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WHAT WE TRULY LEARNED FROM THE GREAT WAR AND THE ABSURDITY OF REMEMBRANCE DAY

By John Chuckman | Aletho News | November 13, 2014

No matter what high-blown claims the politicians make each year on Remembrance Day, The Great War was essentially a fight between two branches of a single royal family over the balance of power on the continent of Europe, British foreign policy holding to a longstanding principle that no one nation should ever be permitted to dominate the continent.

It was also a war between the world’s greatest existing imperial power, Britain, and another state, Germany, which aspired to become a greater imperial power than it was.

To a considerable extent, it was a war resulting from large standing armies and great arms races, a telling indictment of those who preach the false gospel of ever-greater military strength to defend freedom. As with any huge, shiny new investment, great armies will always be used, and the results are almost invariably great misery.

The First World War was not a war to end all wars, as a slogan of the time claimed. If anything, it was a precursor for a great many wars to follow, and, most importantly, it was a powerful and important cause of World War II.

It also was not a war about democracy since none of the participants, including Britain, would qualify as democracies by any reasonable reckoning with their heavily limited voting franchise and government structures stacked in the interests of old and privileged orders, quite apart from their holding empires whose populations enjoyed no franchise at all.

The war was also one of history’s great instances of mass hysteria, particularly among the young men of several countries. In Britain, there have been many laments over the loss of some fine and promising young men who rushed to join up. In Germany, it was no different, and we note one young man, then of no importance, by the name of Adolph Hitler rushing to join up, much as his British contemporaries, to share in the “glory.”

Today, we pretend shock that young men sometimes go abroad to fight for a cause, religious or otherwise, but compared to the mass insanity of World War I, what we see today is truly petty. The authorities everywhere then made great efforts to push young men, using songs, marching bands, slogans, shame and social pressure in many forms, and countless lies. The nonsense about the Kaiser’s troops bayonetting babies was one example, a lie served up again decades later with a slight twist by George Bush the Elder’s government as it desperately wanted support to invade Iraq, the babies the second time around supposedly being ripped from respirators.

World War I made absolutely no sense. It achieved nothing worth achieving, and it did so at immense cost. Apart from killing about 20,000,000 people, the war left countless crippled and disabled and created a great swathe of destruction across Europe.

If Germany had been allowed to dominate Europe for a time, it would have made comparatively little difference to the lives of most people. Indeed, today, that is the situation we find in the European Union.

It is important to realize that large wars are always revolutionary in nature, and no one at the outset can possibly predict the outcomes of such chaotic storms in terms of social, economic, and political change. World War I very much set the stage, with huge losses of men and the incompetence demonstrated by Imperial commanders, for the Communists to take power in Russia, a development which led ultimately to the Cold War.

The War’s immense costs and the realization by millions of soldiers from abroad that they fought for a nation which gave them no rights provided the great first blow towards ending the British Empire. The approaching World War II would finish the work of imperial rot and collapse.

The First World War set the stage for the rise of Hitler less than two decades later and made inevitable the catastrophe of World War II, which would inflict at least two and a half times as many deaths again and would see such horrors as the Holocaust and the use of atomic bombs.

So why, about a century later, do we still treat The Great War with reverence and sentimental remembrance?

The act of remembrance actually contradicts the sound human tendency to forget terrible experiences. Of course, we hear repeated countless times the words of George Santayana, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” one of those glib and catchy sayings which seem at first hearing to carry some deep truth. Just the consideration that in real life no two events ever can be identical makes the saying a pleasantly-phrased nonsense, resembling the aphorisms on far lighter subjects from Oscar Wilde.

Those repeating the glib phrase as received wisdom from an unimpeachable prophet always neglect to remind us of the importance of scrupulously defining what it is that you are remembering. If we remember World War One for exactly what it was, and not for what we wish it had been, we see a vast, pointless slaughter that succeeded in setting conditions for still more slaughter. Never repeating it would be a blessing indeed.

But if we see it as moving and inspirational, if we associate its name with thoughts of ending war or protecting democracy or of great camaraderie and shared hardship, if we are emotionally moved by troops in uniforms and flags flying and bugles and drumbeats, then we most assuredly will repeat it, as we have already done more than once, and I’m pretty sure that’s what the arrogant politicians and jingoes want us ready to do.

Remembrance Day surely is not about the loss of life, as we pretend it is, because the only way to hold those or any lives sacred is not to send them off to war in the first place. The ugly truth is that governments, run by men with great egos – likely more often than not, actual narcissists – who are supported by privileged wealth wanting to keep or expand its privilege, make the decision for wars largely on the basis of fairly primitive instincts, instincts about being first or not letting a competitor gain an advantage, or just vague and meaningless stuff about being manly or resolute – standing your ground, keeping a stiff upper lip, putting up with no nonsense, showing your manhood, and so on and so forth.

