By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, October 3, 2026
Remarks in Baltimore on October 3, 2026, at event with War Is Still A Lie
Thank you to Ronda Cooperstein and the local chapter of World BEYOND War for setting this event up.
I recently read a big stack of books on the decline and elimination of dueling. There were thousands of factors, many of them beyond anyone’s easy control, but key among them was cultural change, was bringing people to find greater humiliation in dueling than in not dueling, greater respect in refusing to duel than in being willing to duel. The picture of dueling as noble, respectable, and courageous was replaced by one much nearer the truth: drunken primadonnas misperceiving insults and committing murder for lack of the ability to admit they were idiots. And dueling died by stages. More and more would-be duelists’ so-called seconds negotiated peace. More and more duels ended without deaths or injuries, often with bullets intentionally shot into the air. More and more duelists were prosecuted for the crime. More and more newspaper cartoonists depicted duelists as monkeys and clowns. Dueling was outlawed and denounced for centuries before the abolitionists finally succeeded.
War has been outlawed for a century and denounced for longer than that, and for a while now it’s been wounded. If Teddy Roosevelt came back to life in some museum and declared that we needed some more wars just for the fun of it, he wouldn’t get far. No longer can anyone get majorities to believe that wars are desirable or good because they build character or are simply one acceptable tool of foreign relations or are needed to spread somebody’s religion or race or empire. Every war is depicted as the last possible resort, no matter how absurdly or how much effort has gone into creating the war and preventing its resolution.
War, like dueling, is an exception. Most people never dueled. In most parts of the world there is no war. Most people would have done anything they could to avoid dueling and most do everything that can to avoid war — even those who support other people going to war. But we haven’t yet gotten to the point where courage in a politician is understood by everybody as standing up to the weapons dealers and warmongers and saying No I won’t do war.
When I first wrote War Is A Lie I thought we were making progress at spotting war lies and wanted that progress to accelerate. In U.S. polling it took about a year and a half from the start of the war on Afghanistan and the start of the war on Iraq to get a majority saying that each war never should have been started. It took much longer than that to get a majority saying each war should be ended. This was because thousands of members of the U.S. military had been killed, and some twisted logic told us that the only way to respect those already killed was to get more killed. It didn’t matter if polling of members of the military found that they wanted to come home, or if their suicides were outpacing their deaths in combat, or if 30 or 40 times as many Iraqis were being killed as U.S. troops — in fact that last bit of information went beyond not mattering to the point of it almost being treasonous to become aware of it. My dream was that we could get faster at opposing the wars, that we could get huge majorities to realize how they were being tricked into supporting horrific evil before a war even started.
And I thought we were making progress. While wars that do not happen never make it into history books, public opposition repeatedly prevented a war on Iran, until it didn’t. And it prevented a massive bombing campaign on Syria. We still weren’t going after the money, the military budget that would generate more wars. We still weren’t dismantling the empire of bases, joining treaties or courts, pursuing cooperation and aid and peacemaking. We still hadn’t moved from each of these many wars is wrong to all possible wars are wrong. But we were taking baby steps.
And then WHAM — Ukraine ate our brains.
I want to go back for a second to 100 years ago when war wasn’t what it would become and wasn’t widely understood even for what it was, to a time when the United States had been training Japan in imperialism and encouraging it to invade and occupy Korea. Well, Japan’s empire and the United States’ own empire collided. The U.S. took over numerous islands, staged its war rehearsals nearby, and threatened and sanctioned Japan. The public issue of the build-up to war was big news for years. Admirable people in both governments tried to work against it. Ten thousand protesters marched up Fifth Avenue opposing the build-up to war with Japan. But the U.S. government created the draft (and saw major draft resistance, and locked draft resisters up in prisons), activated the National Guard, supplied planes and trainers and pilots and money to China for war against Japan (making sure Japan knew about it), imposed harsh sanctions on Japan, advised the U.S. military that a war with Japan was beginning, and ordered the creation of a list of every Japanese and Japanese-American person in the United States. On December 4, 1941, newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, published President Roosevelt’s plan for war against Germany and Japan. U.S. officials had worried for months about a possible attack on Pearl Harbor. On November 15, 1941, U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall briefed the media: “We are preparing an offensive war against Japan,” he said, asking the journalists to keep it a secret. Marshall told Congress in 1945 that the United States had initiated Anglo-Dutch-U.S. agreements for unified action against Japan and put them into effect before December 7. On November 25, 1941, Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote in his diary that he’d met in the Oval Office with Marshall, President Roosevelt, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, Admiral Harold Stark, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Roosevelt had told them the Japanese were likely to attack soon, possibly the next Monday, December 1, 1941. “The question,” Stimson wrote, “was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves. It was a difficult proposition.” On December 7/8, 1941, Japan attacked the U.S. colonies of the Philippines and Guam, plus the U.S. territories of Hawaii, Midway, and Wake, as well as the British colonies of Malaya, Singapore, and Honk Kong, and the independent nation of Thailand. While someplace like the Philippines had many more people in it, and they were legally more Americans, and the Japanese came and remained, Hawaii had more so-called white people in it, so the quick bombing raid there became the Infamous Surprise Attack on Pearl Harbor, which became an annual national holiday. The U.S. Navy allows oil to continue to leak into the shallow harbor from a sunken ship, and visitors get teary-eyed over the rainbow-colored pollution that proves eternal U.S. innocence and the incomprehensible irrationality of foreigners who could attack you at anytime for no reason at all while you’re obliviously playing golf and inventing plastic. There’s much more about this in War Is Still A Lie.
