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Call for Britain's withdrawal from NATO
22 Feb 2015; posted by the editor - United Kingdom

Anti-war activists in the UK have launched a public petition calling on Prime Minister David Cameron to announce a full and immediate withdrawal of the UK from NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation.

Tags: UK, NATO, anti-war

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Not Very Funny
21 Feb 2015; posted by the editor - United States

By David Swanson
Remarks prepared for event with comedian Lee Camp, Charlottesville, Va., February 21, 2015, event postponed by snow storm. When it's rescheduled I'll say something completely unrelated.
This is the serious part of tonight's event, except that Lee often deals with very serious topics. So what I mean is: this is the unfunny part of tonight's event, except that I'm going to talk about the United States government. One of my favorite things that Mark Twain didn't really say but definitely should have said was "Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on, or by imbeciles who really mean it." He left out the possibility of imbeciles who are putting us on.

Tags: anti-war

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The new 'War on Terror' - is there a clash of Civilizations?
20 Feb 2015; posted by the editor - Ireland

The Irish Anti-War Movement is holding a public meeting 'War on Terror' - is there a clash of Civilizations? in Dublin on Saturday, 20 March 2015.

Tags: anti-war, Irish Anti-War-Movement

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Where Do U.S. War Dead Come From?
20 Feb 2015; posted by the editor - United States

By David Swanson
Evan Knappenberger, veteran turned peace activist, put together the following data and map.

Tags: war dead, anti-war

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A Tale of Two Movies
05 Feb 2015; posted by the editor - Features, Entertainment, United States

By John Reuwer, MD, Adjunct Professor, Conflict Resolution, Saint Michael’s College
As a student and teacher of nonviolent action, I was disheartened last week to wake up and read of the box office success of what I thought was yet another shoot-em-up action film, American Sniper, while the same day noting that a film about my field, Selma, though successful, was not even in the same ballpark with the money. It made me wonder why, so I went to see them.

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It's the Blind Partisanship
03 Feb 2015; posted by the editor - Features, United States

By David Swanson
Why did the peace movement grow large around 2003-2006 and shrink around 2008-2010? Military spending, troop levels abroad, and number of wars engaged in can explain the growth but not the shrinkage. Those factors hardly changed between the high point and the low point of peace activism.

Tags: Peace Movement, anti-war

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When Veterans Try to End Wars
02 Feb 2015; posted by the editor - Features, United States

By David Swanson
Nan Levinson's new book is called War Is Not a Game: The New Antiwar Soldiers and the Movement They Built, but it left me wishing there were a "Where Are They Now" chapter, because it ends around 2008. The book is focused on Iraq Veterans Against the War, but includes Veterans For Peace, Military Families Speak Out, Cindy Sheehan, and others. It's a story that has been told many times during the past several years, but this version seems particularly well done; perhaps the distance helps.

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Exporting Sherman's March
01 Feb 2015; posted by the editor - Features, United States

By David Swanson
Sherman statue anchors one southern corner of Central Park (with Columbus on a stick anchoring the other): Matthew Carr's new book, Sherman's Ghosts: Soldiers, Civilians, and the American Way of War, is presented as "an antimilitarist military history"—that is, half of it is a history of General William Tecumseh Sherman's conduct during the U.S. Civil War, and half of it is an attempt to trace echoes of Sherman through major U.S. wars up to the present, but without any romance or glorification of murder or any infatuation with technology or tactics. Just as histories of slavery are written nowadays without any particular love for slavery, histories of war ought to be written, like this one, from a perspective that has outgrown it, even if U.S. public policy is not conducted from that perspective yet.

Tags: anti-war

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Students Save Palestine
30 Jan 2015; posted by the editor - Features, International

By David Swanson
In proposing that Congress Members boycott or walk out on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's planned speech to Congress, expected to push for sanctions if not war on Iran, activists are drawing on actions engaged in by college students in recent years, as they have boycotted or walked out on or disrupted speeches by Israeli soldiers and officials on U.S. campuses. Netanyahu's noodle-headed move—oblivious, apparently, to the U.S. government's effective evolution into a term-limited monarchy—may provide a boost to both the movement to free Palestine and the movement to prevent a war on Iran.

Tags: Benjamin Netanyahu, anti-war

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When Shock and Awe Turns 12
29 Jan 2015; posted by the editor - United States

By David Swanson
Shock and Awe is having a troubled adolescence. The U.S. government is killing children with flying robot death planes, keeping troops in 175 countries, actively using "special" forces in 150 countries, asking us to ignore what it's done to Libya so that we'll support more wars, going silent on Yemen as the supposed model of a country that U.S. warmaking improved rather than ruined, turning down an offer from North Korea to halt nuclear tests, continuing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with no end in sight and no longer any pretense of Congressional or United Nations approval, oscillating on the question of starting a war on Iran (and inviting a foreign leader to give Congress its marching orders), actively antagonizing Russia and sending troops to Ukraine, building new nukes, proposing to enlarge the world's largest military budget next year, and avoiding all accountability for such horrors as human experimentation at Guantanamo.

Tags: Shock and Awe, anti-war

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