Imagine the following scenario: you’re in your courtyard, when a gang shows up, insulting you in what is supposed to be your safest place, beating you in the presence of your children, stealing or destroying your belongings. Picking yourself up, you know there’s no point in calling the police – because in the vast majority of cases, the police won’t catch the offenders. Oh, by the way – the criminals are from a different ethnic group.
Do you think you could live this way? Because this is how many Palestinians in the West Bank have to live. We have just published our annual data sheet on law enforcement – or rather the lack of law enforcement – in the West Bank.
If you are a Palestinian and you’ve been attacked or otherwise harmed by Israeli civilians in the West Bank, there is little to no chance the police will solve the case. Yesh Din has been monitoring the police investigation cases of complaints filed by Palestinians against Israeli civilians since 2005. The unambiguous data show that of 1,045 cases we are monitoring, the police concluded its investigation of 970 cases. 72 indictments were made (about 7.4% of the cases), and the police managed to lose 11 file cases. 884 cases were concluded due to police investigation failure.
593 cases were closed as “perpetrator unknown”, meaning the police failed to identify a suspect. 195 cases were concluded because of “lack of sufficient evidence”, i.e. the police managed to suggest a suspect but lacked the evidence to indict the suspect. 76 cases were closed on the grounds of “absence of criminal culpability” – that is, police claims that no crime was committed; we appealed 25 of these cases, since the investigation was unfinished or we believed there was enough evidence for an indictment. Finally, 12 cases were closed due to “lack of public interest”.
In two cases, the police concluded the perpetrator could not be indicted, probably due to age (minors); and one case was closed because it fell under the jurisdiction of another agency. The police’s general failure rate in 2005-2014 is 85.2%. Ironically, it was in the two years (2013-2014) in which the Nationalist Crime Department was active that the rate of police failure actually rose to 89.6%. The police tell us they invest many more assets and efforts in fighting nationalist-based crimes; so far, it fails to demonstrate results.
And why do I speak of “people breaking into your courtyard”? Because settlers enter private Palestinian property in the West Bank time and again. In our files from 2013-2014 we emphasized the setting of the crimes. It turns out that 28.3% of the recorded incidents took place within Palestinian villages and towns. Most of the incidents still take place in the countryside near the villages – territories which are to be dispossessed – but more than a quarter of the incidents are invasions of towns and villages, places where the settlers have no reason to visit, uninvited.
And the Israeli police, including the new and much ballyhooed Nationalist Crime Department, doesn’t know – or, perhaps, knows but is unwilling – how to deal with Israelis who commit nationalist crimes. This failure is anything but new: back in 1982 the Karp Report warned that Palestinian residents in the West Bank do not trust the Israeli justice system, and that in many cases they avoid complaining to the police since it is pointless. The Karp Report further found that law enforcement in the West Bank failed – and was the first government report to note this failure.
This is Israeli law and order. This is how it has been maintained for over 30 years: an order of rulers and ruled, with a thin legal coating of “laws of occupation” which allows us to say all is well, since it is temporary. For the past 47 years.
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.”
“You are not entitled to that information!” That’s what a staffer in Senator Markey’s office bluntly told me when I called to ask for help in identifying Members of Congress who hold dual citizenship.
Seems that’s a question no one wants to hear. The Internet sources are flaky, with only unreliable estimates for both House and Senate. So I telephoned the Washington, DC offices of my three Congressional representatives from Massachusetts to ask for their help in obtaining definitive data from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), which responds to Congressional offices, but not to the general public.
I might as well have asked the respondents for their social security numbers. While the responses the offices of Senator Warren and Congressman Keating were more polite than the one from Markey’s office, they were no more helpful. Two Warren office interns tried to assist, sending me some interesting but unrelated CRS reports. However, when their internships ended in August, I started all over again with a more permanent staffer. She promised to call back, but never did. I thought I had a promise from a Keating office aide to approach CRS, but she never responded to my several follow-up emails.
As a Harvard Kennedy School alum, I emailed the two professors recommended by a member of the fundraising office, but received no response.
Two prominent ethics in government NGOs manifested a similar lack of interest. Neither the Sunlight Foundation nor the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) saw fit to respond to my phone calls. Nor did my “tipline” submission to CREW spark a reply.
Meanwhile, I did obtain some useful information from the “Ask the Librarian” service of the Library of Congress. First, it referred me to links that reported Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s recent renunciation of her Swiss citizenship and Senator Ted Cruz’ renunciation of his Canadian citizenship. The librarian service also referred me to two government organizations, one of which provided me with a document listing Members born outside the United States and another more detailed CRS document entitled “Membership of the 113th Congress: A Profile,” dated August 26, 2014. The profile document includes cumulative Member data on party breakdown, age, occupations, education, Congressional service, religion, gender and ethnicity and military service, but nothing on dual citizenship. The provided reports came with a caveat: my source was not to be “quoted or cited.”
This week I filed a Freedom of Information Request to CRS asking for the names of Members of Congress who are dual citizens; or, if such data is not available, advice on where it can obtained. Given the omission of dual citizen topic in the Member profile cited above, I suspect that the relevant data is simply not being collected.
Until the Supreme Court decided otherwise in the 1967 case of Afroyim v. Rusk, a US citizen who voted in a political election in a foreign state would lose his US nationality. Afroyim opened the way for the acceptance of dual or multiple citizenship in US law.
