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The corporate media and the billionaire class have controlled the narrative for way too long. In totalitarian countries, the government uses state media to manipulate public opinion and squash dissent. In America, corporations use those same tools to convince voters that commonsense, overwhelmingly popular ideas are impossible. But Common Dreams is different. We cover the news that matters. We know another world is possible. But we can’t do it without you. Our critical Winter Campaign is underway. Can you chip now to help keep us going? Thank you. -- Craig Brown, Co-founder

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Eric Stoner

Eric Stoner is a New York-based freelance journalist and an adjunct professor at St. Peter’s College, whose articles have appeared in The Guardian, Mother Jones, The Nation and In These Times. He blogs at Waging Nonviolence and can be reached at ericstoner1@gmail.com.

Articles by this author

	Views Friday, May 06, 2016 How Friends and Family Remember Daniel Berrigan Like countless others, including all those whose stories follow, Dan Berrigan had a profound impact on my life. I grew up in a conservative Catholic family and community, and was on the fast track to a very different life as a defender of the status quo. During a college class on nonviolence that I... Read more
	Views Friday, March 25, 2011 Is There No Other Way in Libya? One of the arguments that is being forwarded by proponents of military intervention in Libya is that Qaddafi is literally crazy and therefore cannot be reasoned with or expected to step down without force. In an article for Tikkun , entitled “Libya: Acid Test for Nonviolence?,” Metta Center for Nonviolence president Michael Nagler, who I deeply respect and have personally learned a great deal from, makes an argument for war along these lines: Read more
	Views Monday, January 17, 2011 The Tragic US Strategy in Afghanistan Albert Einstein famously defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” If that doesn’t accurately describe the more than nine-year-old U.S. war in Afghanistan, I don’t know what does. The results of the surge of tens of thousands of additional troops into the “graveyard of empires” are now evident. More soldiers, humanitarian workers, and civilians were killed in 2010 than any year since the United States invaded. One tally put the dead at more than 10,000 last year alone. Read more
	Views Friday, December 17, 2010 Record Levels of Violence in Afghanistan Do Not Equal Progress Greetings from Afghanistan. I arrived here now almost a week ago and there is so much to share about this experience that it’s hard to know where to start. I’d like to offer a few random observations about Kabul that I’m sure will make more sense upon reflection. Read more
	Views Friday, December 18, 2009 A Lesson on Nonviolence for the President In Oslo last week, President Barack Obama ironically used his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize to deliver a lengthy defense of the "just war" theory and dismiss the idea that nonviolence is capable of addressing the world's most pressing problems. Read more
	Views Wednesday, September 30, 2009 Obama Is No FDR, Much Less Gandhi On the eve of the G-20 summit last week, President Barack Obama gave a long interview to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, in which he said that even during his days as a community organizer in Chicago he was never a big fan of mass protests. Read more
	Views Saturday, August 15, 2009 Mercenaries and Murder in Iraq It would be nice to celebrate the recent withdrawal of the remaining British troops from Iraq as the end of the UK's direct involvement in the military occupation there. But such festivities would unfortunately be premature. Read more
	Views Sunday, April 19, 2009 The Dawn of Robot Wars With little public scrutiny, robotics is quickly revolutionizing not only how war is fought, but who fights in war. While the U.S. military first began to experiment with remote-controlled weapons during World War I, the Pentagon had no robots on the ground when it invaded Iraq in 2003, and only a handful of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the air. Today, according to P.W. Singer, author of Wired for War and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, the U.S. Read more
	Views Wednesday, February 18, 2009 No Mercy for Mercenaries After raking in more than a billion dollars from its contracts in Iraq , Blackwater is finally being forced to leave the country that it has terrorised for so long. But the notorious mercenary firm's departure will likely have more symbolic significance than any real impact on the day-to-day lives of Iraqis. Read more
	News Monday, February 16, 2009 Attack of the Killer Robots One of the most captivating storylines in science fiction involves a nightmarish vision of the future in which autonomous killer robots turn on their creators and threaten the extinction of the human race. Hollywood blockbusters such as Terminator and The Matrix are versions of this cautionary tale, as was R.U.R. ( Rossum’s Universal Robots ), the 1920 Czech play by Karel Capek that marked the first use of the word “robot.” Read more

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