War

By Jonathan Bridge, Sheffield Hallam University | – (The Conversation) – On the morning of December 6 1917, a French cargo ship called SS Mont-Blanc collided with a Norwegian vessel in the harbour of Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada. The SS Mont-Blanc, which was laden with 3,000 tons of high explosives destined for the battlefields […]

Israel/ Palestine

Gaza/ Hiroshima: Could Israel Nuke the Palestinians?

Tomdispatch

By Joshua Frank | – ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Israel’s robust military, the fourth-strongest in the world, is ravaging Gaza and, along with armed settlers, terrorizing Palestinians in the West Bank following the brutal Hamas massacres of October 7th. Like so many other colonial projects, Israel was born of terror and has necessitated the use […]

Books

In the Shadow of War: Life and Fiction in Twenty-First Century America

Tomdispatch

By Beverly Gologorsky ( Tomdispatch.com) – I’m a voracious reader of American fiction and I’ve noticed something odd in recent years. This country has been eternally “at war” and you just wouldn’t know that — a small amount of veteran’s fiction aside — from the novels that are generally published. For at least a decade, […]

Nonviolence

Why we Need Armistice Day Back: Remembering the Horrors of War

H. Patricia Hynes

Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment) – November 11 – at the “11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month” – marks 105 years since the World War 1 Armistice, which ended the nightmare of the deadliest war in history until then. The brutality of that first industrial war robbed 20 million soldiers […]

Armenia

From Armenia to Gaza: War, Crimes, Truth and Denial

Tomdispatch

By Arnold Isaacs ( Tomdispatch.com) – This month’s catastrophic violence in Israel and Gaza — specifically, the contradictory statements from each side on the other’s war crimes — has taken me back to a revealing personal moment almost exactly 18 years ago, recalling a different war in a different part of the world. That day […]

Iraq

What’s not being Said: What War does to the Nations that Fight It

Andrea Mazzarino

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Reacting to the terrorist attacks by the Palestinian militant group Hamas that killed more than 1,400 Israelis, Americans have been remarkably focused on whether we should support Israel or the residents of Gaza. In either case, we act as if Israel’s only possible decision was whether or not to launch a […]

Children

Please Don’t Kill the Children: The Dehumanization of War

Tomdispatch

By Kelly Denton-Borhaug ( Tomdispatch.com ) – When humans embrace the dehumanization of others, we release our ugliest, most destructive selves. Dehumanization is a perverse force that propagates violence and justifies the lust for war and its atrocities. On August 6, 1945, Sakue Shimohira was 10 years old when an atomic blast obliterated her home […]

nuclear weapons

At the Brink? Contemplating the Unimaginable Costs of a Nuclear War

Andrea Mazzarino

( Tomdispatch.com) – Here’s something strange about our all-too-nuclearized planet: in my youth during the 1950s and early 1960s, the possibility of an obliterating nuclear war played a significant role in our everyday nightmares. We schoolkids then regularly engaged in “duck and cover” drills, diving under our desks to protect ourselves from a possible nuclear […]

Featured

War is not Inevitable, and Social Scientists are Finding Peace Movements more Effective

H. Patricia Hynes

Greenfield, MA (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – I am heartened each time I come across a study affirming that waging war is not an innate part of human nature, that we humans are just as likely to be peaceful as we are to be violent. To quote the revered anthropologist Margaret Mead, “warfare is only […]