Not a single thing that we commonly believe about wars that helps keep them around is true. –Excerpted from “War Is Still A Lie”

Paulo Kirk

Jul 28, 2026

LINK TO THE INTERVIEW BETWEEN HAEDER AND SWANSON.

Recall: Trump remarked in 2026, when accused of violating a promise not to wage wars:

“I didn’t guarantee no war. Why would I have built the strongest military in the world?”

KYAQ — FM, Lincoln County Oregon, August 12: Streaming at 8 pm PST, and rebroadcast Thursday the 13th 3 pm PST!

David Swanson was kind enough to spend an hour with you, the listening audience. Third edition of: War is a Lie, now, WAR is STILL a Lie.

On a sidenote: Hours before the Swanson interview, I had just picked up some youth from PDX, after they were in Japan for a few days on this sister city exchange that happens every three years: Youth there come over, youth here go over, adults from Japan come over, adults from Lincoln County go over to Japan.

The city of Newport celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Sister City relationship between Newport and Mombetsu, Japan, a partnership that has fostered cultural exchange and international friendship since its official establishment in 1966.

Public protest has also grown, including weekly protests in metropolitan areas and college campuses from Sapporo to Okinawa. The Japan Pediatric Society called for a ceasefire, while the United Church of Christ in Japan (Japan’s largest Protestant denomination) condemned Zionism. Negative Japanese public opinion toward Israel has been increasingly visible over the past two years. In a Pew Research survey this year, 79 percent of Japanese respondents had a negative opinion about Israel.

To some degree, this negative public opinion toward Israel’s military campaign and humanitarian concern for Palestinian suffering appears to be motivating domestic political action. Already last year, 28 out of Japan’s 47 prefectural assemblies had passed resolutions calling for a ceasefire. And in February of this year, Ishiba pledged that Japan would take Gazan civilians unable to receive proper medical treatment, with Foreign Minister Iwaya confirming the first two patients later in March.

• Two-State Advocacy: Japan’s Position on the Peace in the Middle East formally supports a two-state solution where Israel and an independent Palestinian state coexist.
• Financial Aid: Japan has provided billions of dollars in economic and humanitarian assistance to Palestinian territories since 1993.
• Criticism of Unilateral Actions: Tokyo regularly condemns Israeli West Bank settlement expansions and humanitarian crises in Gaza while simultaneously calling for the disarmament and release of hostages held by Hamas.

Of course, I asked the guys in my van their general impression. Hands down is how nice the hosts were, how nice the families putting them up were. Of course, the smells and sights, all new and exotic.

“I guess we will be giving Netanyahu another billion bucks after his visit,” one fellow said.

No, they had not heard of David Swanson or “War is a Racket” or Cornel West or Ralph Nader or Abby Martin or Gerald Horne or Breakthrough News or or or.

David and I talk about that a bit: the lack of knowledge, the lack of historical context, and the lack of gumption to launch (another military term we used in the interview . . . we just can’t get rid of that jargon) campaigns to shut down military recruiting, military weapons manufacturing stopping war in its tracks.

I write about this ALL the time: the five branches of the death machine, the so-called uniform dis-services, making their 2026 recruiting quotas early. The k12 schools are colonized by this mentality that some wars are necessary, and that the USA is the good cops on the block, and all the others in the world who are not US want to destroy our way of life.

IN fact, I contacted David to come onto the show once again from his blog, davidswanson (dot) org. He wrote about the billionaire Chris Nolan’s anti-war (sort of) new blockbuster flick, The Odyssey.

Have We Advanced Since Homer?

I opined:

Slavery in Homer’s The Odyssey is a foundational element of household structure and power, defined by absolute mastery, a strict binary of loyalty versus betrayal, and brutal enforcement. ANd so, has it changed? Millions under sanctions, under water theft, under genocide, under resource plunder, under slave wages, under the mighty propaganda that states “our soldiers are heroes and theirs are terrorists.”

“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children.” — Father Daniel Berrigan regarding the burning of draft files during the Catonsville Nine

Come back on my radio show to talk about your book.

+—+

Can you imagine showing this in our K12, or even community colleges, with the renewed witch hunts for anti-Americanism, which is ANTI-WAR, if you are a social justice warrior.

Deemed too dangerous for broadcast in May 1968, the iconic footage of nine Catholic activists burning draft files might have been lost forever if not for Pat McGrath — a dogged and sympathetic reporter, who has struggled to ensure its preservation. Read the full story on Waging Nonviolence:

From David’s book:

Since I wrote War Is A Lie in 2010 and updated it in 2015, the lies used to prop up wars have varied but continued. My summary remains true:

Not a single thing that we commonly believe about wars that helps keep them around is true. Wars cannot be good or glorious. Nor can they be justified as a means of achieving peace or anything else of value. The reasons given for wars, before, during, and after them (often three very different sets of reasons for the same war) are all false. It is common to imagine that, because we’d never go to war without a good reason, having gone to war, we simply must have a good reason. This needs to be reversed. Because there can be no good reason for war, having gone to war, we are participating in a lie.

