Tag: War

War Crimes in the News

DETROW: That’s what the press secretary says. The Pentagon has repeatedly said, the United States does not deliberately target civilians, and yet the president is talking about attacking a desalination plant. Would that be a war crime?

RONA: Absolutely, Scott, both under international law and U.S. law. We have a War Crimes Act that prohibits precisely this kind of thing. It would also be a violation of laws against terrorism. It’s prohibited to engage in attacks in armed conflict where the primary purpose is to spread terror among the civilian population. If you’re targeting a desalination plant, then that would be an act of terrorism.

DETROW: Help us understand a little bit more just ’cause I think you cannot overexplain this enough, right? Like, here’s an example. In the early days of the war, it seems like the United States accidentally bombed a girls school. What is the difference between something like that and deliberately attacking civilian infrastructure like a desalination plant?

RONA: So the difference is that even though one might have been mistaken and the other intentional, under U.S. law, both intentional and mistaken attacks that aren’t pursuant to due diligence can be war crimes.

https://www.npr.org/2026/04/01/nx-s1-5766235/who-is-held-accountable-if-a-war-crime-is-committed-in-iran

Hundreds of Thousands Demonstrate – March for Palestine

In the Netherlands, an estimated 250,000 people, most dressed in red, gathered in Amsterdam to press the government to take tougher action against Israel.

Sunday’s protest and march through the Dutch capital comes less than four weeks before national elections. Two “Red Line” demonstrations in The Hague earlier this year also drew tens of thousands of people.

After packing the central Museum Square, the protesters walked through the city center, holding Palestinian flags and peace emblems. One placard read, “Ashamed of the government.”

Sunday’s demonstrations came a day after hundreds of thousands marched in Rome, Barcelona and Madrid in a show of growing international outrage at Israel’s two-year military campaign in Gaza. Smaller rallies took place in Paris, Lisbon, Athens and Skopje, North Macedonia, and in London and Manchester.

Hundreds of thousands march across Europe in support of Palestinians

Starvation in Gaza

The World Health Organization said Sunday there have been 63 malnutrition-related deaths in Gaza this month, including 24 children under the age of 5 — up from 11 deaths total the previous six months of the year.

Gaza’s Health Ministry puts the number even higher, reporting 82 deaths this month of malnutrition-related causes: 24 children and 58 adults. It said Monday that 14 deaths were reported in the past 24 hours. The ministry, which operates under the Hamas government, is headed by medical professionals and is seen by the U.N. as the most reliable source of data on casualties. U.N. agencies also often confirm numbers through other partners on the ground.

The Patient’s Friends Hospital, the main emergency center for malnourished kids in northern Gaza, says this month it saw for the first time malnutrition deaths in children who had no preexisting conditions. Some adults who died suffered from such illnesses as diabetes or had heart or kidney ailments made worse by starvation, according to Gaza medical officials.

The WHO also says acute malnutrition in northern Gaza tripled this month, reaching nearly one in five children under 5 years old, and has doubled in central and southern Gaza. The U.N. says Gaza’s only four specialized treatment centers for malnutrition are “overwhelmed.”

PBS News
Israel’s leader claims no one in Gaza is starving. Data and witnesses disagree
World Jul 28, 2025 5:17 PM EDT

SUMMERS: So tell us, if you can, what are families, people there in Gaza, able to eat now?

TANIS: Fundamentally, food is not available for the more than 2 million Palestinians there. There’s a very small supply of local vegetables, like some eggplant, zucchini, rarely maybe onion or garlic. Now, before things got so bad, people could at least eat bread. Now, flour is very expensive, and there’s not enough of it. So even if you have money, you can’t buy food.

And it’s not just food, though, because there’s a serious shortage of fuel and water for cooking and drinking. And the IPC report said today that nearly 9 out of 10 families in Gaza have to resort to extreme coping measures. I asked Beckie Ryan with the aid group CARE – she’s in Gaza right now – to tell us what she’s hearing from mothers who come to their clinic.

BECKIE RYAN: Some of the coping mechanisms they’ve had to resort to is choosing which child, you know, will be fed that day. You know, are they going to buy supplies for the baby, or are they going to buy something that the 5-year-old can eat?

TANIS: Aid workers also told me they’re seeing children rummaging through garbage daily, but not finding any food.

NPR
Famine is unfolding in Gaza, an alert from UN-backed food security experts confirms

Memorial Day – Beginnings of, David Blight, NYTIMES

But for the earliest and most remarkable Memorial Day, we must return to where the war began. By the spring of 1865, after a long siege and prolonged bombardment, the beautiful port city of Charleston, S.C., lay in ruin and occupied by Union troops. Among the first soldiers to enter and march up Meeting Street singing liberation songs was the 21st United States Colored Infantry; their commander accepted the city’s official surrender.

Whites had largely abandoned the city, but thousands of blacks, mostly former slaves, had remained, and they conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war.

The largest of these events, forgotten until I had some extraordinary luck in an archive at Harvard, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the city’s Washington Race Course and Jockey Club into an outdoor prison. Union captives were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand.

After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, “Martyrs of the Race Course.”

Forgetting Why We Remember
By David W. Blight
May 29, 2011

Tigray Protest – Denver – April 2, 2022

Haven’t heard as much about this in the news. Here’s some info from the NYTIMES:

A year of conflict in Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country and a linchpin of regional security, has left thousands dead, forced more than two million people from their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine-like conditions.

Forces under Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed — the Ethiopian military, ethnic militias and troops from neighboring Eritrea — are fighting to oust the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, or T.P.L.F., from its stronghold in the northern region of Tigray.