One American politician, in a play on an infamous quote by George Wallace, said no one would ever “out-commie” him again in an election. Such was the thinking of Lyndon Johnson in making the fatal decision to start a major war in Southeast Asia. On just such hormone-laden considerations hung a decade’s brutal fighting and the deaths of 3 million Vietnamese.

The real reason for the ceremonies and parades and speeches is to keep young men keen to go and kill and die, there being no group of humans more subject to cheap emotional appeals about glory and heroism than young men, as we see, ad nauseam, generation after generation.

As I’ve written before, humans are little more than chimpanzees with larger brains, those larger brains enabling us to magnify immensely the power of our murderous instincts, a fact we seem determined proudly to display every Remembrance Day.

November 13, 2014 Posted by | Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

No Apologies: U.S. Aggression Against Vietnam

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teleSUR | November 10, 2014

Out of all the peculiarities of the political milieu in the U.S., what probably stands out the most is the discourse on the U.S. obliteration policies against Vietnam. If in any other country there exists a wider gap between the conventional portrayals and narrative on a war of aggression carried out by that country, on one hand, and the documentary record, on the other, then I have yet to come across it.

What does the general picture on U.S. aggression look like? The U.S. air force dropped more bombing tonnage solely in South Vietnam than the total bombing tonnage of every single aerial bombing campaign by all sides in WWII put together. The total amount of U.S. bombings during the Vietnam War was more than twice the size of all the bombings in WWII.

12 million acres of forest and 25 million acres of farmland, at the bare minimum, were destroyed by U.S. saturation bombing. The U.S. sprayed over 70 million liters of herbicidal agents to Vietnam.

Reflecting the fundamental defects of the conventional narrative on the matter, the death toll of the Vietnamese caused by the U.S. military onslaught is routinely debated in hundreds of thousands, sometimes in millions. According to Robert McNamara, for example, 3.6 million Vietnamese were killed in the war.

Among the most comprehensive studies on the matter was published in 2008 by Harvard Medical School and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. They put the Vietnamese death toll at 3.8 million. According to Dr. Nick Turse, an American historian and investigative journalist who has conducted pioneering research on the Vietnam War, even the “staggering figure” of 3.8 million “may be an underestimate”. Furthermore, the U.S. attack wounded 5,3 million Vietnamese civilians and up to 4 million Vietnamese fell victim to toxic defoliants used by the U.S. against large parts of the country. The U.S. assault created 200,000 prostitutes, 879,000 orphans, 1 million widows and 11 million refugees.

To enter from the realm of international law, facts and figures to what at times goes by the name of ‘internal U.S. debate’ on the matter of U.S. attack on Vietnam is tantamount to an abrupt teleportation into an unsavory twilight zone. Consider the following results of a Gallup poll conducted in November, 2000. Of respondents aged between 18 and 29, 27% said that the U.S. was backing North Vietnam, 45% said South Vietnam and 28% expressed no opinion at all.

What about support for the war among the U.S. public, say, at the end of the 1960’s? According to a Gallup poll conducted in July, 1969, more than a year after the My Lai massacre, 53% of the respondents approved of Nixon’s handling of the war.

Arguably the main trend after the termination of U.S. aggression against Indochina has been a systematic glorification of U.S. actions. During a conference in 2006 titled Vietnam and the Presidency, former U.S. head of state Jimmy Carter gave his well-known account on the war and its effects to his presidency. Carter, not regarded as an ardent advocate of aggressive U.S. foreign policy among post-WWII U.S. presidents, perhaps quite the contrary, stressed the importance of moving “beyond the Vietnam War to better things”.

Carter gave special emphasis on what he called a “healing process” – a healing process for American society, needless to say – and proclaimed that, under his administration, “that healing process made major strides forward”. Not only that, the “healing process” was no less than “complete” when “the Vietnam heroic monument, one of the most popular places in Washington” was set up, soon after the Carter presidency.

The inscription on the world-renowned Vietnam Veterans Memorial states that “[o]ur nation honors the courage, sacrifice, and devotion to duty and country of its Vietnam veterans.” Instead of having prosecuted war criminals and paid enormous compensation to Vietnam, for starters, the U.S. gave Vietnam the above sentence.

Carter’s commentary serves as an odious, yet illustrative, reminder of the standard line of thinking in the U.S. political culture. In short, when the U.S. attack on Vietnam had finally come to its end, what was of uttermost importance was a “healing process” for the United States, and reflecting the progress, if not completion, of that healing process was the erection of a monument singing the praises of the “courage” and “sacrifice” of the U.S. veterans. Now, let us move “beyond the Vietnam War to better things”.

Perhaps even more revealingly, Carter has asserted on the Vietnam War that “I don’t feel that we ought to apologize or to castigate ourselves or to assume the status of culpability”, stressing that “the destruction was mutual”.