But some things have changed. The Iraq Syndrome has ended. The Iraq Syndrome, modeled on the Vietnam Syndrome, was a reluctance to support more wars because of the experience of having lived through the Iraq War. Such reluctance is generally understood as an illness rather than as temporary enlightenment. While John Kerry, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and many other Iraq War supporters who didn’t come as close as they did, all failed to become president, Donald Trump and Joe Biden did not fail.

Both Trump and Biden did the Iraq Syndrome the courtesy of pretending they had opposed attacking Iraq. There’s no evidence that Trump had done that. Biden had in reality been a leading supporter of launching that war. Apparently lying about that past was seen as a sufficient level of decency for this new age. But there was no requirement that, even in retrospect, you criticize the Iraq War for a reason suggesting a general aversion to wars. Trump’s most common criticism was that the United States had failed to take Iraq’s oil. It was nice to think he was joking, but President Trump spoke at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency on January 23, 2017, and promoted a policy of waging wars for the theft of resources.

Major ground wars with thousands of U.S. troops dying are now being avoided. As U.S. deaths are the only deaths that count for much in most corporate U.S. journalism, this can create the impression that wars have largely gone away, the focus on the small number of U.S. deaths in the war on Iran, and on the lying about them, notwithstanding.

U.S. media coverage of wars, when it happens, tends to downplay the U.S. role. The war in Ukraine received major attention for a time — including absolutely remarkable coverage of war victims (if all sides of all wars were covered the way one side of this one was, war might just shrivel up and die). But mostly the war in Ukraine was falsely depicted as something the U.S. government had little or nothing to do with . . . and ought to have more to do with. The war on Gaza also garnered attention — including through the new power of social media to influence corporate media — but much of the reporting was heavily slanted toward defending those engaged in genocide. Any reports of denunciation by U.S. officials of the mass killing tended to helpfully omit the U.S. role in arming, funding, legally protecting, and collaboratively propagandizing in support of it. As the corporate media took seriously U.S. claims to “oppose” the horrors being inflicted on Palestinians, the satirical journal, The Onion, ran the headline: “Trump Writes Netanyahu Strongly Worded Check.”

+—+

We talked about the MAD world of NUTS: How Orewllian and Hollywood ad PR Spinning Eddy Bernays the world of MSM (corporate media) and even lefties have become:

NUTS stands for Nuclear Utilization Targeting Selection (or Target Selection), a Cold War military strategy. It is the idea that a nation can fight, control, and “win” a limited nuclear war by targeting an enemy’s military forces and missile sites instead of cities.

Mutually assured destruction, or MAD, is a military strategy where a full-scale nuclear attack by one country causes complete destruction for both the attacker and the defender. It relies on second-strike capabilities and rational deterrence to prevent a first strike.

Glorious, no, all this photogenic death?

Fuck Nolan and Damon and the lot of them:

Full movie.

It is so so much worse NOW, as this came out in 2022.

CIA: A bit flippant, man.

Served, uh?

Morgan and hundreds of others shill for the USA, military, FBI, ATF, or CIA. It’s all about the Benjamins;

David and I got into the true costs of war in the first show, and in his 2026 book, he is clear just how BIG the dirty budget for WAR is.

I mentioned one more lie, the lie that war is something that people or governments all do to roughly the same extent. “Boys will be boys,” “War is human nature,” “Capitalism creates war,” “War is everywhere” — this sort of rhetoric makes less sense if we admit that 96 percent of humanity just doesn’t do war on remotely the same scale as this 4 percent of people here in the United States. In the summer of 2026, Trump was demanding that Congress fork over $1.5 trillion in military spending. But according to a report from the Project on Government Oversight, U.S. military spending was already $1.5 to $1.7 trillion per year, or — if you include (and why shouldn’t you?) interest on debt for past military spending, $1.7 to $2.3 trillion per year. The variations among the five different calculations featured in the report had a lot to do with the complexity and obscurity of the U.S. government, including the variety of sources of government data that can be used. It takes serious research to dig the militarism out, as it’s hidden everywhere. But the big-ticket items are things like “Homeland Security,” veterans’ benefits, and debt interest.

The report gives us not the slightest hint at any reason to doubt the highest figure. If that $2.3 trillion per year is correct, and if Trump’s servants on Capitol Hill add another $0.5 trillion just for kicks plus another $0.2 trillion specifically for destroying Iran and rebuilding the bases that Iran destroyed — and the pending destruction of which was the immediate excuse for the war — then we’ll be at $3 trillion. . . and — barring the appearance of a spine in a significant number of members of Congress — another $3 trillion or more the next year and the next and the next.