The tide of the civil war has fluctuated wildly. The government teetered in early November when fighters from Tigray surged south toward the capital, Addis Ababa, forcing Mr. Abiy to declare a state of emergency. Foreigners fled the country and the government detained thousands of civilians from the Tigrayan ethnic group.

Why Is Ethiopia at War With Itself?
Sixteen months after Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed began a military campaign in the Tigray region, fighting has slowed but Ethiopians are bitterly divided and their country is wracked by suffering.
March 16, 2022

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigray_War

Scene from Anti Vietnam War Protest – April 1971

The veterans’ presence in Washington today is deeply confusing to the American mood. A police sergeant on duty at the Capitol says, ‘Hell, I’d throw in my badge before I touch these guys.’ A businessman, who was just passing by, now fussily clears a path for Bill Loivie, who has spent two years in military hospitals and will always need crutches. An old couple, he in red baseball cap, she in blue rinse, have come up from Georgia to see Washington in the spring and now they march with a woman who lost a son over there. Even a party of enormous ladies from the Daughters of the American Revolution, an organization that would gleefully detonate the world tomorrow and which happened to be meeting in Washington today, stand transfixed and almost crying, almost, as the carnage passes them by, including Jack Saul from California wearing a grotesque mask of Richard Nixon smiling. And when someone asks Jack, jokingly, what he himself looks like, he takes it off and reveals a face that looks as though he has just finished pouring acid on it. ‘Peace,’ he says.

Eyewitness to History
Civilization’s most momentous events come vibrantly alive in this magnificent collection of over three hundred eyewitness accounts spanning twenty-four turbulent centuries — remarkable recollections of battles, atrocities, disasters, coronations, assassinations and discoveries that shaped the course of history, all related in vivid detail by observers on the scene.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_Veterans_Against_the_War

March 9 – Calendar of Wisdom Quote, Tolstoy

War and Christianity are not compatible.

War is one of the worst, most terrible things in this world.

War in this world can be stopped not by the ruling establishment, but by those who suffer from the war. They will do the most natural thing: stop obeying orders.

The armed world and the wars it wages will be destroyed one day, but not by the kings or the rulers of this world. War is profitable for them. War will stop the moment the people who suffer from war fully understand that it is evil.

A Calendar of Wisdom: Daily Thoughts to Nourish the Soul, Written and Selected from the World’s Sacred Texts
Leo Tolstoy

Anti War Perspective from Russia – New York Times Opinion Piece

Russian has become the language of fear. My parents avoid discussing politics over the phone; they’re not alone. Since the Kremlin has strangled freedom of speech, most Russians I know are afraid to publicly express their opinions. They’ve gone back to Soviet-era’ kitchen conversations to share their views on politics.

We have seen the Kremlin crack down violently on protests about elections and political prisoners like Aleksei A. Navalny. On the day Putin launched his full-scale assault on Ukraine, the government issued a statement warning that Russians who protest could face prosecution.

I was heartened, and scared, to see that the warning did not stop Russians from turning out in force that same day. Protests took place across Russia, from Moscow to St. Petersburg to Khabarovsk. Signs bore messages like “No War” and “Do you see evil and keep silent? Partner in crime!” Nearly 1,800 people were arrested.

This War Is Not in My Name
By Irina Kuznetsova
Dr. Kuznetsova emigrated from Russia to Britain in 2014. She is an associate professor of human geography at the University of Birmingham.

Vietnam – Jimmy Cliff

Hey, Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam
Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam

Yesterday I got a letter from my friend
Fighting in Vietnam
And this is what he had to say
‘Tell all my friends that I’ll be coming home soon
My time it’ll be up some time in June
Don’t forget, he said to tell my sweet Mary
Her golden lips as sweet as cherries

And it came from
Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam
Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam

It was just the next day his mother got a telegram
It was addressed from Vietnam
Now mistress Brown, she lives in the USA
And this is what she wrote and said
Don’t be alarmed, she told me the telegram said
But mistress Brown your son is dead

And it came from
Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam
Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam
Somebody please stop that war now

It was just the next day his mother got a telegram
It was addressed from Vietnam
Now mistress Brown, she lives in the USA
And this is what she wrote and said
Don’t be alarmed, she told me the telegram said
Oh, but mistress Brown your son is dead

And it came from
Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam
Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam
Somebody please stop it

Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam
Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam
What I’m saying now somebody stop that war

Desultory Vietnam War Quotes

“There may be a limit beyond which many Americans and much of the world will not permit the United States to go. The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 non-combatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny, backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.” —Robert McNamara in a memo to President Lyndon Johnson on May 19, 1967.

“Hey, Hey LBJ, How many kids did you kill today?” —A protest chant that first became popular in late 1967.

“We have reached an important point where the end begins to come into view.” —General William C. Westmoreland speaking to the National Press Club on November 21, 1967 as part of a Johnson administration effort to shore up sagging public support for the war.

“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” —AP correspondent Peter Arnett quoting a U.S. major on the decision to bomb and shell Ben Tre on February 7, 1968 after Viet Cong forces overran the city in the Mekong Delta forty-five miles south of Saigon during the Tet Offensive.

https://www.cfr.org/blog/vietnam-war-forty-quotes

How many wars is the US in?

According to this, it was 7 as of March 2018. (Most recent info I could find).

The U.S. military is officially fighting wars in seven countries, according to the White House’s latest war report. Known formally as the “Report on the Legal and Policy Frameworks Guiding the United States’ Military Force and Related National Security Operations,” the unclassified portion flags ops in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Niger — all under the banner of the same war authority granted in the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force to fight al-Qaeda-linked militants.

US at war in 7 countries — including Niger; US Army rebuilds Afghan firebases; F-35s to India?; and just a bit more… https://www.defenseone.com/