New Clear Vision

Judging Society by Its Prison System

by David Swanson

Prisoners risking death by refusing food in the Pelican Bay supermax, and those hunger striking in solidarity in prisons around California, are a judgment of our sickness. “The degree of civilization in a society,” said Dostoyevsky, “can be judged by entering its prisons.”

Civilization is something we no longer seem to aspire to. The United States locks up more people and a greater percentage of its people than anyone else. We lock them in training centers for anger and violence. We subject them to rape, assault, humiliation, and isolation. We throw the innocent in with the guilty, the young with the old, the nonviolent with the violent, the hopeful with those who’ve lost all interest in life. (more…)

Not on a Moving Train!

by David Swanson

How often have we been told that we can’t have a serious nonviolent movement resisting our government’s destructive path as long as the Democrats are better than the Republicans?

How often have we been told that we can’t back third-party candidates as long as the Democrats are better than the Republicans?

This week has seen an inordinate number of realizations that the Democrats are as bad as or worse than the Republicans. And what has the response been?

Activist groups are proposing not to donate money to President Barack Obama. Some have even suggested declining to volunteer for him. Most responses have been even weaker than that. Citizens have transformed themselves into pundits and announced that Obama will not be reelected. (more…)

King George III Won — Happy July Fourth!

by David Swanson

The Declaration of Independence is best remembered as a declaration of war, a war declared on the grounds that we wanted our own flag.  The sheer stupidity and anachronism of the idea serves to discourage any thoughts about why Canada didn’t need a bloody war, whether the U.S. war benefitted people outside the new aristocracy to whom power was transferred, what bothered Frederick Douglas so much about a day celebrating “independence,” or what the Declaration of Independence actually said.

When you read the Declaration of Independence, it turns out to be an indictment of King George III for various abuses of power.  And those abuses of power look fairly similar to abuses of power we happily permit U.S. presidents to engage in today, either as regards the people of this nation or the people of territories and nations that our military occupies today in a manner uncomfortably resembling Britain’s rule over the 13 colonies. (more…)

What’s Next for Peace Activism in the U.S.?

by David Swanson

Five years ago was a high point for participation in the peace movement in the United States.  This was because the Iraq war was young and violent, but also because the pitiful, poorly funded organizations driven by opposition to war were joined by the major well-funded organizations and individuals and funders who oppose the Republican Party in any way available, including through opposition to wars that are identified as Republican wars.  The Democratic Party was in the minority in Congress and not in the White House.  It didn’t promise peace and justice, but its supporters poured money and time and energy into bashing the Republicans for their wars and injustices. (more…)

Investing in Nonviolence, Not Dictatorships

by David Swanson

(Editor’s Note: This coming week, we will be running a thematic series of articles focusing on the Israel-Palestine conflict and attendant issues. This essay helps to establish a framework for U.S. engagement in the region.)

I recently flew from California to Washington, D.C., and when the plane landed, the pilot came on the intercom to tell everyone to celebrate: our government had killed Osama bin Laden. This was better than winning the Super Bowl, he said.

Set aside for a moment the morality of cheering for the killing of a human being — which despite the pilot’s prompting nobody on the plane did. In purely Realpolitik terms, killing prominent individuals whom we’ve previously supported has never resolved anything. (more…)

Why Aren’t We ‘Raising Hell’ for Sustainability, Peace, and Prosperity?

by David Swanson

Yes, yes, poverty exists, just as war does, and the two feed off each other.  When I titled a book War Is A Lie I meant that the justifications offered for wars were false and that the idea that we must always have wars is false.  Our government doesn’t market new poverty campaigns in the same way it does wars.  It markets campaigns to dismantle healthcare and pension systems or to eliminate foreign aid or to restrict organizing rights.  But our culture pushes the false notion that poverty must always be with us.

The fact is that our nation and our world are capable of environmental sustainability, peace, and the eradication of poverty.  We’ve spent a decade racing headlong away from these goals in response to dramatic crimes that killed 3,000 people.  The fact that 10,000 people have died from perfectly preventable causes in Africa alone every single day for those 10 years somehow gets lost in our self-obsessed, short-sighted, fear-driven, greed-excusing, corporate communications system. (more…)

Let’s Celebrate Life and Liberty, Not Death and Dehumanization

by David Swanson

U.S. newspapers sometimes print what they call the total death count from one or more of our wars, and all the dead who are listed are Americans.  They aren’t all the Americans.  They don’t include contractors or suicides or various other categories of dead Americans.  They certainly don’t include those who died for lack of basic needs while we dumped half of our public treasury into wars.

But they also don’t include anyone from that 95% of humanity that’s not from the United States.  In our current wars, well over 95% of the dead, even in the short-term, are from the countries where the wars are fought.  Some get labeled combatants and some civilians, but they’re all left out of most body counts, and when they are counted they are counted low.  Our government pretends not to count them at all, and only thanks to Wikileaks do we know otherwise, that the military has counted some of them. (more…)