By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, January 6, 2026
We live in a world where feeding grain that could feed 10,000 people to captive animals in order to butcher those animals and eat their dead flesh, thereby feeding 1,000 people and devastating our ecosystems, is unquestionable, where grotesque levels of consumption based on climate and environmental destruction and human exploitation are just part of living, where locking huge numbers of people in cages is deemed a positive contribution to society, where maintaining nuclear weapons that accomplish absolutely nothing but risk total destruction — and total destruction many times over — is understood as serious and responsible, where hoarding wealth that could transform millions of lives is heroic, where bribes are called campaign contributions, propaganda is called journalism, and objecting to genocide can get you punished for bigotry.
I could, of course, go on for pages, but the point is that questioning any such states of affairs is considered radical, impolite, conspiratorial, and a little bit nutty.
This is where Donroe Trumpolini helps out. Don’t get me wrong. I think Trump should have been impeached, removed, and prosecuted on his first Day 1, and said so before, during, and ever since that day. But there are pyrite-linings in the most fascistic clouds. And this is certainly one such. Trump is now telling the world that war is peace, that attacking another country is law enforcement, that kidnapping is diplomacy, that openly admitting to stealing oil is as good an excuse for mass murder as pretending to spread democracy, and that kidnapping a nation’s president gives you the right and ability to run that nation.
It’s finally too much for a huge number of people. Trump is — a little too openly — asking everyone to be in on the lies. Until Maduro was kidnapped it was our duty to all claim that he was leading a fictional drug cartel. Now it’s our duty to drop that whole idea and never mention it again. This is, according to the polls and the online discussions, just too much — even for people who thought keeping the war going in Ukraine was defensive, or occupying Iraq was philanthropy, or genociding Gaza was taking a stand against anti-Semitism. Finally, finally, finally, it’s too much.
So, now I don’t have to reach back into the past to help people get comfortable with radicalism. There’s no need to ask whether they would have gone along with slavery or burning witches. And I don’t just mean because of the MAGAs out there publicly advocating for slavery and burning witches. I mean because millions of people now see a blatantly criminal attack on another nation in gross violation of the UN Charter (combined with threats to a half dozen more nations) and realize that if that’s a Rules Based Order, the lunatics are running the asylum — on crack. If sending missiles into a country, killing at least 80 people, murdering the president’s guards, declaring that nobody has died, and kidnapping a man and wife from their bedroom to be tried in another country’s courts is how you counter “narcoterrorism” — even though you quickly drop most of the narco bit and there never was any terrorism apart from your own threats and drone murders — then you’ve made narcoterrorism sound preferable.
Welcome to radicalism, folks. You’re correct. War is not law-enforcement. Murdering people on dry land isn’t morally above murdering them in boats. Murdering them in boats is not acceptable if you call it war, or if you get Congress to approve it, or if the boats are made of solid cocaine. Murdering people turns out to be . . . murdering people. A man who demonstrably cannot run his own mouth cannot and must not run another country. You know these basic facts even though they are diametrically opposed to most of what can be printed on a newspaper’s front page or spoken on a corporate network.
I’ve got one additional radical idea for you, now that you are with me on so many others. It’s this: if any significant percentage of us take serious nonviolent action to undo the whole madhouse, we will succeed. The idea of our powerlessness is not less nutty than the idea of a drone missile as a legal process; it’s just been repeated many more times for many more years.
4 Responses
Great essay! But I have one small suggestion: please don’t start the essay by criticizing meat-eating. I’m a vegetarian, but a large number of readers will be annoyed by that rather tangential issue. The essay would be stronger if it confined its analysis to militarism and excluded the distracting discussion of vegetarianism.
When I read that, I read it as feeding a lot of animals food that starving people could eat so that the people feeding those animals could then eat them, is a problem. I didn’t see it as a critique of vegetarianism at all.
Strongly disagree. It might offend some people, but it might lead to opening minds of many more. The insanity of the animal industry is on the same scale as the other insanities listed (if not greater in total impact), and is not at all tangential. It is causing monumental suffering, to both animals and humans, and it is carried out by very similar giant corporations, for the same insane and insatiable greed, and is portrayed in public discourse as acceptable with the same totally nonsensical propaganda (and denial). The only difference is it’s somewhat less in the awareness of the majority of the left – much more reason to bring it to light and let those whom it’s new to, to contemplate it in the same realm as those other offenses that they’re familiar with. Actually a stroke of genius and bravery by Swanson, and I’m deeply grateful.
I said it was unquestionable — meaning precisely that people would immediately tell me not to question it . . . for the very reason that it would be unacceptable to question it.