The military budget figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) are widely used, in part because SIPRI provides them for most nations on Earth so that one can do comparisons. But SIPRI has the U.S. at $0.95 trillion in 2025. The report from POGO suggests that SIPRI’s omission of veterans’ benefits may be a bigger mistake for the United States (which has waged so many wars) than it would be for some other countries. The U.S. government also far outpaces the rest of the world’s nations when it comes to debt. And less of other nations’ smaller debts may be due to wars they haven’t waged. So, possibly it is not completely outrageous to make a comparison between the real level of U.S. military spending and SIPRI’s level of everybody else’s military spending. (Note that SIPRI has no 2025 data for Venezuela, Cuba, or North Korea.)

Of course, dreams deferred, cancelled and buried, what is the price on just one victim of war’s derailed future, detached soul, denigrated culture, destroyed family line?

Wars are wrongful deaths compounded greatly and to the nth degree, no, but who gets to repair the damage of a child whose parents are gone, whose school is gone, whose mosque is gone, whose calorie and water intake are going going gone?

The largest recorded wrongful death award for a single person is $2.64 billion, awarded in the 2013 Nebraska case Estate of Tyler Thomas v. Joshua Keadle [

The Case and the Breakdown

• The Victim: Tyler Thomas, a 19-year-old college student who was murdered in 2010.
• The Verdict: After a civil trial against her killer, a Nemaha County judge awarded her family $2.64 billion [1.14].Compensatory Damages: $240 million for the immense loss and suffering.
• Punitive Damages: $2.4 billion intended strictly to punish the perpetrator.

Other Record-Breaking Single-Person Awards

While the Nebraska verdict stands as the technical record for a single individual, other massive landmark wrongful death awards for one person include:

• $1.127 Billion: Awarded in North Dakota to the Estate of Taylor Goven after a tragic fatal crash involving a drunk driver
• $640 Million: Awarded by a Texas jury in 2025 to the family of David Loree II, a worker killed in a fatal construction site crane accident
• $205 Million: Awarded by a Colorado jury to the parents of 6-year-old Wongel Estifanos, who tragically died on an amusement park ride.

Ahh, David, how many civilians have been murdered? Or just flagging after everyone else in their town or family has been murdered?

Activist David Swanson and researchers estimate that nearly 1 million people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence, with millions more dying from indirect causes. The total death toll includes hundreds of thousands of civilians, national forces, and opposition fighters.

Direct and Indirect Deaths

• Direct deaths: An estimated 940,000 people were killed by direct war violence in major conflict zones like Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan.
• Civilian toll: Over 432,000 civilians died directly from the fighting and military operations.
• Indirect deaths: Millions more died indirectly due to the destruction of economic life, health care systems, clean drinking water access, and infrastructure.
• Displacement: Roughly 38 million people were displaced from their homes by these conflicts.

The Costs of War project conducts and publishes research about the ongoing consequences of the United States post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere; the costs of global U.S. military operations; and the domestic effects of U.S. military spending.

Created in 2010 and housed at Brown University’s Thomas J. Watson Jr. School of International and Public Affairs, the Costs of War project builds on the work of over 70 scholars, experts, human rights advocates, and physicians from around the world.

We aim to raise awareness and foster public debate by providing the fullest possible account of the human, economic, political, and environmental costs of U.S. militarism, laying the foundation for better-informed U.S. foreign and domestic policies.

Praise:

“Swanson’s penetrating analysis of the lies behind wars, backed by his extensive historical knowledge, shines a light not only on the destructive wars but on the irrational, delusional thinking and propaganda that start and prolong them and lead to so much death, destruction, and suffering.” — Jay Kvale, peace activist

“David Swanson’s new book has given me a fresh perspective on a topic I’ve dedicated my life to: America’s war culture and its ever-nuanced fallout. Economic collapse, pollution, dependence on fossil fuels, even global warming: you can’t begin to fathom our predicaments until you conceive of the American war monster. Swanson rips away the public relations/ advertising of this military-industrial giant to show its true cancerous colors. Read slowly, America. This is a powerful mirror for those still clinging to our media distortions. It’s an indictment of a culture grown dependent on, and distorted by, the machinery of violence. But there is a compassion, an empathy to the author’s tone. We are all victims, Swanson argues. We are a people kept blind to the true costs, the human tragedies, by the never-ending lie of war.” — Charles Bivona, writer, professor

“It’s been a week since I finished War Is A Lie, and I can’t stop thinking/ talking about it…. Everyone in my life is getting a copy for their birthday this year, and I’m composing a letter to the editor of every major paper in Idaho. Thank you for rocking my world.” — Kim Mazik, peace activist

Living Hells:

And so the weather in Wisconsin is hell, or Spain or France, right?

