On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four college students and wounded nine others – one of them, Dean Kahler, is paralyzed below the waist – on the campus of Kent State University. Nobody was found guilty of the bloodletting. On that awful day,...
I am often asked what inspired me to help launch Antiwar.com, turn it into the focal point of anti-war activities on the Internet, and write literally hundreds of columns in a little over a year. I can only point to the picture hanging over my desk: a portrait of a...
Vice President Gore, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has outlined in some detail his views on foreign policy in a speech Sunday before the International Press Institute in Boston. Not surprisingly, his views differ little from the administration in...
The twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of Saigon has been the occasion for a whole series of retrospectives, reassessments, and general all-around breast-beating, and everyone seems to be having a grand old time of it. The Left – or what passes for the Left in...
War infects and weakens our republican form of government, spreads social and political diseases throughout the body politic – but is, as Randolph Bourne put it, "the health of the State." The State, in wartime, is glorified and empowered: the militarization of...
Perhaps, alongside thankfulness that against the odds nobody was hurt, one should be almost grateful to the national government for clarifying matters. Political scientists define government as the institution in a given society with a monopoly on the legitimate use...
On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam war the airwaves are full of special programs, and the op-ed pages are packed to the gills with articles and symposia – all opining about the "lessons" of that...
From Miami to Mitrovica, from Ruby Ridge to Iraq, the US government propaganda machine is geared up to put the best "spin" on the violence at the core of its power. In the assault on Iraq, TV viewers in the West were entertained by the "Nintendo war" as American...
I know, at least in theory, that we are governed by criminals: after all, what kind of a person would bomb an aspirin factory in an effort to divert attention from his own sickening perversions? Who else would slaughter thousands in the former Yugoslavia in the name...
One of the pleasures of keeping fat files – sometimes outweighed, sometimes not by the general air of messiness on the desk – is the opportunity to compare what officials said they expected at various times in the past to what has actually occurred. In the...
