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daniel ellsberg
Dissent Is Patriotic: Daniel Ellsberg's Legacy Demands Action
Few will find themselves in Ellsberg’s position, but all of us bear responsibility for doing whatever is in our power to confront injustice in all of its forms, at home and abroad.
Jun 18, 2025
Two years ago this week, Daniel Ellsberg died at the age of 92. In the popular imagination, his legacy is often reduced to a singular act of conscience and courage: the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers, a classified government study that exposed the systematic deceit and misconduct of successive U.S. administrations in prosecuting the war in Vietnam.
Ellsberg had spent over a decade inside the national security apparatus, directly contributing to the planning and execution of that war. But over time, he came to regard the intervention as a criminal, imperial war of aggression. Reflecting on the U.S. role in Southeast Asia, he concluded: “We were not on the wrong side; we were the wrong side.” He described the bombing campaigns in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—which involved dropping more than three and a half times the tonnage of explosives used by the United States in all of World War II—as “totally useless, unnecessary from any point of view, and thus unjustifiable homicide, murder.”
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What the US Air Force Doesn't Want You to Notice on Election Night
As the warring ruling class seems to be pushing for nuclear brinkmanship, on this election night let us not be distracted.
Nov 05, 2024
Much significance will happen at the end of Election Day, and a countdown will begin at 11:00 p.m. PDT on November 5th. While everyone’s attention will be on who our next president will be, the U.S. The Air Force will test-launch an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile with a dummy hydrogen bomb on the tip from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The missile will cross the Pacific Ocean and 22 minutes later crash into the Marshall Islands. The U.S. Air Force does this several times a year. The launches are always at night while Americans are sleeping.
This is what nightmares are made of—between 1946 and 1958 the U.S. detonated 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands, and the result is that the Marshallese people have lost their pristine environment and face serious health problems. Our environment is threatened here as well. Not only did the indigenous Chumash people lose their sacred land to Vandenberg Air Force Base, but also America’s Heartland presently has around 400 ICBMs stored in underground silos equipped with nuclear warheads that are ready to launch at a hair trigger’s notice. Named “MinuteMen III,” after Revolutionary War soldiers who could reload and shoot a gun in less than a minute, ICBMs not only put Americans at risk of accident, but they put all life on earth in danger.
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The Threat of 1,000 Holocausts Puts Everything at Stake
If a nuclear war happens, of course we won’t be around for any retrospective analysis. Or regrets. So, candid introspection is in a category of now or never.
Oct 01, 2024
Everything is at stake. Everything is at stake with nuclear weapons.
While working as a nuclear war planner for the Kennedy administration, Daniel Ellsberg was shown a document calculating that a U.S. nuclear attack on communist countries would result in 600 million dead. As he put it later: “A hundred Holocausts.”
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