In 2000, the then Secretary of Defence William Cohen expressed a similar approach towards the U.S. actions in the Vietnam war. “I don’t intend to go into any apologies, certainly, for the war itself” Cohen declared upon his visit to Vietnam. “Both nations were scarred by this. They have their own scars from the war. We certainly have ours.”

The tenets of the official U.S. position towards the unparalleled crimes the U.S. military committed in Vietnam remain as disturbing as ever: no apologies for U.S. conduct during the war, certainly no reparations; no intentions to prosecute U.S. government officials and military personnel for any of the countless war crimes the U.S. committed in Vietnam; romanticizing and glorifying the overall performance of the U.S. military in the war.

Indeed, in the post-WWII era, the conventional narrative in the U.S. on the Vietnam war has emerged as arguably the most disturbing case of the perpetrator’s nationalistic indifference towards, and often approval of, an apocalyptic destruction of the target of its attack. Finally, let us all bask in the shining light of American self-criticism, embodied by the following quote by the U.S. President Barak Obama at the commemoration ceremony of the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War:

“Veterans, families of the Vietnam War, I know the wounds of war are slow to heal. You know that better than most. But today we take another step. The task of telling your story continues. The work of perfecting our Union goes on. And decades from now, I hope another young American will visit this place and reach out and touch a name. And she’ll learn the story of service members — people she never met, who fought a war she never knew — and in that moment of understanding and of gratitude and of grace, your legacy will endure. For you are all true heroes and you will all be remembered. May God bless you. May God bless your families. May God bless our men and women in uniform. And may God bless these United States of America.”

November 12, 2014 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Evidence that US secretly pays off civilian Yemeni drone strike victims

Reprieve | November 11, 2014

The US government has apparently made secret payments of $100,000 to the families of two Yemeni men who were mistakenly killed in a covert drone strike, an investigation by international non-profit Reprieve has found.

Faisal bin Ali Jaber, a Yemeni man who lost his brother-in-law and nephew in a 2013 drone strike, was offered a bag containing US dollar bills at a meeting with the Yemeni National Security Bureau (NSB). The NSB official who had requested the meeting told a family representative that the money came from the US and that he had been asked to pass it along.

Since the deaths of his relatives, Mr bin Ali Jaber – who is represented by lawyers at Reprieve – has travelled to Washington, DC and met with Congressmen and members of the National Security Council, as well as telling his story to a number of journalists. The Yemeni NSB official reportedly cited this activity as part of the reason the family was offered the $100k payment.

The payment came after Mr bin Ali Jaber’s family had already gone through a formal compensation process, during which the Yemeni government confirmed in writing that the US carried out the drone strike and that the deaths of their civilian relatives were “a mistake”. During this formal compensation procedure the family also received a payment of 11m Yemeni Rials plus damages.

Despite the private admissions and payments to Mr bin Ali Jaber and his family, given via the Yemeni security services, the US has never publicly admitted that the strike in which Waleed bin Ali Jaber and Salim bin Ali Jaber were killed was a mistake and that the two men were innocent civilians. The deaths have never been investigated and the US has never apologised to the families.

Waleed bin Ali Jaber was a local policeman and his father was an imam who had preached against al Qaeda in the local mosque just days before he was killed.

Faisal bin Ali Jaber said: “My family received money from the US government as an admission of their guilt for ‘mistakenly’ killing our relatives in a drone strike. But this is not justice. There are many other families in Yemen who have lost innocent relatives in US drone strikes but do not receive hush money for speaking out. If the US can admit their ‘mistake’ in a back room of the Yemeni security services, they can surely admit it publicly and apologise for what they have done to my family, and many others in Yemen.”

Cori Crider, Reprieve’s Strategic Director and attorney for Mr bin Ali Jaber, said: “President Obama is as reluctant as ever to admit the full extent of the US drone program in Yemen – but money talks, even if the White House won’t. Cash payments without full accountability won’t quell the outrage about civilian drone deaths, and continued US strikes will only bring further instability to Yemen. The victims’ families want and deserve an explanation, while the American people need to hear the truth about what is being done in their name.”

November 11, 2014 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

NATO’s Estonia drills are anti-Russian, don’t make Europe more secure – Moscow

RT | November 11, 2014

Moscow believes NATO drills in Estonia are of “a clearly anti-Russian nature” and will scarcely contribute to European safety, according to a statement by the Russian Defense Ministry.

NATO has conducted five military exercises near the Russian border over the past six months, the head of the ministry’s Department of International Cooperation, Sergey Koshelev, told journalists on Tuesday.

“Obviously the policy chosen by our colleagues from NATO will hardly make Europe a safer place,” he said.

The comment was in response NATO’s plans of having so-called ‘Trident Juncture’ drills in Estonia. Koshelev believes the exercises have been inspired by warnings of a “Russian threat,” as voiced by NATO’s supreme allied commander, Philip Breedlove.