SOURCE: Residents describe the tents as sealed ovens that trap heat instead of keeping it out. Many are forced to spend hours outdoors searching for fresh air despite the dangers surrounding them.

“We Are Living in Hell”

A 90-year-old displaced woman described life inside the camp as “hell.”

She suffers from diabetes and high blood pressure and previously underwent open-heart surgery, making the extreme temperatures particularly dangerous for her.

The woman said the heat repeatedly worsens her condition, raising her blood sugar and leaving her severely exhausted. She has been admitted to hospital several times before returning to the same tent that provides no meaningful protection.

Rodents frequently enter sleeping areas, she said, while mosquitoes and other insects spread throughout the camp. The tents’ worn plastic coverings do little to prevent either the heat or pests from entering.

She added that life in the camp offers neither safety nor dignity, while death and funerals have become part of the displaced community’s daily reality.

Tents Offer No Protection From the Sun

Whether the tents remain closed or are opened for ventilation, residents say the conditions are unbearable. Sunlight enters from every direction, while there is no effective way to reduce the temperature.

Cooking Fires Deepen the Hardship

The heat also continues after sunset. Families open tent doors and windows, hoping for a breeze, but the lack of electricity, fans, and ventilation equipment means nighttime offers little relief.

Water Queues by Day, Mosquitoes by Night

Another resident described camp life as a continuous cycle of suffering.

The day begins with long queues for water under the sun, followed by the need to bathe repeatedly because of the unbearable heat.

+—+

We could have talked for hours, with the unfolding headlines of our hour on the radio show:

• Israel Is Paying Millions to Train AI Chatbots How to Talk About Gaza. It’s Working. Former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale is overseeing an operation posting hundreds of blog posts on behalf of Israel, with the goal of infiltrating artificial intelligence.
• The US has openly announced its intention to dismantle the International Criminal Court and liberal journalists who for years have screeched about the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump have had absolutely nothing to say.
• Cuba is facing genocide. Will China, Russia, Brics and Europe surrender to Trump’s neo-Hitlerism?
• ‘China Threatening World, Fuelling War’: U.S. VOWS To Fight Back Beijing Amid Rare Minerals ROW
• College professors face an emerging challenge: We know students are no longer reading entire books

“It is the most painful manifestation of a climate emergency that is making… wildfires more voracious and heatwaves more frequent, and as a result our land more vulnerable,” said Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.

• More than 300,000 people have been displaced as historic wildfires tear across France and Spain, presaging what some have called a climate-fueled “crisis of habitability” across Europe, which is heating faster than anywhere else on the globe.
• The emerging AI battlespace: Counter-AI threats to AI-powered satellite remote sensing analysis

Fucking Hell, dual, triple, quadruple use, man: Popcorn anyone?

Yes, the microwave oven did come out of military research first. The technology started from World War II radar systems, specifically using a vacuum tube called a cavity magnetron developed to detect enemy planes and ships.

+—+

And, yes, Hitlers are all around us, as Swanson points out how many people have deemed Hitler as the boogeyman to rationalize WAR.

• Manuel Noriega (Panamá)
• Saddam Hussein (Iraq)
• Slobodan Milošević (Yugoslavia)
• Muammar Gaddafi (Libya)
• Bashar al-Assad (Syria)
• Vladimir Putin (Russia)

Swanson explains that the standard blueprint for mobilizing a population for war relies on transforming a complex political conflict into a binary struggle between absolute good and absolute evil. This is achieved through specific propaganda steps:

• Targeting a Leader: The focus is shifted away from a nation’s people and placed entirely on a single “monster” who is running it.
• The Hitler Label: That leader is explicitly branded as “the next Hitler” or “worse than Hitler” to bypass logical debate.
• The Munich Analogy: Anyone suggesting diplomacy or a peaceful settlement is immediately branded a “coward” or an “appeaser,” echoing Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 deal with Nazi Germany.
• The “Just War” Exception: Because World War II is widely romanticized as the ultimate “good war,” war advocates use it as a moral blank check. They claim that this specific new conflict is just as urgent and necessary (Introduction, War is a Lie)

U.S. President Donald Trump has been the most anti-science President in U.S. history, and Adolf Hitler was likewise extremely against science. Both nations’ leaders favored technology but condemned and downplayed any scientific findings that conflicted with his prejudices. But now, fascism and its anti-science are almost normal: consider Benjamin Netanyahu and the late Lindsey Graham.

For examples, regarding Trump: “White House admits it used keywords to kill billions worth of California research grants”, AP News, 22 July 2026

• White House Taps Palantir for Government-Wide Database Surveilling Americans