The Irish Anti-war Movement opposes the visit to Ireland by US President Donald Trump for many reasons but primarily because he is currently the world's top warmonger. The IAWM is calling on all Irish people who oppose war and racism to protest vigorously during his visit here. We call on those who wish to show their disdain with Trump to join the peace camp in Shannon Airport and the protests happening elsewhere this week including at the Spire in Dublin on Thursday evening, 6 June.

A group of seven US Veterans for Peace took part in a protest against the U.S. military use of Shannon Airport in Ireland on Sunday 17 March.

By David Swanson
Villanova University is hosting a West Point Military Academy-supported event about “Just War” theory.

The first International Conference against US/NATO military bases is set to take place in Dublin between 16-18 November 2018.

By David Swanson
One should not sell bombs to a government that abuses human rights, which means murders a man without using one of the bombs.

By David Swanson
For the past decade, the standard procedure for big coalition rallies and marches in Washington D.C. has been to gather together organizations representing labor, the environment, women's rights, anti-racism, anti-bigotry of all sorts, and a wide array of liberal causes, including demands to fund this, that, and the other, and to halt the concentration of wealth.

The Chicago-based West Suburban Faith-Based Peace Coalition is sponsoring a Peace Essay Contest with a $1,000 award to the winner, $300 for the runner-up, and $100 for third place. Essays have to be directed to a person who can help promote knowledge of the Kellogg-Briand Pact (KBP) and, from whom a response is expected.

By David Swanson
“I understand that wars and militarism make us less safe rather than protect us, that they kill, injure and traumatize adults, children and infants, severely damage the natural environment, erode civil liberties, and drain our economies, siphoning resources from life-affirming activities. I commit to engage in and support nonviolent efforts to end all war and preparations for war and to create a sustainable and just peace.”

By David Swanson
Dear Democrats,
Are you finding yourselves suddenly a bit doubtful of the wisdom of drone wars? Presidential wars without Congress? Massive investment in new, smaller, "more usable" nuclear weapons? The expansion of bases across Africa and Asia? Are you disturbed by the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen? Can total surveillance and the persecution of whistleblowers hit a point where they've gone too far? Is the new Cold War with Russia looking less than ideal now? How about the militarization of U.S. police: is it time to consider alternatives to that?

In condemning the continued bombardment of Aleppo, and other Syrian centres of resistance, by Russian and Syrian army forces, the Irish Anti-War Movement (IAWM) is repeating its call to the Irish Government to cease the use of Shannon Airport by the US Military, an act alone which the IAWM says would send a powerful message to western powers that we are sick of their perpetual warfare.

By David Swanson
Despite Ireland's officially neutral status and its claim to have not gone to war since its founding in 1922, Ireland allowed the United States to use Shannon Airport during the Gulf War and, as part of the so-called coalition of the willing, during the wars that began in 2001.

By David Swanson, director of World Beyond War
In planning an upcoming conference and nonviolent action aimed at challenging the institution of war, with the conference to be held at American University, I can't help but be drawn to the speech a U.S. president gave at American University a little more than 50 years ago.

A new Bill has been drafted that would abolish the U.S. military draft if passed by Congress.

January 12, 2016, the day of President Obama's State of the Union address to Congress, has been selected by the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance as a day of national protest against current US military action of all kinds, including drone warfare. 

By David Swanson
People in the United States want tighter gun laws within the United States. They probably can’t be, and certainly aren’t being, polled on the U.S. role as top weapons supplier to the world. You can’t poll people on something they’ve never heard of.

By David Swanson, for teleSUR
David Swanson unmasks the propaganda logic behind Amazon.com's Man in the High Castle and U.S. celebrations of failure
The United States is indisputably the world’s most frequent and extensive wager of aggressive war, largest occupier of foreign lands, and biggest weapons dealer to the world. But when the United States peeps out from under the blankets where it lies shivering with fear, it sees itself as an innocent victim. It has no holiday to keep any victorious battle in everyone’s mind. It has a holiday to remember the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—and now also one, perhaps holier still, to recall, not the “shock and awe” destruction of Baghdad, but the crimes of September 11, 2001, the “new Pearl Harbor”.
 

By David Swanson
Back in 2010 I wrote a book called War Is A Lie. Five years later, after having just prepared the second edition of that book to come out next spring, I came across another book published on a very similar theme in 2010 called Reasons to Kill: Why Americans Choose War by Richard E. Rubenstein.

By Nicolas Davies
“...at the very moment the number one nation has perfected the science of killing, it has become an impractical instrument of political domination.” - Richard Barnet, Roots of War, 1972
France and Russia’s military responses to mass murders in Paris and Egypt echo the United States’ response to mass murders in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania in 2001. As Oxford University researcher Lydia Wilson told Democracy Now on November 17th, Islamic State (IS) is “seemingly delighted” by this warlike response to its latest atrocities.