“Today Estonia is chosen as an object of that ‘threat’,” Kochelev said. Although recently such objects were Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, which also hosted large-scale NATO drills.”

“Taking this into account, it’s strange to hear some NATO representatives lamenting a group of Russian planes flying in international airspace over the North Atlantic,” he added.

The Trident Juncture drills are clearly anti-Russian, Koshelev believes.

“According to the drills’ scenario, the headquarters of various levels should have their actions tested in a situation in which one of the members of the bloc is attacked by an unnamed “big hostile nation,” he said. “From a geographical standpoint Estonia, which hosts the drills, borders only with ‘little friendly nations’ besides Russia. Hence, the NATO drills have a clearly anti-Russian nature.”

November 11, 2014 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Veterans’ Day Through a Maureen Dowd Flashback

By JERRY LEMBCKE | CounterPunch | November 10, 2014

Unbelievable—an overused word, for sure. But it is what came to mind as I read Maureen Dowd’s November 1, New York Times column. Unbelievable that she would begin “A Cup of Joe: Making every day Veterans Day” with her own flashback to the war in Vietnam. “When I close my eyes,” she writes, “I can easily flash back to a time when it was cool to call people in uniform ‘pigs’ and ‘baby killers.’” Really? I mean really, she really wrote that.

It can’t be that she doesn’t know better because the world of journalism in which she lives surely does. When Barack Obama trafficked in the same imagery for his 2012 Memorial Day speech, Los Angeles Times editor Michael McGough said the President’s words recalled the stories of veterans spat-on by war protesters. He called the stories an “edifying myth,” but a myth nevertheless. McGough pointed readers to a 2007 slate.com article in which news critic Jack Shafer upbraided reporters for repeatedly lending credibility to the spat-on veteran stories.

There are plenty of stories but no evidence that anyone spat on Vietnam veterans, and only scant evidence that anyone at the time claimed it to be happening. There are also stories that G.I.s were met at airports by radicals holding placards reading, “Baby Killer.” But planes with returning troops landed at military airbases to which protesters did not have access, and despite thousands of troops returning with PX-purchased cameras slung around their necks, there are no photographs, that I’ve seen, of those signs in airport settings or anywhere else.

And “pigs”? Veterans? I’ve never heard that one. Is she referring to demonstrators calling police officers pigs? This is a Veterans Day column about veterans—who would believe she is not slurring images to imply that was baby-killing veterans who were called pigs? Unbelievable.

Dowd’s “flashback” was just a set-up for writing about Starbuck’s chief Howard Schultz’s mission to “celebrate soldiers.” On a crusade to get “’more skin in the game’” from Americans, Schultz has put former Defense Secretary Robert Gates on the Starbucks board, and pledged to hire veterans. He is organizing a Veterans Day Concert for Valor on the Capitol Mall that will feature the stars Rihanna, Eminem, and Bruce Springsteen.

Set against the backdrop of veteran disparagement drawn by Dowd, his efforts are made to appear even more righteous than they otherwise might. Schultz himself, as cast by Dowd, cuts a contrasting figure to the alleged traitors who scorned the Vietnam fighters. “My [draft lottery] number was 332,” he remembers, “so I didn’t go. But I would have.” Belief that the nation itself failed to adequately support the men and women sent to Vietnam, or even betrayed the military mission there, is essential to the mantra that we “must not let that happen again”—words that motivate Schultz but which make sense only if the real history of the war years is forgotten.

The scenes imagined by Dowd of antiwar-movement hostility to returning G.I.s took root during the 1970s as a political antidote to the uncomfortable truth that activists recruited veterans to their ranks, and thousands of returnees joined the war to end the war. By the end of the Reagan years, though, fantasies like the one spun by Dowd had displaced reality in American memory. With the help of Hollywood and the mental health establishment, the image of Vietnam veterans empowered and politicized by their wartime experience, was made-over into one of “damaged goods,” men traumatized by combat and the rejection they encountered upon coming home who now suffer the hidden effects of “unseen wounds.”

The damaged-goods narrative carried over from the post-Vietnam era to the news coverage of units returning from Iraq and Afghanistan; within months after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, PTSD, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, had displace almost all else from the coming-home story. Dowd follows the script, credentialing Schultz’s concern that “many vets he talked to had lost `a sense of core purpose’.” She strings together her own set of clichés about lack of public support for the war (read in that the lack of appreciation for veterans), the high rate of PTSD among veterans, and a supposed “PTSD bias among employers.”

The coda for that package can’t be Schultz’s own struggle with war trauma (recall that lottery number). So trot out another trope: the World War II veteran, his father, so shaken by combat in the South Pacific that, well, he never talked about it.

