Debra Sweet | May, 26, 2023

This week, we had planned to share a look at the U.S. drone war — it's aftermath and ongoing and growing carnage as the use of weaponized drones spreads. Look for that next week.

Warning: there's an assignment here, should you choose to accept it.

On May 15, a study was released that should have made huge headlines, but didn't. Thanks to Lyle Rubin, classroom presenter with WeAreNotYourSoldiers.org, who first called our attention to the recent Brown University study by Stephanie Savell of its Watson Institute — How Death Outlives War: The Reverberating Impact of Post-9/11 Wars on Human Health.

And thanks to RevCom.us which presents, this week, an important introduction to the U.S. global war on terror — New Study Reveals Massive Hidden Toll of “Indirect” Casualties of War: America’s Post-9/11 Wars: The “Gift” That Keeps on Killing.  The piece brings the study to life with a pictorial of the key findings, country by country, saying the study has "opened a window on a level of American crime which has been largely hidden until now." From the summary: A “spiraling pattern of war-induced poverty, food insecurity, communicable diseases, and death…”

Even when I was very young I felt strangely about Memorial Day. We would drive to relatives' graves and put flowers, out of respect, as my older family members called it "Decoration Day." My father did not like the holiday at all. He was drafted into World War II at 19 and sent to Okinawa in 1944 at the end of the U.S. battle against the people of Okinawa (and also against Japanese soldiers) and kept there during the U.S. occupation. When finally he talked about it, after age 80, it was to explain to his grandchildren why he hated war. He was proud that he never used his weapon, as was the case with the majority of conscripts there.

"We are still in the early stages of an authoritarian regime change," warns Salon writer Chauncey Devega. "We still have an aspiring authoritarian leader. Many people have gotten to the point where I was a year ago, which is recognizing that this situation is uncertain and the outcome depends upon us. Matters are not hopeless but they are dire. The stakes are very high."

It's worth thinking about how imperialist wars start; how they can end up; how opposition develops externally and domestically. Sometimes waging wars make the aggressor less stable. Sometimes they lose legitimacy. A lot depends on what the opposition does. In this week of anniversaries, let's look back.

What happened since 9/11? There was a time before endless war, but here's a chronicle of the actions the government took since then, and the public protest that resulted.

Debra Sweet | August 8, 2014

August 8,1974: it's been 40 years since Richard Nixon was driven from office in disgrace, and rightly so. He didn't go because the system "worked," as revisionist history says now. 

The situation in the central European country of Ukraine continues to be tense, volatile, unpredictable, and dangerous. What—as we go to press—is contention at the level of economic blackmail and lower-level military moves could erupt very quickly into something even much worse.

Anyone who thinks U.S.-led “arms inspections” or “disarmament” represents a step in the right direction or is anything other than another form of imperialist intervention and bullying needs to study and think about the lessons of Operation Desert Fox.

When I asked this week “When did it become appropriate to hold a vote about whether or not we should commit the “supreme international crime”?  I received a comment that

The people who have received your message are probably already convinced of the illegality (or at least immorality) of a US attack on Syria, but efforts to persuade those not yet convinced would be aided by being able to refer to some internationally recognized legal document in which wars of aggression are so characterized and the characterization is explained (because all other war crimes flow from wars of aggression).

Sixty-eight years ago, on August 6, 1945, the United States committed the worst terrorist bombing ever—the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

On August 9, another American A-bomb destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki. The two blasts were each the equivalent of tens of thousands of tons of dynamite. The heat reached 1,000 degrees Celsius [1,832 degrees Fahrenheit]. The explosions and the radiation cloud they created killed more than 200,000 people, either immediately or over the next few months. Many years of suffering from cancer and other ills caused by radiation poisoning lay ahead for the survivors and their children.