The Surprise Attack on Pearl Harbor is the archetype into which propagandists fit the Unprovoked Attack on Ukraine. Almost overnight, people who couldn’t have told you what Ukraine was the day before would stop you on the street and ask you if you were helping Ukraine. This was the most successful propaganda I had ever seen or heard of. “Helping Ukraine” came to mean anything from hanging up a Ukrainian flag (many of them still there in 2026) to sending humanitarian aid to Ukrainians to supporting the U.S. government sending Ukraine mountains of free weapons. This support for Ukraine went deep even into those Americans who had opposed many other wars. This war they were going to support, and with it NATO, and with NATO (somehow) really stick it to Trump.
Of course, Russia had criminally and murderously invaded Ukraine and was killing and destroying on a major scale. Murder is murder, whether Japan, or Russia, or Ukraine, or the United States does it. But of course the war was named the Unprovoked War because of how it had been provoked. There had been public comments by U.S. officials arguing that the provocations would not provoke anything. “I don’t buy this argument that, you know, us supplying the Ukrainians with defensive weapons is going to provoke Putin,” said Senator Chris Murphy. One can still read a RAND report advocating creating a war like this one through the sorts of provocations that senators claimed wouldn’t provoke anything. In September 2023, then Secretary General of NATO Jens Stoltenberg explained the cause of the war in terms Vladimir Putin would have agreed with, saying, “[Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.” The United States had facilitated a coup in Ukraine in 2014. Fighting between Ukraine and eastern provinces that sought autonomy began at that time. In the days prior to the Russian invasion, Ukrainian attacks on those provinces increased significantly, while news reports carried new Western predictions each day that Russia would invade the next day. Russia’s horror of NATO came not just from NATO’s expansion to Russia’s border but also from the United States tearing up treaties, installing missile bases, and proliferating nuclear weapons. Some Americans are better able to understand this if you describe it as a Cuban missile crisis in reverse, though you could also just call it a Cuban missile crisis, since Kennedy resolved that crisis by agreeing to remove missiles from Turkey in exchange for the Soviet Union removing missiles from Cuba. Now U.S. missile bases are as close to Russia as they were then, but no Russian bases are in the Americas.
There is a lot more on this topic and pretty much any topic I touch on in War Is Still A Lie. I just want to note here that two weeks after the major Russian invasion, negotiations were held in Istanbul and reached an agreement to end the war, but the U.S. and UK governments said no — this according to numerous U.S. and UK and Russian officials including top U.S. so-called diplomat Victoria Nuland shamelessly and openly in front of a video camera. For years, the U.S. government told us we had to send weapons to Ukraine for a necessary and unavoidable and last-resort war that the U.S. government was forbidding the Ukrainian government from ending. And the U.S. propaganda was so good that many people in the U.S. kept supporting the war in Ukraine because supposedly the Ukrainians themselves wanted that, even long after polling in Ukraine, among those who hadn’t fled or died, and despite a widespread fear of speaking out, found majorities of Ukrainians wanting to make a compromise and end the war.
Now I was worried about that eternal question that President George W. Bush had framed so eloquently as: IS OUR CHILDREN LEARNING?
But good news for our progress at spotting war lies was just around the corner in the form of horrific news for the world. This came in the form of a livestreamed genocide in Gaza and the second coronation of Donald Trump.