Unbelievable. Not so much the details in what Dowd wrote (okay, I don’t believe the “baby killer” part—because there is no evidence for it) but that American journalism at its highest levels continues to recycle a meme-laced narrative from the post-Vietnam War years. (The reticent World War II veteran appears most often, as a strange apparition, in PTSD-themed stories of Vietnam veterans.) It is a story-line that casts a shadow over the antiwar movement, and obscures the political agency of veterans with images of their dependency and dysfunction. Most importantly, it diverts attention from the very neo-colonial foreign policy that puts all of us at risk, and feeds fantasies of perfidious enemies at home and abroad—fantasies with their own vengeful imperatives.

Veterans Day this year, the country may be moving beyond the platitudes of “Welcome Home” and “Thank You for your service,” expressions that found resonance in the mythical world of spat-upon veterans visited by Maureen Dowd in her flashbacks.

Just as some veterans have begun to publically shun the shallowness of the welcome-home rhetoric, more are likely to take offense at their use as props in corporate PR campaigns like Howard Schultz’s. Engaged thoughtfully on the matter, still others will see the danger inherent in America’s growing sense of itself as a defeated and declining super power in search of redemption and vengeance that is cued to exploit victim-veteran imagery for revanchist militarist purposes.

This year’s Veterans Day is a good time to take the spotlight off veterans, while yet privileging the special perspective they have, to begin a national conversation with them about the meaning of our wars and the importance of the way we remember them.

Jerry Lembcke is Associate Professor Emeritus of Sociology at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. He is the author of The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam and  Hanoi Jane: War, Sex, and Fantasies of Betrayal. His newest book is PTSD: Diagnosis or Identity in Post-empire America? He can be reached at  jlembcke@holycross.edu.

November 10, 2014 Posted by | Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Reclaim Armistice Day and Honor the Real Heroes

By Arnold Oliver | Peace Voice | November 10, 2014

More than a few veterans, Veterans For Peace among them, are troubled by the way Americans observe Veterans Day on November 11th. It was originally called Armistice Day, and established by Congress in 1926 to “perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations, (and later) a day dedicated to the cause of world peace.” For years, many churches rang their bells on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month – the time that the guns fell silent on the Western Front by which time 16 million had died.

To put it bluntly, in 1954 Armistice Day was hijacked by a militaristic congress, and today few Americans understand the original purpose of the occasion, or even remember it. The message of peace seeking has vanished. Now known as Veterans Day, it has devolved into a hyper-nationalistic worship ceremony for war and the putatively valiant warriors who wage it.

Here is a news flash. Most of what goes on during wartime is decidedly unheroic, and heroes in war are few and far between.

I have to tell you that when I was in Vietnam, I was no hero, and I didn’t witness any heroism during the year I spent there, first as a U.S. Army private and then as a sergeant.

Yes, there was heroism in the Vietnam War. On both sides of the conflict there were notable acts of self-sacrifice and bravery. Troops in my unit wondered how the North Vietnamese troops could persevere for years in the face of daunting U.S. firepower. U.S. medical corpsmen performed incredible acts of valor rescuing the wounded under fire.

But I also witnessed a considerable amount of bad behavior, some of it my own. There were widespread incidents of disrespect and abuse of Vietnamese civilians including many war crimes. Further, all units had, and still have, their share of criminals, con artists and thugs. Most unheroic of all were the U.S. military and civilian leaders who planned, orchestrated, and profited greatly from that utterly avoidable war.

The cold truth is that the U.S. invasion and occupation of Vietnam had nothing to do with protecting American peace and freedom. On the contrary, the Vietnam War bitterly divided the United States, and was fought to forestall Vietnamese independence, not defend it.

Unfortunately, Vietnam wasn’t an isolated example. Many American wars — including the 1846 Mexican-American War, the Spanish-American War in 1898, and the Iraq War (this list is by no means exhaustive) — were waged under false pretexts against countries that didn’t threaten the United States. It’s hard to see how, if a war is unjust, it can be heroic to wage it.

But if the vast majority of wars are not fought for noble reasons, and few soldiers are heroic, have there been any actual heroes out there defending peace and freedom? And if so, who are they?

Well, there are many, from Jesus down to the present. I’d put Gandhi, Tolstoy, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on the list along with many Quakers and Mennonites. And don’t forget General Smedley Butler, who wrote that “War is a Racket”, and even, sort of, Robert McNamara, who came around in the very end.

In Vietnam, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson stopped the My Lai massacre from being even worse.

Another candidate is former U.S. Army specialist Josh Stieber who sent this message to the people of Iraq: “Our heavy hearts still hold hope that we can restore inside our country the acknowledgment of your humanity, that we were taught to deny.” Ponder a million Iraqi deaths. Chelsea Manning sits behind bars for exposing those and other truths.

The real heroes are those who resist war and militarism, often at great personal cost.

Because militarism has been around for such a long time, at least since Gilgamesh came up with his protection racket in Sumeria going on 5,000 years ago, people argue that it will always be with us. But many also thought that slavery and the subjugation of women would last forever, and they’re being proven wrong. We understand that while militarism will not disappear overnight, disappear it must if we are to avoid economic as well as moral bankruptcy.

