Swanson -- Charlottesville Marked the International Day of Peace

By the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice, September 21, 2026

Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice held a rally at the Downtown Mall on Monday, marking the International Day of Peace. The rally was moved under the Charlottesville pavillion due to rain.

A focus was CCPJ’s petition urging the City Council of Charlottesville to pass a resolution opposing current wars.

Devon Sproule led the rally in song.

Speakers included Lena Seville, Virginia Rovnyak, Alexandra Kedrock, David Swanson, and Jeff Fogel.

Following the rally, participants attended a City Council meeting. Among those who spoke to the City Council in support of a resolution were David Swanson, Lena Seville, and Joanie Freeman.

Videos here.

David Swanson’s remarks at the rally were as follows:

We recently learned that some months ago the U.S. military came within moments of so-called intercepting a Chinese ship. The U.S. military had used so-called artificial intelligence to determine that the ship was carrying some sort of nuclear technology, but at the last minute found the modicum of natural intelligence to realize its robot had got it wrong.

If AI is a threat to life on Earth, it needs to take a number and get in line behind existing threats bizarrely erased by claims that an omnicidal threat is something new under the sun, threats like climate collapse, disease epidemics, and nuclear war. If AI kills us all, it will likely be in combination with one of the pre-existing threats. And long before AI can have a chance to kill us all through superior malevolence, we will first have to survive the danger of humans teaming up with AI to kill us all through magnified stupidity.

The greatest threat right now is the president of the United States who continues to publicly threaten genocide in Iran, to erase a civilization, to blow up a whole nation. This might be the single worst crime in the history of the world, possibly killing 90 million people plus many millions or billions more depending on the types of weapons used and the resulting escalation — quite likely including nuclear war on a scale to impose nuclear winter on the globe. Yet there are larger protests to protect the Kennedy Center. Yes, I, too, love the Kennedy Center. But another sign that our priorities are askew is that when Trump talks of making a deal with Iran, various Democrats in Congress accuse him of “chickening out” and of making a terrible deal. Well, of course it would be a terrible deal — at least for Trump and his oil-company funders, but not more terrible than war.

Does anybody here remember when they used to pretend that wars had nothing to do with oil? And they weren’t about profits or power or the egos of sadistic dictatorial buffoons? Remember? They were very, very serious. People were being bombed into democracy. Towns were being reluctantly leveled as proper and proportionate strategic steps to meet the benchmarks of solemn statesmen. I’m glad all of that’s gone. I’m glad our national court jester makes his motivations as clear as a preschooler. It’s one reason we now have a huge majority against the wars. Another is the sheer idiocy of making a war be about reopening a waterway that was closed by the war. Remember when we thought making a war be about finding imaginary weapons was the dumbest possible idea?

And yet, I also remember when a smaller percentage of us opposed wars and we nonetheless packed the streets and pressed for change. We gave the war on Iraq such a bad name that they told us we were ill. We had the Iraq Syndrome, which was their name for a reluctance to support more wars. While that illness lasted we prevented a big war on Syria and even a war on Iran for a while, and even the election of people who’d voted for the war on Iraq. Now we have a larger majority than ever against the wars. The Iran war became unpopular faster than any past war. But the warmongers are grinning ear to ear and asking What, Me Worry?

Why should they? They’ve got us all fooled with a different lie, the lie of our powerlessness, the lie that we can do nothing whatsoever, or we can vote, we can go home and cry, or we can go shopping, or we can vote really really hard. Oh my God of course you should vote. But voting is to civic duty what putting on one sock is to getting dressed. There’s a lot more to be done. We have to educate. We have to mobilize. We have to communicate. We have to disrupt and pressure and redirect. We have to advance clear demands and make them irresistible. We have to protest and cause trouble and make continuing the war business as usual painful. The next Ed Sheeran has to think twice about bowing to the genocide deniers; so do our senators and our misrepresentative in Congress.

The war on Iran is happening because the Pentagon is given trillions of dollars to use largely as it sees fit. People are very upset about $38 billion spent on this war — not to mention the economic impacts. And well they should be. That’s about the annual cost of making preschool free or housing universal in the United States or ending starvation on Earth, and it’s casually dumped into blowing up elementary schools and oil tankers. Meanwhile, Trump wants to use another $2.8 billion of your money to send Israel 40,000 bombs weighing 2,000 pounds each. Our grotesque laws allow that only to governments that are going to drop 2,000-pound bombs on people without violating their human rights. I’m unclear who can do that, but it isn’t Israel. Meanwhile, Congress is pushing through another $1,500 billion — 1.5 trillion — for the Pentagon which will be used for any wars that it or Israel wants going forward, unless we stop that spending bill.

Imagine if the U.S. government had given Iran new schools for a tiny fraction of the cost of blowing up schools, what U.S.-Iranian relations would look like. Iranians to this day do a tremendous job of distinguishing between the U.S. public and the U.S. government. We like to think we do the same. But it’s hard to believe us. It’s hard to believe that we’re doing everything right now for Iran that we would be doing for the United States if the elementary schools had been blown up here or if Trump were routinely threatening to level this entire country.

At the very least we need our local, more accountable levels of government to take our message to higher ones. Dozens of times over the years the City Council of Charlottesville has to its great credit used a procedure that was placed in rules for Congress by Thomas Jefferson. It has sent petitions to Washington expressing the concerns of our local population on topics of greater scope than Charlottesville. This is a moment when that should be done again.

His remarks to City Council were:

Today is the International Day of Peace, but where is the peace? And where is our demand for peace? President Donald Trump is routinely threatening the genocidal elimination of the entire nation of Iran, and hinting at the use of nuclear weapons in the commission of that crime. He is proposing a massive new transfer of resources from just about all useful projects into war funding, proposing a Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion, meaning less money for all kinds of needs in Charlottesville while also probably meaning more wars.

The record of courageous and ahead-of-its time resolutions from the Charlottesville City Council (some of which have inspired numerous other cities to follow suit) suggests that this state of affairs should not sit well with this City Council. Past resolutions passed by this city council have included

1971 End the War on Vietnam

1982 For nuclear disarmament

1983 For nuclear disarmament

1984 Against Apartheid in South Africa (First in the U.S. South.)

2000 For abolishing the death penalty in Virginia (First in Virginia.)

2003 Against attacking Iraq

2003 Against the PATRIOT Act

2007 End the War on Iraq

2012 No War on Iran (First in the U.S.)

2013 No drones (First in U.S.)

2017 For moving the money from militarism to human needs

2019 Divestment from Weapons and Fossil Fuels

2020 No War on Iran

2020 Demilitarizing the Charlottesville police

2024 For a ceasefire in Gaza

Nearly 200 have signed a local petition urging a new resolution against wars and increases in military spending. We respectfully request that it be added to your agenda as soon as possible.

The majority of the U.S. population has long been clear where we stand. The current war on Iran was immediately opposed by a majority of us. That’s never happened before. Usually it’s taken many months to get a majority saying that a war never should have been started. For decades it’s been my hope that we would become faster learners, and that dream has been realized. But it does us little good if our governments won’t listen. Our government in Washington might still not listen even if our local government speaks to it, but we have to ask you please to give it a try.

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