Baltimorean H.L. Mencken had of course declared that “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
For the three-quarters of the people whose inner souls are steadily vomiting in response to U.S. politics happy times were not here again. But war opposition was. And, in fact, having shown us the Ukrainian victims of war on every television channel may even have primed us to notice Palestinian victims of war on every social media channel. If Russia shouldn’t slaughter people, why should Israel? So, for three years now we’ve been fed every Israeli military lie and most of us have chosen to believe our own eyes instead. Even people who called other people names like Putin-lover were willing themselves to brave being called Hamas-lover. Even people who had moments before sworn that there was no such thing on Earth as opposing both sides of a war declared their condemnation of murders by both Israel and Hamas. And, for a while, the more the warmongers shouted that peace is anti-Semitic, the more the streets filled up with protesters.
And along came Trump to put perhaps one of the final nails into the coffin of war lies. I had thought the dumbest war lie would always be something like “Watch me find these imaginary weapons!” Then Trump started a war on Iran that closed the Strait of Hormuz and told us the point of the war was to open the strait that had been closed by the war. Now my dream had come true; we now had a majority in the U.S. opposed to a war and wanting it ended on Day 1. People were somewhat predisposed I think to spot ridiculous war lies by Trump’s having lied that if elected he would end wars before even taking office. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza rolled on along with new wars on Venezuela, Lebanon, Yemen, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, and Caribbean fishing boats — and the widespread threat of war, Trump’s repeated hinting at using nuclear weapons, the worldwide fear of being made the next Gaza at the whim of a childish fascistic fool. When asked why he hadn’t ended wars as promised, Trump replied “I didn’t guarantee no war. Why would I have built the strongest military in the world?” Good question. It’s always smart to follow the money.
People are upset right now about $40 something billion having been spent on the war on Iran, not counting the economic impact, not counting the destroyed U.S. military bases, etc. I hope we’re all also upset about the mass murder, but still, I’m with you. For less than what is spent on one of these wars you could end homelessness or the lack of preschool or college; you could create a green new deal. You could work wonders. But nobody ever funded the war on Iran. The Pentagon just had what it wanted lying around. It wishes it had had more missiles that would have cost more money. I wish Iran still had more elementary schools. And if you make a bar graph of three items, the cost of something good like free preschool for anyone in the U.S., the cost of this war, and the cost of the military budget now making its way through Congress, to fit the third one on the page you have to make the first two so small that you almost need to squint to see them.
Why would there be a bill for $1.5 TRILLION for the war machine making its way through Congress? And, by the way, the U.S. military gets about that much again from other sources. The top excuse, the obsessively overwhelmingly leading justification for the entire mad pursuit of total violent domination of every inch of the Earth and cyberspace and outerspace and the space between our ears is China.
This past Wednesday morning I was speaking by Zoom to a college class about war and peace, and one of the students asked about the risk of the U.S. demilitarizing and other nations not. I gave a standard answer about how a reverse arms race could be done in stages. The U.S. could commit to not spending more than three times any other nation on its military and proceed downward from there. Of the couple of dozen nations that spend much of anything on their militaries, all but three are U.S. allies and weapons customers being hammered hard by the U.S. government (and NATO) to spend more. The only country spending more than a tiny fraction of the U.S. — in fact, spending close to a third of U.S. military spending as it’s usually reported or a sixth of what it really is — is China. If the U.S. were to keep its nukes out of South Korea and Japan, and its troops out of South Korea, and finally end the war and turn South Korea’s military over to South Korea, and start joining treaties and courts and beginning a general disarmament, North Korea would almost certainly join in serious negotiations about getting rid of its nukes, while China would — I guaranteed to this college class — not keep increasing its own military spending.
Within a minute of saying goodbye on Zoom, I saw that Trump had offered to sell weapons to China. Let me repeat that, Trump has been offering to sell U.S. war weapons to China. This is, in my humble opinion, terrific news. I have no idea whether Trump knows that a lot of people still want to hear some excuse for dumping virtually all of our money into the biggest war machine ever — much less for handing the decisions about the wars over to the actual weapons. I have no idea whether he’s noticed that every conversation in Congress and corporate media quickly becomes a competition about competing with China. I do know that he wants decisions to be simply about the Will of Donald Trump. So, he may not care about China as the big excuse for military spending, but I certainly care about the wonderful news that he’s taken that excuse away.
Surely we do not need trillions more dumped into the Pentagon because of China while Trump is trying to sell China weapons. Surely the rest of the world’s governments that Trump is badgering to spend more on weapons do not need to do so because of China while Trump is trying to sell China weapons. Surely Australia, for example, does not need to be filled up with U.S. troops because of China while Trump is pitching China on his favorite weapons.