As Civil War General W.T. Sherman said at West Point, “I confess without shame that I am tired and sick of war.” We’re with you, bro.

This year on November 11th, Veterans For Peace will bring back the original Armistice Day traditions. Join them and let those bells ring out.

Arnold “Skip” Oliver is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio. A Vietnam veteran, he belongs to Veterans For Peace, and can be reached at soliver@heidelberg.edu.

November 10, 2014 Posted by | Militarism, Solidarity and Activism, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Winston Churchill was a Racist Ass#*%!

Moonlit History | October 24, 2014

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Churchill is seen as the British icon of endurance and strength through gloomy war. His drowning voice of “we shall fight on the beaches” is easily identifiable with World War II. And he was a complete drunk.

But what do common folks now-a-days know of this man? Do you know much about Dear ol’ Churchill? Let’s find out.

In December of 1910, while young Churchill was Home Secretary, he wrote:

“The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. I am convinced that the multiplication of the Feeble-Minded, which is proceeding now at an artificial rate, unchecked by any of the old restraints of nature, and actually fostered by civilised conditions, is a terrible danger to the race.” Churchill was all-for forcing “feeble-minded” people to labour colonies. January 19, 1899, Churchill wrote in a letter to his cousin: “The improvement of the British breed is my aim of life.” [1]

Wait a minute, he was in favor of eugenics? This sounds really familiar to someone else in history, I just can’t remember his name. Anyway, moving on.

As a young MP, it was well-known he believed that “the Aryan stock is bound to triumph.” — Okay, wait! He sounds just like that guy with the funny mustache! Whoa!

When concentration camps were built in South Africa, for white Boers, he [Churchill] said they produced “the minimum of suffering”. The death toll was almost 28,000, and when at least 115,000 black Africans were likewise swept into British camps, where 14,000 died, he wrote only of his “irritation that Kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men.”

As Colonial Secretary in the 1920s, he unleashed the notorious Black and Tan thugs on Ireland’s Catholic civilians, and when the Kurds rebelled against British rule, he said: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes… [It] would spread a lively terror.” [2]

And after Ghandi’s movement of peace was taking hold in the then British colony of India, Churchill was noted to have said:

“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.” Churchill’s gross demeanor towards others not of his skin did not cease while the Bengali famine occurred (which led to the death of nearly 3 million souls). He remarked the famine was not Britain’s fault, but it was “their” fault—because they “breed like rabbits.” He was talking about the Indians, of course. Amartya Sen, an economist who won the Nobel Prize in 1998, proved for a fact that the famine was due to the imperialist structure of the British Empire. [3]

In conclusion: make your own conclusion.

Sources:
[1] Winstonchurchill.org
[2] The Independent
[3] BBC

November 9, 2014 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Winston Churchill wanted to nuke Kremlin ‘to win Cold War,’ FBI memo reveals

RT | November 9, 2014

A secret memo from the FBI’s archives has revealed that Britain’s Winston Churchill once urged the US to drop an atomic bomb to “wipe out” the Kremlin. He reportedly thought it was the only remedy against the spread of communism to the west.

Churchill, Britain’s prime minister during World War II and again during the Cold War 1950s, made his views known to a visiting American politician in 1947, The Daily Mail reported in a preview of a new book, “When Lions Roar: The Churchills and The Kennedys” by investigative journalist Thomas Maier. The book containing the secret FBI memo is to be published next month.

Britain and the Soviet Union had been allies during WW2. However, according to the memo written by an FBI agent, Churchill asked a Right-wing Republican senator, Styles Bridges, to help persuade then-President Harry Truman to launch a nuclear attack which would make the former USSR easy to deal with.

The FBI memo claims Churchill insisted that the “only salvation for the civilization of the world would be if the President of the United States would declare Russia to be imperiling world peace and attack Russia.”

The Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in 1949, much to the surprise to the United States, which was apparently unaware that the Soviet Union possessed nuclear weapons.

Britain’s wartime leader allegedly pledged that if an atomic bomb could be dropped on the Kremlin, “wiping it out,” it would be “a very easy problem to handle the balance of Russia, which would be without direction.”

Churchill, who served as British PM twice, from 1940-45 and 1951-55, warned that if this was not done, Russia would attack America within “the next two or three years, when she gets the atomic bomb and civilization will be wiped out or set back many years.”

November 9, 2014 Posted by | Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , , , , | Leave a comment

Critics Slam US Military’s ‘Disturbing’ Praise for Israel’s Gaza Offensive

Palestinians collect their belongings from under the rubble of a residential tower, which was destroyed by an Israeli air strike in Gaza City on August 24, 2014. (Photo: UN Photo-Shareef Sarhan/flickr/cc)
Common Dreams | November 7, 2014

Critics say it is “shameful” that a high-ranking U.S. military official suggested the Pentagon can learn lessons from Israel’s 50-day attack on Gaza this summer.

