Talk World Radio

Recorded by Dale Lehman / WZRD and posted at Radio4All (listen here). Or listen below.

This is a keynote talk by David Swanson for the West Suburban Faith-Based Peace Coalition at their Peace Essay Contest Awards Presentation on August 27, 2019, the 91st Anniversary of the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

It was Swanson's 2011 book, "When the World Outlawed War", an inspiring but forgotten story from the 1920s of how people created a treaty to ban all war — a treaty still on the books but ignored, given to Frank Goetz, the Coalition's just past President and Peace Essay Contest coordinator, by peace activist Kathy Kelly, that inspired him to establish the Peace Essay Contest, now in its 7th year.

Barry Sweeney is a member of the Board of Directors of World BEYOND War. Barry is based in Ireland, but is often in Vietnam and Italy. His background is in education and environmentalism. He taught as a primary school teacher in Ireland for a number of years, before moving to Italy in 2009 to teach English. His love for environmental understanding led him to many progressive projects in Ireland, Italy, and Sweden. He became more and more involved in environmentalism in Ireland, and has now been teaching on a Permaculture Design Certificate course for 5 years. More recent work has seen him teaching on World BEYOND War’s War Abolition course for the last two years. Also, in 2017 and 2018 he organized peace symposia in Ireland, bringing together many of the peace/anti-war groups in Ireland. Barry is helping to plan NoWar2019:

https://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2019

He discussed this petition to the Irish and U.S. governments:

https://actionnetwork.org/petitions/the-world-must-support-ireland-against-us-wars

Timmon Wallis is the author of Disarming the Nuclear Argument and The Truth About Trident. He has a PhD in Peace Studies from Bradford University in England, and has been working on nuclear disarmament and other peace issues since the 1970s. Most recently, he was Program Manager for Peace and Disarmament for Quakers in Britain, before moving back to Northampton, Massachusetts. He has also been Executive Director of the Nonviolent Peaceforce. As a member of the ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) team at the UN in 2017, Timmon took part in the negotiations which led to the adoption by 122 countries of the Nuclear Ban Treaty and won ICAN the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. With his new partner, Vicki Elson, he is now running NuclearBan.US, the campaign to get cities and states in the United States to comply with the Nuclear Ban Treaty. Wallis recently authored a report called Warheads to Windmills: How to Pay for a Green New Deal.

Pat Elder is a member of World BEYOND War’s Board of Directors. He is the author of Military Recruiting in the United States, and the Director of the National Coalition to Protect Student Privacy. The coalition works to counter the alarming militarization of the United States’ high schools. Pat also writes for World BEYOND War and Civilian Exposure, an organization that tracks how the U.S. military poisons people around the world. Pat’s focus is on documenting contamination caused by the U.S. military’s use in routine fire-fighting drills of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (also known as PFAS). Pat Elder will be speaking at the NoWar2019 conference and rally in Limerick, Ireland, this October 5th and 6th: https://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2019

Edward Horgan retired from the Irish Defence Forces with the rank of Commandant after 22 years service that included peacekeeping missions with the United Nations in Cyprus and the Middle East. He has worked on over 20 election monitoring missions in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Asia, and Africa. He is international secretary with the Irish Peace and Neutrality Alliance, Chairperson and founder of Veterans For Peace Ireland, and a peace activist with Shannonwatch. His many peace activities include the case of Horgan v Ireland, in which he took the Irish Government to the High Court over breaches of Irish Neutrality and U.S. military use of Shannon airport, and a high profile court case resulting from his attempt to arrest U.S. President George W. Bush in Ireland in 2004. He teaches politics and international relations part-time at the University of Limerick. He completed a PhD thesis on reform of the United Nations in 2008 and has a master’s degree in peace studies and a B.A. degree in History, Politics, and Social Studies. He is actively involved in a campaign to commemorate and name as many as possible of the up to one million children who have died as a result of wars in the Middle East since the first Gulf War in 1991. And Ed Horgan will be speaking at the NoWar2019 conference planned for Limerick Ireland in October: https://worldbeyondwar.org/nowar2019

Jeremy Kuzmarov has taught at numerous colleges across the United States and is author of four books on U.S. foreign policy including The Russians are Coming, Again: The First Cold War as Tragedy, the Second as Farce, with John Marciano and the new book that we will be discussing and which I highly recommend: Obama's Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State.

Jeff Ostler is Beekman Professor of Northwest and Pacific History at the University of Oregon. He teaches courses on U.S. history and American Indian history. And he is the author of an important new book called Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas.

http://davidswanson.org/u-s-troops-back-in-saudi-arabia-what-could-go-wrong/

Rob Kall is an award-winning journalist, inventor, software architect, connector, and visionary. He's the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity. He has pioneered first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science, and Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful people on his Bottom-Up Radio Show. And Rob founded and publishes the progressive news and opinion site, OpEdNews.com, which has seen over 23 million visitors.

Donald E. McInnis is the author of She's So Cold: Murder, Accusations, and the System that Devastated a Family. He is a California criminal defense attorney, and he represented one of the three accused boys, Aaron Houser, in the Stephanie Crowe murder case. Over the span of his 40-year legal career, Mr. McInnis has worked alternately for the prosecution and for the defense, having served as a deputy district attorney for two California counties and as a deputy public defender for one California county during his early professional years. His website is https://donaldmcinnis.com