War

By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, September 9, 2019

Green Ireland has a peaceful blue sky.

Shannon Airport’s full of war planes; Here’s why.

When Emperor Trump

Tells Ireland to Jump

Ireland bows down and asks him “How high?”

Neutral Ireland takes no part in war

Except that troops carry weapons galore

Through the airport at Shannon

While mass slaughters they’re planning

For far off from their two-dollar

Do you want to hear more?

If you ask me the Irish know better.

They’ve seen dead that could not have been deader.

A true friend to the Yanks

Would say thanks but no thanks.

Here comes peace strolling by. Have you met her?

Original Post: https://worldbeyondwar.org/limerick-at-peace

In my town in the United States — as is not especially unusual — we have big memorials in prominent public places marking some of the most catastrophically immoral actions of the past. Unfortunately, all five of these major monuments celebrate and glorify these past horrors, rather than reminding us not to repeat them. The University of Virginia is building a memorial to the enslaved people who built the University of Virginia. So, we will have five celebrations of evil, and one cautionary remembrance thereof.

Two of the five monuments celebrate the genocide of the westward expansion across the continent. Two celebrate the losing and pro-slavery side of the U.S. Civil War. One honors the troops who participated in one of the most devastating, destructive, and murderous assaults on a small part of the earth that humanity has yet produced. In the United States people call it “the Vietnam war.”

The true story of British whistleblower Katharine Gun is public. The new movie dramatizing that story, with Keira Knightley in the starring role is called a thriller. And that it is.

How can a known event be made into a suspenseful thriller? In part this is possible because the story is a complex one that few know the details of, and in part because most people don’t know anything about anything. There’s too much information in the world, and most of it is useless or worse. The story of a whistleblower who took great risks to expose the greatest possible crimes by people holding the most power in the world is not the bit of information that has been most repeated over the past 16 years since it happened. In fact, it’s hardly been mentioned at all in corporate media.

I recommend not reading anything about Katharine Gun until after you see Official Secrets. And what I write about the movie here will avoid revealing much at all.  But feel free to go watch the movie first and then come back to this.

By David Swanson, Executive Director, World BEYOND War, May 6, 2019

World BEYOND War has just released an updated 2019 mapping of militarism in the world.

Open the mapping system, check out, and customize the maps here.

Here are some examples of what the map system can show. (You’ll find detailed numbers and sources and dislpay options at the link above.)

Where wars are present that directly and violently killed over 1,000 people in 2018:

Read this Military.com article from Friday: “Do U.S. High Schools Bar Military Recruiters? Activists Try to Call Pentagon’s Bluff.” It discusses the offer that Pat Elder and I made to award funding to any school that could be identified as one of the over 1,100 public high schools that the Secretary of the Navy told Congress in December bar military recruiters. The article states:

“Addressing members of the Senate Armed Services Committee in December, Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer described an ‘excess of 1,100 schools and districts that deny access to uniform members to recruit on campuses,’ mainly in the northeast and northwestern United States, he said. And Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Ronald Green in January said there are ‘just some places where we are not allowed to recruit.'”

Last week I tweeted this: “The U.S. military wants to fly small nuclear power plants into wars in order to power the wars’ weaponry. Because there was some chance we might not all die fast enough if nothing this stupid was tried.” I linked to a report on this insane idea. Someone replied: “The Navy already does this.”

True enough. Submarines and aircraft carriers engage in this lunacy, and we take it for granted. Submarines also haul nuclear weapons around the world’s seas, ready to intentionally or accidentally destroy the world as needed.

But some people don’t take anything for granted. Westminster Abbey, next door to Parliament, in London, is hosting a ceremony of thanksgiving to properly thank God for 50 years of nuclear weapons in the water. Oh, well, you might think, that makes sense to give thanks for having survived such behavior this long.

No, no, no. You misunderstand. They’re thanking God for having created the nukes and subjected the world to the risk of apocalypse, not for the incredible luck of having thus far survived it.

1. What would you like the U.S. discretionary budget to look like? With 60% now going to militarism, what percentage would you like that to be?

By David Swanson, Director of World BEYOND War

When I was a kid there was a local basketball team called the Washington Bullets. The team changed its name when “bullets” became offensive due to the high rate of gun murders in Washington, D.C. This is the same city that to this day has a football team called the Washington Redskins. What offends is not, perhaps, violence, but violence directed at people who matter. (Compare: tens of thousands of Yemenis vs. one Washington Post reporter.)

U.S. President Donald Trump has announced his intention to remove all U.S. troops from Syria.

If that happens it will fulfill part of the demand that World BEYOND War has been making since Trump promised nine months ago to get “out” of Syria “like very soon.”

Removing troops from the ground — all of them, not just some — and ceasing base construction, if it happens, will be a start.

Even more important is ceasing to bomb from above.

In addition, alternative approaches need to be launched, including unarmed peaceworkers, a weapons ban for the region, a disarmament program, major actual humanitarian aid (and an end to sanctions that harm ordinary people), and diplomacy.

The fact that politicians and the parties they belong to generally do more harm than good is simply no reason not to encourage the good and discourage the bad.

Opposition to this withdrawal of troops is coming from a variety of disturbing quarters for a range of unconvincing reasons.