Adam Hochschild, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of eight books, including King Leopold’s Ghost and To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. His most recent book is Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
Memorials across the world pay tribute to “fallen soldiers,” but virtually none exist for those who fought for peace.
The first day of the Battle of Somme was one of the deadliest in history.
What if, from the beginning, everyone killed in the Iraq and Afghan wars had been buried in a single large cemetery easily accessible to the American public? Would it bring the fighting to a halt more quickly if we could see hundreds of thousands of tombstones, military and civilian, spreading hill after hill, field after field, across our landscape?
News from the Ituri region of the misnamed Democratic Republic of Congo in recent weeks has been so grim as to make one want to turn the page or flip the TV channel in despair: tens of thousand