So, phone the neighbors, wake the kids, and pinch the lazy new panda bears because a peace dividend is surely on the way if enough people find out that Trump has tried to sell China weapons and think about it for a few seconds and do something about it for a few days. That last bit is the sticking point I know. Even if we can get more people to see the absurdity of impoverishing ourselves to build up to a war on China while trying to sell China weapons than we could ever get people to see the absurdity of impoverishing ourselves to build up to a war on China while investing in bioweapons labs in China, there’s still the problem of the extra-big lie.
The big lie is of course the lie that becomes more believable because the truth would be extremely horrible to admit to. The extra-big lie is the lie that even though most of us want something there’s no point in trying to do anything about it. You’re powerless. They don’t care what you think. Nothing has ever worked before. So, snap out of it, grow up, and weep or vote, or at the most vote really really hard and break the voting machine with how powerfully you vote. Otherwise, just live with it and go shopping. That’s the extra-big lie. Needless to say, you should vote and if everyone would we’d be better off. If we could vote on policies like Californians voting for a teeny little tax on oligarchs, we’d be better off. But nobody ever voted themselves the right to vote. Nonviolent movements have changed laws and societies, prevented wars, ended wars, and reversed policy proposals, and believing you can do nothing is exactly what Lockheed Martin wants, far more than believing that Muslims are evil or China hates you or Putin’s hiding in your closet.
I see some disempowering of people also in all the worry about artificial intelligence taking control of the world and killing off the humans. The problem with AI that we face right now, not in some possible future when it becomes independent of people, is the combination of artificial intelligence and good old natural stupidity. The U.S. military almost went after a Chinese ship, believing that it contained nuclear weapons technology. At the last minute the U.S. military found enough natural intelligence to realize that a robot had made that up about the nuclear weapons. Was the robot trying to start world war three? I doubt it. Is the U.S. military willing to risk world war three? Clearly. And I think its increased use of machines to make decisions should be even worse for the Doomsday Clock than Ukraine has been. But the announcements that AI is an omnicidal threat and that this is something new hide the fact that the threat lies in the exacerbation of one of the existing threats — nuclear, climate, disease, etc. Anything to distract us from the fact that our biggest enterprise is organized mass murder and destruction.
As dueling was mocked out of existence, we need satirists for the war industry, We need more lyrics like those of Jesse Welles’ song War Isn’t Murder which begins
War isn’t murder
Good men don’t die
Children don’t starve
And all women survive
War isn’t murder
That’s what they say
When you’re fighting the devil
Murder’s okay
War isn’t murder
They’re called casualties
There ain’t a veteran
With a good night’s sleep
Of course, people can join in such a peace culture, but often with a limitation, an asterisk, a back-of-the-head shadow of doubt. Because what if the mythical good war arrives next year, then what? If it were possible to really comprehend what a trillion dollars is, this wouldn’t be such a problem. War kills primarily through the diversion of money from where it’s needed. It also creates nuclear weapons, destroys the environment, prevents cooperation on the environment and disease and homelessness, allows government secrecy and surveillance, militarizes police and borders and minds, fuels bigotry, and so forth.
And of course if someone agrees with me on dismantling the war machine today, then I really don’t care if they simply adore any number of past wars. But given the way this actually works, a few words should be said, going back again to the 1930s.
In 1938, representatives of 32 nations and 63 organizations publicly met in France with some 200 journalists covering the event. They discussed the Nazis’ desire to expel or kill Jews in Germany and Austria and decided to not accept their expulsion to anywhere in any significant numbers but to leave them to their fate. Only Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic even increased their immigration quotas. The decision was openly based on anti-Semitism. Australian delegate T. W. White said, without asking the native people of Australia: “as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.” The dictator of the Dominican Republic viewed Jews as racially desirable, as bringing whiteness to a land with many people of African descent. Land was set aside for 100,000 Jews, but fewer than 1,000 ever arrived. The conference was proposed by and chaired by a representative of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt who chose not to make any serious efforts to aid Jewish refugees, before, during, or after the conference. Foreign correspondent, columnist, and Pulitzer Prize winner Anne O’Hare McCormick described the “heartbreaking” scenes of long lines of Jews seeking visas from U.S. consulates while “waiting in suspense” for the outcome of this conference. She believed the world faced a fundamental “test of civilization.” Could America accept the moral guilt, McCormick asked, if Germany was allowed to continue with its blatant “policy of extermination” of the Jewish people? The U.S. Coast Guard chased a ship of Jewish refugees away from Miami. The State Department turned down the visa application of Anne Frank’s family. Congress rejected the Wagner-Rogers bill to admit more Jewish and non-Aryan refugees, but passed the Hennings Bill to allow unlimited numbers of British Christian children into the United States. A 1938 Gallup poll found that seventy-two percent of Americans believed “we should not allow a larger number of Jewish exiles from Germany into the U.S.” Much much more on this in War Is Still A Lie.