By Gar Smith / Environmentalists Against War
During the 15 November Democratic Presidential Debate, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders sounded an alarm that “climate change is directly related to the growth of terrorism”. Citing a CIA study, Sanders warned that countries around the world are “going to be struggling over limited amounts of water, limited amounts of land to grow their crops and you’re going to see all kinds of international conflict”.

By David Swanson
Robert Reich’s website is full of proposals for how to oppose plutocracy, raise the minimum wage, reverse the trend toward greater inequality of wealth, etc. His focus on domestic economic policy is done in the traditional bizarre manner of U.S. liberals in which virtually no mention is ever made of the 54% of the federal discretionary budget that gets dumped into militarism.

By David Swanson
Toward the end of altering our idea of what counts as “doing something”, I offer this composite representation of numerous media interviews I’ve done.

By David Adams, World Beyond War
As the culture of war, which has dominated human civilization for 5,000 years, begins to crumble, its contradictions become more evident. This is especially so in the matter of terrorism.

By Herbert J. Hoffman, Ph.D., Member VFP National, Maine and New Mexico
It was my senior year in high school—many years ago—and I was seated, along with many of my football teammates, on the auditorium stage. It was a pre-game rally before 1500 classmates and teachers. The auditorium was filled with energy. The main speaker was a much revered former outstanding athlete at Central High School. A man in his 50’s, he spoke with passion about the upcoming football game. It was exciting! However, I found myself feeling revulsion as he concluded his speech by saying, “Go out there and Kill, Kill, Kill!”, repeating the last three words numerous times as the audience joined in.

By David Swanson
On the morning of Armistice Day, 11 November 2015, longtime peace activist Turi Vaccaro climbed to where you see him in the photo. He brought a hammer and made this a Plowshares action by hammering on the enormous satellite dish, an instrument of U.S. warfare communications.

By David Swanson
“War Is Beautiful” is the ironic title of a beautiful new book of photographs. The subtitle is “The New York Times Pictorial Guide to the Glamour of Armed Conflict”. There's an asterisk after those words, and it leads to these: “(In which the author explains why he no longer reads The New York Times)”. The author never explains why he read the New York Times to begin with.

By David Swanson
I was part of a debate on Tuesday that involved a larger disagreement than any exhibited at the Democratic presidential candidates debate that evening. A group of peace activists met with the president, a board member, some vice presidents, and a senior fellow of the so-called U.S. Institute of Peace, a U.S. government institution that spends tens of millions of public dollars every year on things tangentially related to peace (including promoting wars) but has yet to oppose a single U.S. war in its 30-year history.

By David Swanson
In an online discussion I asked Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International, a fairly straightforward question: "Will Amnesty International recognize the UN Charter and the Kellogg Briand Pact and oppose war and militarism and military spending?

In the week that marks the 70th annual general meeting of the United Nations, author and peace activist David Swanson speaks about the role of the UN to WHDT TV in Boston.

By David Swanson
When I wrote War Is A Lie in 2010 (second edition coming April 5th!) it was a condemnation of war, but not exactly a manifesto for abolishing it.

By David Swanson
The United Nation's 17 Sustainable Development Goals don't just ignore the fact that development isn’t sustainable; they revel in it. One of the goals is spreading energy use. Another is economic growth. Another is preparation for climate chaos (not preventing it, but dealing with it). And how does the United Nations deal with problems? Generally through wars and sanctions.

By David Swanson
The Pope will speak to Congress on Thursday. No other institution on earth does more to destroy the habitability of the planet for future generations. Will the Pope raise his concerns with them or only when he’s thousands of miles away?

By John Amidon & Ellen Grady
Members of the grassroots human rights coalition, Upstate Drone Action to Ground the Drones and End the Wars were arrested for closing the main gate of Hancock Airfield to back their call for a halt to the US weaponized drone program operated out of Hancock, in the Town of Dewitt, NY, by the 174th Attack Wing of the NYS Air National Guard. Hancock is home to “hunter/killer” (the Pentagon's phrase) MQ9 Reaper drone.

By David Swanson
In the United States it's hard to imagine admiring an attorney general. The words call to mind people like Eric Holder, Michael Mukasey, Alberto Gonzales, John Ashcroft, Janet Reno, and Edwin Meese. There were those who fantasized that Barack Obama would not prevent an attorney general from prosecuting top officials for torture, but the idea of a U.S. attorney general prosecuting a U.S. president for war/genocide doesn't even enter the realm of fantasy (in part, because Americans don't even think of what the U.S. military does in the Middle East in those terms)

By David Swanson
In the United States it is considered fashionable to maintain a steadfast ignorance of rejected peace offers, and to believe that all the wars launched by the U.S. government are matters of “last resort”.

