Yet change that actually matters occurs only rarely. Even then, except in retrospect, genuinely transformative change is difficult to identify. By attributing cosmic significance to every novelty [...]
Tomgram: Engelhardt, Movie-Made Me Posted by Tom Engelhardt at 9:25am, November 17, 2011. [Note to TomDispatch Readers: Copies of my book, The United States of Fear, have just arrived. They will soon be winging their way toward those of you who have offered such generous support for TomDispatch by sending in $75 donations for personalized, signed [...]