According the Jerusalem Post, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Martin Dempsey made statements Thursday praising the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) for taking “extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties” during Operation Protective Edge.

Dempsey told an audience at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs: “We sent a team of senior officers and non-commissioned officers over to work with the IDF to get the lessons from that particular operation in Gaza.” He referred to the group of officers as the “lessons learned team.”

But Ramah Kudaimi of the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation said Israel’s tactics should not be replicated.

“It is very disturbing and shameful that U.S. military commanders believe that what Israel did in Gaza is something to be applauded,” Kudaimi told Common Dreams. “Five hundred dead children does not seem to be evidence that Israel was trying to not kill civilians. The seven-year siege on Gaza is not a policy to avoid civilian suffering.”

Israel’s recent seven-week military assault on Gaza killed at least 2,194 Palestinians, at least 75 percent of them civilians and over 500 of them children.

“At least 80 percent of the 100,000 Palestinian homes damaged or destroyed were refugee homes,” the United Nations Relief and Works Agency reports.

The offensive damaged or destroyed over half of Gaza’s hospitals and health centers at a time when more than 11,000 were wounded, a UNRWA and World Health Organization joint investigation found.

Israel struck six UN schools sheltering Palestinians, including in cases where exact coordinates of the shelters were formally submitted by UNRWA to the Isreali military. These strikes alone killed at least 47 people and wounded hundreds.

Furthermore, Israel has been accused of potential war crimes by Amnesty International and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay.

“It is very despicable that the U.S. continues to white-wash Israeli crimes while funding them through military aid,” said Kudaimi. “Dempsey’s statements are not shocking. Anyone who follows U.S. military policy, knows they too have problematic definitions of protecting civilians.”

November 8, 2014 Posted by | Militarism, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

Pentagon Resists Call for Oversight Unit to Rein in Cost Overruns on Major Weapons Systems

By Noel Brinkerhoff | AllGov | November 8, 2014

Despite numerous examples of runaway costs on expensive weapons programs, the Defense Department is resisting calls to make changes to its process for ensuring quality control.

The Pentagon’s inspector general (IG) recently reviewed the work of the Office of the Defense Undersecretary for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics and concluded in a report that it hadn’t “established an overarching quality management policy to ensure the consistent application of quality management system requirements across DoD components.”

In other words, do a better job of monitoring the development of new weapons systems before budget overruns result in soaring costs.

Not that there haven’t been a lot of examples of this problem:

·       The Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle fell four years behind schedule and accumulated an overrun of $750 million.

·       The Advanced Threat Infrared Counter Measure/Common Missile Warning System got five years off-track at a cost of $117 million.

·       The F22A Raptor Advanced Tactical Fighter exceeded its budget by $400 million.

The USS San Antonio, an amphibious transport dock ship, took three years longer than planned to build and consumed an extra $846 million along the way.

The IG recommended the Pentagon create a central quality management oversight office to help reduce delays and cost overruns.

The response last month from the Defense Department was they don’t need another layer of bureaucracy. “While we agree there are benefits to central leadership, it already exists,” Katrina McFarland, director of Defense Acquisition Resources and Analysis, said according to Government Executive. These quality checks “are in many cases are working poorly right now for a very simple reason: a shortage of trained and qualified acquisition professionals in the quality field.”

The IG requested another response, this time one that addresses its concerns, by December 5.

To Learn More:

Pentagon’s Buying Managers Resist IG’s Call for Central Oversight Office (by Charles S. Clark, Government Executive)

Evaluation of Government Quality Assurance Oversight for DoD Acquisition Programs (Inspector General, U.S. Department of Defense) (pdf)

Unnecessary Defense Acquisitions are a Costly Mistake for the Pentagon, Taxpayers (by David Williams, Townhall.com)

Majority of Pentagon Weapons Contracts Go Over Cost Estimates (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

Stunning Cost Overruns in Weapons Development Programs (by Noel Brinkerhoff, AllGov)

November 8, 2014 Posted by | Corruption, Economics, Militarism | | Leave a comment

The use of nuclear weapons

By Bjorn Hilt | International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War | November 6, 2014

NoNukesKidsThey always tell us that nuclear weapons will never be used.

The fact is that nuclear weapons are used every day by the nuclear-armed states to threaten the rest of the world with total annihilation, while threatening themselves with the same fate.

During the time of the Cold War, we called such an insane situation MAD: Mutual Assured Destruction. The threat was immediate and the situation very dangerous. We don’t like to think about it, but today’s risk that nuclear weapons can be detonated somewhere deliberately or by accident is at least as high. The doomsday clock of the atomic scientists is set at five minutes to midnight.

The current situation is that all people in states with and without nuclear weapons are still terrorized by the nuclear-armed states and must live with the fear of the horrifying effects of nuclear weapons. MAD can be accomplished in an afternoon.