By David Swanson
The United States and its European allies have launched wars on the Middle East that have created an enormous refugee crisis. The same nations are threatening Russia. The question of maintaining peace with Iran is on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Even in Asia and the Pacific, not to mention Africa, the biggest military buildup is by the United States.

By David Swanson
This headline in the Guardian is completely accurate: West Point professor calls on US military to target legal critics of war on terror.

By David Swanson
Remarks in Chicago on the 87th anniversary of the Kellogg-Briand Pact, 27 August, 2015
Thank you very much for inviting me here and thank you to Kathy Kelly for everything she does and thank you to Frank Goetz and everyone involved in creating this essay contest and keeping it going. This contest is far and away the best thing that has come out of my book When the World Outlawed War.

By David Swanson
Jeremy Deaton seems to be a fine writer on the subject of climate change right up until he stumbles across the propaganda of the U.S. military. I highlight this as the latest example of something that is so typical as to be nearly universal. This is a pattern across major environmental groups, environmental books, and environmentalists by the thousands. In fact, it's in no way limited to environmentalists, it's just that in the case of environmentalism, blindness to the damage done by the U.S. military is particularly dramatic in its impact.

By David Swanson 
No, I’m not referring to the U.S. election. I’m referring to Bycatch. The name refers not to fish accidentally caught and killed while trying to catch and kill other fish, but to humans murdered in a game in which the player hopes to murder certain other humans but knows that he or she stands a good chance of murdering some bycatch.

By David Swanson
After marking the destruction of Nagasaki and the police-murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson on 9 August, Americans have options for what to commemorate on 10 Augusth. I'm inclined to think that 10 August should be formally recognized as Gulf of Tonkin War Fraud Day. But I'm not sure, because another event is in even more need of remembrance.

By David Swanson
Let’s do the count: Senators rallying and whipping their colleagues to support the Iran agreement: 0. Senators admitting that Iran has had no nuclear weapons program and has never threatened or been a threat to the United States: 0.

By CJ Hinke, WorldBeyondWar.org
Excerpted from Free Radicals: War Resisters in Prison by CJ Hinke, forthcoming from Trine-Day in 2016.
The lines of resistance to war take many forms as these stories of resisters in prison in World Wars I (“the Great War”, “the war to end all wars”) and II (‘the good war”), the Cold War, the undeclared Korean “conflict”, the ‘Red Scare’ of the McCarthy period, the 1960s and, finally, the US war against Vietnam, demonstrate. There are as many reasons and methods to refuse war as there are refusers. The Department of Justice classified WWII resisters as religious, moral, economic, political, neurotic, naturalistic, professional pacifist, philosophical, sociological, internationalist, personal and Jehovah’s Witness.

The Irish Anti-War Movement (IAWM) today issued a strongly worded statement expressing deep concern about plans by Minister for Defence Simon Coveney to allow the international defence industry to have increased access to the Irish Defence Forces for ‘product testing’, as reported in the Irish Independent on 12 July.

By David Swanson
The U.S. presidential election is very far away. There’s a measurable rise in the ocean, the construction of numerous new military bases, a decision on peace or war with Iran, a push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, intense antagonization of Russia, and more than likely another month-long bombing of Gaza between now and then.

The historic Golden Rule peace boat, restored by Veterans For Peace and many friends, sets sail from the Eureka marina at noontime on Thursday, July 23, on its way to San Diego.

By David Swanson
Talking with Iran has made the war profiteers and their servants sad and the rest of the world happy. Perhaps the novel idea of negotiating rather than killing will be carried over to several other parts of the world.

By Emanuel Pastreich, Foreign Policy in Focus
Sixty years after Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell issued their manifesto about the growing threat of world war, the globe continues to face the prospect of nuclear annihilation - coupled with the looming threat of climate change.

Shannonwatch is organising a protest at the Shannon Airport on July 18 during the Air Display taking place that day.

By David Swanson
What happens when a bunch of lawyers intent on distinguishing combatants from civilians discover, by interviewing hundreds of civilians, that it cannot be done? Does it become legal to kill everyone or no one?  

By David Swanson
Remarks at UNAC Conference, 8 May 2015
This week I read an article by someone I have a lot of respect for and who I know to mean well, and who wrote about being a part of something called “the Less War Movement.”

By David Swanson
Chris Woods’ excellent new book is called Sudden Justice: America’s Secret Drone Wars. The title comes from a claim that then-President George W. Bush made for drone wars. The book actually tells a story of gradual injustice. The path from a U.S. government that condemned as criminal the type of murder that drones are used for to one that treats such killings as perfectly legal and routine has been a very gradual and completely extra-legal process.

By David Swanson
Rosa Brooks' article in Foreign Policy is called There is no such thing as peacetime. Brooks is a law professor who has testified before Congress to the effect that if a drone war is labeled a proper war then blowing children apart with missiles is legal, but that if it's not properly a war then the same action is murder.

