The killing train rolls on

It rolls on with its thousands upon thousands of corpses, it rolls through towns and cities, through prairie and forest, though the mountains and the plains, through heaven and earth, through the valley of the shadow of death, across the

Heroism in War

In contemporary society, perhaps all societies, violent actions are often applauded and labelled heroic — and especially actions in war. And so the question arises: what makes actions such heroic, if at all? This is a question close to pure

ANZAC Day

By jingo, it’s ANZAC day, Australia’s favourite nationalist/gambling holiday! Time to put aside pro-war ANZAC “lest we forget” mythology, which amounts to forgetting everything important in history. Lest we forget Australia’s role in maintaining British, now American, domination of the

On militarism

During the US wars in Indochina, a tumult of protest and activism at Stanford brought many momentous changes to the university. Among these was the banishment of the ROTC from campus. But recently, the suggestion has been made in the

Self-determination and Afghanistan

Self-determination is a central principle of international law. In the case of Afghan self-determination it’s probably also useful to point out that there is a sizeable Afghan peace movement, very courageous and principled, which the antiwar movement in the US

Rice's nonsense on torture

Oh wow, I only got around to watching this video now, and from some of the comments I thought she must have been making some half-convincing arguments… nope! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijEED_iviTA&feature=channel_page Well, first we upgrade al Qaeda to tyrants, okay. Then one

Civilian Casualties in Iraq?

We have a densely argued discussion of the available evidence andliterature review in footnote number 30 of our open letter: http://www.stanford.edu/group/antiwar/cgi-bin/mediawiki/index.php?title=Condi_coalition_letter_draft#cite_note-29 (Why does the link for footnote 30 ends in “note-29”. I think I blame computer scientists who like to