During the Cold War, we also talked about a terror balance. To use or to threaten to use indiscriminate weapons of mass destruction in order to achieve one’s own political goals is also a form of terrorism. The goal claimed by the nuclear-armed states is their own security. What a delusion. Nobody and nothing ever became more secure by the existence of nuclear weapons. These are nothing but weapons of terror, regardless of whether they are detonated in war or used to threaten and intimidate.

The other day I asked one of my grandsons (age 11) what he would think about someone who claims to need more and stronger weapons than most others. In his view that was cowardice and nothing else. When I asked him about nuclear weapons, he said that no country should need them.

For me, it is insane and terrifying that they are still around, and that we still allow a small number of states to be armed with nuclear weapons and to use them every day to threaten the rest of us. The time is more that ripe to ban nuclear weapons.

November 7, 2014 Posted by | Militarism | , , , , | Leave a comment

Inside the UN Resolution on Depleted Uranium

By JOHN LAFORGE | CounterPunch | November 6, 2014

On October 31, a new United Nations General Assembly First Committee resolution on depleted uranium (DU) weapons passed overwhelmingly. There were 143 states in favor, four against, and 26 abstentions. The measure calls for UN member states to provide assistance to countries contaminated by the weapons. The resolution also notes the need for health and environmental research on depleted uranium weapons in conflict situations.

This fifth UN resolution on the subject was fiercely opposed by four depleted uranium-shooting countries — Britain, the United States, France and Israel — who cast the only votes in opposition. The 26 states that abstained reportedly sought to avoid souring lucrative trade relationships with the four major shooters.

Uranium-238 — so-called “depleted” uranium — is waste material left in huge quantities by the nuclear weapons complex. It’s used in large caliber armor-piercing munitions and in armor plate on tanks. Toxic, radioactive dust and debris is dispersed when DU shells burn through targets, and its metallic fumes and dust poison water, soil and the food chain. DU has been linked to deadly health effects like Gulf War Syndrome among U.S. and allied troops, and birth abnormalities among populations in bombed areas. DU waste has caused radioactive contamination of large parts of Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and perhaps Afghanistan.

The measure explains that DU weapons are made of a “chemically and radiologically toxic heavy metal” [uranium-238], that after use “penetrator fragments, and jackets or casings can be found lying on the surface or buried at varying depth, leading to the potential contamination of air, soil, water and vegetation from depleted uranium residue.”

The main thrust of the latest UN resolution, “Encourages Member States in a position to do so to provide assistance to States affected by the use of arms and ammunition containing depleted uranium, in particular in identifying and managing contaminated sites and material.” The request is a veiled reference to the fact that investigators have been stymied in their study of uranium contamination in Iraq, because the Pentagon refuses to disclose maps of all the places it attacked with DU.

In the diplomatic confines of UN resolutions, individual countries are not named. Yet the world knows that up to 700 tons of DU munitions were blasted into Iraq and Kuwait by U.S. forces in 1991, and that U.S. warplanes fired another three tons into Bosnia in 1994 and 1995; ten tons into Kosovo in 1999, and approximately 170 tons into Iraq again in 2003.

The International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons (ICBUW.org), based in Manchester, England and representing over 160 civil society organizations worldwide, played a major part in seeing all five resolutions through the UN process and is working for a convention that would see the munitions outlawed. In October, ICBUW reported that the US military will again use DU weapons in Iraq in its assaults against ISIS “if it needs to”. The admission came in spite of Iraq’s summer 2014 recent call for a global ban on the weapons and assistance in clearing up the contamination left from bombardments in 1991 and 2003.

The new resolution relies heavily on the UN Environment Program (UNEP) which conducted radiation surveys of NATO bombing targets in the Balkans and Kosovo. It was a UNEP study in 2001 that forced the Pentagon to admit that its DU is spiked with plutonium. (Associated Press, Capital Times, Feb. 3, 2001: “But now the Pentagon says shells used in the 1999 Kosovo conflict were tainted with traces of plutonium, neptunium and americium — byproducts of nuclear reactors that are much more radioactive than depleted uranium.”)

The resolution’s significant fourth paragraph notes in part: “… major scientific uncertainties persisted regarding the long-term environmental impacts of depleted uranium, particularly with respect to long-term groundwater contamination. Because of these scientific uncertainties, UNEP called for a precautionary approach to the use of depleted uranium, and recommended that action be taken to clean up and decontaminate the polluted sites. It also called for awareness-raising among local populations and future monitoring.”

The “precautionary principle” holds that risky activities or substances should be shunned and discouraged unless they can be proved safe. Of course, instead of adopting precaution, the Pentagon denies that DU can be linked to health problems.

John LaForge works for Nukewatch and lives on the Plowshares Land Trust near Luck, Wisc.

November 6, 2014 Posted by | Environmentalism, Militarism | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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