Anti-War
I stare blankly at the news. Little men with guns once again stir the country – the world – into a state of shock and grief and chaos. Attention: Every last one of us is vulnerable to being eliminated . . . randomly,
On Saturday, Dec. 13, there’s a classroom shooting at Brown University, in Providence. R.I. Two students are killed, nine others wounded. A day later, in Sydney, Australia – in the midst of a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach – two gunmen fire into the crowd of celebrants. Fifteen people are killed. The shock is global. The grief and anger flow like blood.
So do the questions: Why? How can we stop this? How can we guarantee that life is safe?
Usually, the calls for change after mass shootings focus on political action: specifically, more serious gun control. Ironically, Australia does have serious gun control. And, unlike the U.S., mass shootings there are extremely rare, but they still happen, which indicates that legal efforts can play a significant, but not total, role in reducing violence.
There is a great opportunity coming up to build the peace movement by supporting or creating anew a powerful local event on the International Day of Peace. We’ve got all the resources you could want below — and if something is missing, let us know!
September 21 is the International Day of Peace, first celebrated in 1982 and recognized annually by many nations and organizations, including day-long pauses in wars that reveal how easy it would be to have year-long or forever-long pauses in wars.
This could not be more critical than at this moment of escalating genocide in Gaza, the ongoing devastation of the war in Ukraine, horrific militarized violence in Sudan and the Congo, and military spending skyrocketing across much of the globe.
This is a good day on which to work for permanent peace and to remember the victims of war. Below are events you can join, and resources you can use to support those events or to organize new ones.
August 21, 2025
Have you read “The Case for Military Intervention to Stop the Gaza Genocide“? I don’t mind promoting it to you, since I agree with most of it (and also consider most of it to do absolutely nothing to advance any case for military intervention to stop the Gaza genocide).
The enormous problem we face is not the people who care enough and are desperate enough to make this misguided proposal. The enormous problem is the usual one: corrupt, evil, malfunctioning, and sadistic governments abetted by great masses of people too busy, distracted, ignorant, or uncaring to try anything at all.
The first eight pages of 23 in the document linked above simply tell us that there is a genocide happening and that nothing thus far has worked to stop it. On this there can be no dispute, and anyone unaware or unengaged should immediately read those eight pages five times.
World BEYOND War has just released its 2025 edition of Mapping Militarism, which uses 24 interactive maps to highlight the state of war and peace on our planet. Each map allows the viewer to spin the globe, zoom in and out, scroll the timeline back through the years, or switch from map view to list view. Try it.
“You are not alone. Far from it. If you are concerned about the climate crisis and want your national government to do something about it, you are part of an enormous global majority.”
If we look beyond the opponents of genocide who are so shamefully smeared with the label “antisemite,” but if we still treat “Semite” as meaning “Jew,” then the identity of a leading actual antisemite might surprise many people.
Very few, I’ve found, are aware that the policy of Nazi Germany for years was to pursue the expulsion of the Jews, not their murder, that the U.S. government led the world’s governments in holding public conferences to discuss who would accept the Jews, that those governments — for open and shamelessly Anti-Semitic reasons — refused to accept the Nazis’ future victims, and that Hitler openly trumpeted this refusal as agreement with his bigotry and as encouragement to escalate it. I’m not aware of a single popular history text that includes the fact that the U.S. and British governments, throughout the war, repeatedly refused to evacuate the Jews or any other at-risk groups simply because they found it inconvenient.
Our legal actions and activist mobilizations prevented Israeli arms companies from exhibiting at Eurosatory 2024.
A coalition of human rights, anti-armament, arms-control, and Palestine advocacy groups sustained legal and campaign pressure to stop the Israeli pavilion at the world’s biggest arms fair, Eurosatory. Despite the legal complexities and manoeuvring encountered, and the inaccurate media coverage that continues, the central fact is that this coalition ensured that Israeli companies were stopped from exhibiting at the arms fair. It is easy to see that commercial relationships forged at shows like these by Israeli companies and delegations generate billions of euros worth of contracts, strengthening the economic power of the arms companies and, through them, Israel’s war machine. For a few days we managed to have Eurosatory prohibit any employee or agent of these companies, regardless of their nationality, from being present in the hall. At one point, up to 850 participants linked to Israeli arms and security companies had their badges disabled.
Yurii Sheliazhenko is facing trial on June 11 and the possibility of 5 years in prison for speaking in support of peace in Ukraine. Yurii has been formally charged by the Ukrainian government with the crime of justifying Russian aggression. The evidence is this statement which explicitly condemns Russian aggression.
Please sign and share this petition to the Ukrainian Government:
We call on you to drop any legal proceedings against Yurii Sheliazhenko, and to respect human rights, the right to conscientious objection, and the right to freedom of speech. The absurdity of prosecuting someone for justifying Russian warmaking on the basis of a statement in which he has explicitly condemned Russian warmaking, is matched by the absurdity of waging war in the name of freedom and democracy while engaging in this sort of harassment of citizens. We urge you to do better.
New York, New York- May 29, 2024 – In a one-of-a-kind alliance aimed at alleviating the financial burden of unpaid personal debt owed by America’s veterans, Jerry Ashton, founder of the 501(c)(3) charitable foundation End Veteran Debt (EVD), and Craig Antico, co-founder of ForgiveCo (FGVC), a Public Benefit Corporation, have joined forces to see these debts forgiven – in full.
Antico and Ashton, distinguished former executives in the collections industry, earned acclaim in 2014 for co-founding RIP Medical Debt, one of America's most successful charities. Over the past decade, that charity, now known as Undue Medical Debt, has garnered sufficient donations to eliminate billions of dollars in unpayable medical debt, relieving millions of Americans. Having made their mark on the general population, this renewed alliance signifies their commitment to addressing the unique needs and challenges faced by America's returning heroes and their families.
Bringing different skills to the challenge