Washington, DC.
United States military veterans of several wars, from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan, will call for the demilitarization of U.S. foreign policy, as they mark the 12th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

By David Swanson
“War with Iran is probably our best option.” This is an actual headline from the Washington Post.

By David Swanson, originally published by Truthout.org

Excerpted from *A Global Security System: An Alternative to War 
In On Violence, Hannah Arendt wrote that the reason warfare is still with us is not a death wish of our species nor some instinct of aggression, “. . .but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.” The Alternative Global Security System we describe here is the substitute.

By David Swanson
World Beyond War, a U.S. nonprofit dedicated to ending all war, published this week a guide toward that end, a short book titled A Global Security System: An Alternative to War.

By David Swanson
This advertisement does a number of things in 15 seconds that U.S. television has not done before. It presents a moral case against drone murders (the U.S. government's terminology, and strictly accurate). It opposes drone murders as illegal. It shows victims. It provides the name and website of an organization opposing drone murders. And it directly asks drone “pilots” to refuse to continue. It also makes the Nuremberg argument that an illegal order need not (in fact must not) be obeyed.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By David Swanson
A scholarly study has found that the U.S. public believes that whenever the U.S. government proposes a war, it has already exhausted all other possibilities. When a sample group was asked if they supported a particular war, and a second group was asked if they supported that particular war after being told that all alternatives were no good, and a third group was asked if they supported that war even though there were good alternatives, the first two groups registered the same level of support, while support for war dropped off significantly in the third group. This led the researchers to the conclusion that if alternatives are not mentioned, people don't assume they exist—rather, people assume they've already been tried.

By David Swanson
The cover of the January-February 2015 The Atlantic asks "Why Do The Best Soldiers in the World Keep Losing?" which leads to this article, which fails to answer the question.

By David Swanson
Imagine a letter co-signed by former presidents, former representatives from both sides of the aisle, House speakers, former governors, attorneys general, cabinet members, ambassadors, CEOs, movie stars and directors, writers, astronauts, religious leaders, mayors, academics, mainstream media correspondents, and more - all united in stating "Nobody wants war." Imagine the New York Times publishing this letter. The equivalent happened in Germany just a few days ago.

By David Swanson
Senator Rand Paul wants Congress to Declare war on ISIS. Some, like Bruce Fein, are willing to ignore the UN Charter and the Kellogg Briand Pact, and write as if a war would be legal if Congress would just declare it.

By David Swanson
The following is excerpted and adapted from War Is A Lie
We learn a lot about the real motives for wars when whistleblowers leak the minutes of secret meetings, or when congressional committees publish the records of hearings decades later.War planners write books.They make movies. They face investigations. Eventually the beans tend to get spilled.But I have never ever, not even once, heard of a private meeting in which top war makers discussed the need to keep a war going in order to benefit the soldiers fighting in it.

By David Swanson
According to a book by George Williston called This Tribe of Mine: A Story of Anglo Saxon Viking Culture in America, the United States wages eternal war because of its cultural roots in the Germanic tribes that invaded, conquered, ethnically cleansed, or—if you prefer—liberated England before moving on to the slaughter of the Native Americans and then the Filipinos and Vietnamese and on down to the Iraqis. War advocate, former senator, and current presidential hopeful Jim Webb himself blames Scots-Irish American culture.

By David Swanson
It seems like we just got through dealing with the argument that war is good for us because it brings peace. And along comes a very different twist, combined with some interesting insights. Here’s a blog post by Joshua Holland on Bill Moyers' website.

By Kathy Kelly
On October 7, 2014, Kathy Kelly and Georgia Walker appeared before Judge Matt Whitworth in Jefferson City, MO, federal court on a charge of criminal trespass to a military facility. The charge was based on their participation, at Whiteman Air Force Base, in a 1 June 2014 rally protesting drone warfare. Kelly and Walker attempted to deliver a loaf of bread and a letter to the Base Commander, encouraging the commander to stop cooperating with any further usage of unmanned aerial vehicles, (drones) for surveillance and attacks.

By David Swanson
Dostoievski once had a character imagine what a head would think if for some seconds it were aware of having been cut off by an executioner's guillotine, or if somehow it were aware for a full minute, or even for five minutes.

By David Swanson 
If members of the U.S. public were ever to wonder what the other 95% of humanity thinks about them, would it be better to break that harsh truth to them gently or just to blurt it out?  I'm going to go with the latter.

By David Swanson
We're in the grip of twin madnesses, and those who have overcome one of them can still be completely controlled by the other. The first madness is the idea that spending a trillion dollars a year on weaponry and war preparations makes us safer, that 1,000 military bases abroad protect rather than provoke, that nuclear arsenals discourage terrorism, that drones have civilized the act of blowing up somebody's house, that the Pentagon's business really is "defense."