One of the big hurdles in dismantling the machinery of death is nuclear weapons. It’s accepted history that having gone from being able to destroy all life on Earth thousands of times to mere hundreds of times constituted the ending of the Cold War. It is my contention that even getting it down to tens of times or even a single time wouldn’t end anything of the sort, though it might kickoff an amazing reverse arms race. To get a small nation without a massive global military to give up nuclear weapons would require eliminating military threats toward that nation. But for a large nation with a military costing vastly more than the rest of the world’s militaries combined to give up its nuclear weapons would put only two things at risk — namely the ability to initiate the destruction of all life on Earth and the ability to jump in and participate redundantly if another nation has already doomed the Earth to a nuclear winter. We all claim to oppose the first thing and I hope we mean it. The second thing should not be of interest to anyone either. If Russia or some super cool computer used by Russia or perhaps Matthew Broderick were to launch nukes and doom the world to death and starvation, would you care whether someone in a U.S. uniform made it to a button in time to add more missiles before they died? If not, unilateral nuclear disarmament would be wiser than hoping the next dozen near-misses as they call them don’t wipe us out.
All right, I’m going to stop and start taking your questions, but first let me say that your senators and misrepresentative are home now and want you to vote for them and probably have not committed to doing everything possible to reduce the military spending (or to remove the merger with the Israeli military) in the so-called National Defense Authorization Act. It’s your job to make sure they have no choice but to do that. And the emperor himself is visiting a weapons company in the Baltimore area on Tuesday. I hope he’s protested. I hope local media is flooded with letters and calls. I hope it’s the last time he dares to come here.
You’ve got a local chapter of World BEYOND War you can work with to advance peace education, communication, and activism. At World BEYOND War dot org you’ll see that we have an online course about to begin on War and the Environment, and a webinar coming up on how to stop the U.S. military spending legislation, and an annual conference coming up on moving beyond borders. Please take part as much as you are able.
Let me add here three answers I gave to an Iranian news agency yesterday:
- Is the naval blockade and the expansion of sanctions against Iran, given their impact on the Iranian people’s access to food and medicine, the transportation sector, and aviation safety, consistent with international humanitarian law and other international laws? Are these sanctions not a crime against humanity?
In the Geneva Conventions we can read this: “No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited. Pillage is prohibited. Reprisals against protected persons and their property are prohibited.” It takes many years of law school and a great deal of money to believe that consistent with blockading an entire population to deny it food and medicine while threatening complete genocide. Such threats are also a violation of the UN Charter as is the entire war and therefore every constituent part of the war.
- What practical and effective measures can the international community take to prevent and stop violations of the rights of the Iranian people by the United States?
195 nations could overthrow the Security Council veto power of the other 5. National courts in any nation could prosecute U.S. and Israeli crimes under universal jurisdiction. Nations with U.S. bases in them that have not been destroyed during this war could evict them. And any government that has been beaten and badgered by the U.S. government and NATO into dumping its resources into weapons to supposedly protect it from China could point out that Trump has been trying to sell China U.S. weapons as well, send the weapons back, ask for a refund, and bankrupt the war machine on the model of the bankruptcy of ever company Trump ran before he was in government.
- Given the continuation of the war of attrition against Iran, the expansion of sanctions, and the consequences of this war inside the United States, does the Donald Trump administration have a clear path toward ending the war as the United States approaches its midterm elections? Please elaborate.
No, he hasn’t a clue. His secret plans to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza never existed. We have yet to see even Richard Nixon’s secret plan to end the war on Vietnam because it never existed. There is a possibility of nuclear or non-nuclear escalation by this lunatic. But he has no idea how to negotiate a compromise, there’s no reason for anyone to believe anything he promises unless he immediately does it, and whenever he even talks about making a deal, the so-called opposition among the Democrats jump up and down about how bad the deal would be as if continuing the war and risking nuclear war is preferable — even as the incompetents at the Pentagon are bringing in so-called artificial intelligence and prominent leaders in the field of natural stupidity into their so-called thought processes.
