War

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 […]

Afghanistan

How 9/11 Bred a “War on Terror” from Hell

Tomdispatch

By Norman Solomon | – [Today’s piece is adapted from the introduction to Norman Solomon’s book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine (The New Press, 2023).] ( Tomdispatch.com) – The day after the U.S. government began routinely bombing faraway places, the lead editorial in the New York Times […]

Displaced and Refugees

Cities like Homs and Kharkiv show how Homes, Streets and Neighbourhoods have become the Frontline in modern Warfare

The Conversation

By Ammar Azzouz, University of Oxford | – (The Conversation) – It has been almost 12 years since I left my city. And I have never been able to return. Homs, the place I was born and grew up, has been destroyed and I, like many others, have been left in exile: left to remember […]

Pentagon

Living on a War Planet . . . And Managing not to Notice

Tomdispatch

By David Bromwich ( Tomdispatch.com ) – A new war, a new alibi. When we think about our latest war — the one that began with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, just six months after our Afghan War ended so catastrophically — there is a hidden benefit. As long as American minds are on Ukraine, […]

Afghanistan

How War Divides Us: All the Ways our 21st Century Wars have Polarized Americans

Andrea Mazzarino

( Tomdispatch.com ) – Blame Donald Trump and all too many of his followers, but don’t just blame him or them. Yes, he was indeed responsible for the nightmare of January 6, 2021, and, in his own fashion, for the incitement of right-wing militia (terror!) groups like the Proud Boys. (“Stand back and stand by!”) […]