Not all countries allow their citizens to obtain dual citizenship. One country that does make it easy to become a dual national is Israel. Under its “Law of Return,” every Jew has the right to come to Israel as an oleh (a Jew immigrating to Israel) and become an Israeli citizen.
The recent experience of Lenny Lapon, a Jewish American citizen from Massachusetts, shows how automatic the conferral of Israeli citizenship can be. As Lapon described it when he publicly renounced that citizenship last July, his flight to Israel in October 2010 resulted in the award of Israeli citizenship and an Israeli identification number. Thus it is likely that Jewish members of Congress became Israeli citizens if and when they visited Israel. We don’t yet know if this was the case for any or all of the visiting Jewish Members. Nor do we know if any such member has renounced Israeli citizenship.
Religion and ethnicity in such a diverse country as the US raise no serious conflict issues (1) because neither of those identifications takes precedence over citizen loyalty to the US and (2) because both religion and ethnicity of Members are transparent to the public.
Why is it important for citizens to know if their representatives in Congress are dual citizens? Because both real and apparent conflicts of interest erode the public trust. If there are dual citizens in Congress or in top levels of the Executive Branch, citizens may reasonably demand that all foreign citizenship be renounced as a condition of high political office.
At the level of individual members, transparency is essential. For example, a constituent should know whether or not another state loyalty is involved when his or her representative speaks out on a major issue, such as on military assistance to Israel or recognition of Palestine as a state. Only if we know who are the dual citizens in Congress and what are their second countries, can we intelligently assess the credibility of their policy statements and actions.
Responding to the Markey staffer, we are entitled to that information.
L. Michael Hager is a retired lawyer and diplomat whose work has been published in the Washington Post, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, The Hill, International Herald Tribune, London Independent, Jordan Times, and Truthout. He was the executive director of Conflict Management Group in Cambridge, MA, president of the Education For Employment Foundation in Washington, DC., and co-founder of the International Development Law Organization in Rome. He now resides in Massachusetts.
A new confidential document of Pakistani security agencies reveals that a US security company, formerly known as Blackwater, has been involved in fostering unrest and instability in the restive southwestern Pakistani province of Balochistan, Press TV reports.
“The revelations were made by paramilitary forces in a briefing given to the chief minister of Balochistan that the American private company [formerly called] Blackwater, operating from neighboring Afghanistan, is involved in Balochistan’s unrest… They are supporting anti-state elements in the province,” said Zahid Gishkori, a Pakistani journalist, who has seen the classified report.
The newly-leaked document confirms earlier Pakistani media reports in 2011 that the US security company of Blackwater had launched a grand-scale operation to instigate insurgency and turmoil in Balochistan in an attempt to destabilize the country.
The report casts serious doubts over the veracity of the so-called US war on terror. Thousands of Pakistanis have so far lost their lives in bombings and other militant attacks since 2001, when Pakistan entered an alliance with the US in the so-called war on terror.
Pro-Taliban militants and some Baloch insurgent groups often carry out attacks against security forces as well as civilians in the country’s violence-ravaged province of Balochistan and have also managed to spread their influence in various regions of the country despite frequent offensives by the Pakistani army.
A number of Baloch militant groups say they want greater political autonomy and a share of the province’s natural resources.
Blackwater is a military company which provides the US federal government with security services. The company changed its name to Xe Services in 2009 and Academi in 2011.
The company is also notorious in Iraq for using aggressive tactics when defending American diplomats and visiting officials. Blackwater agents were involved in a series of deadly shooting incidents that infuriated Iraqi citizens and government.
In September 2007, Blackwater guards killed several Iraqis at Baghdad’s Nisour Square, prompting the Iraqi government to expel the infamous security firm.
David Sheen testifies at the Bundestag, the German Parliament in Berlin, on 10 November 2014, about Israeli top officials inciting racism and racial violence
The continuing controversy over which Navy Seal supposedly killed Osama Bin Laden, and the allegedly ISIL-linked killings of two Canadian soldiers, are the latest media stunts designed to prop up the illusion of a “global war on terror” (GWOT) against radical Islam.
The GWOT master narrative features two master villains. Indeed, it is a legend with two legendary anti-heroes: The villain of Act One, Osama Bin Laden; and the villain of the present Act Two, “Caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
In folklore and mythology studies, the word “legend” means “fantastic story that may or may not be true.” In espionage, the same word means: “A spy’s claimed background or biography, usually supported by documents and memorized details.” (Source: SpyMuseum.org)
Among the most fantastic stories of our time are the legends of two larger-than-life terrorists: Osama Bin Laden of al-Qaeda, and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of ISIL.
Both of these amazing individuals have accomplished near-miraculous feats: Bin Laden caused three skyscrapers to disappear at free-fall acceleration into the path of most resistance, while also making America’s air defenses disappear for two hours so he could bomb the Pentagon, the best-defended building on the planet; while Baghdadi and a ragtag bunch of amateur extremists have somehow seized control of a large swathe of oil-rich and geo-strategically important territory against the opposition of the entire world.
Both accomplishments seem, to say the least, highly improbable.
The amazing successes of both the 9/11 attacks and “Islamic State” have been amazingly counterproductive (from an anti-imperialist Muslim point of view).
Though both al-Qaeda and ISIL have claimed to be fighting to liberate Muslims from their imperialist and Zionist enemies, the two terror groups are actually doing tremendous harm to the Muslim cause.
9/11 allowed Israel to crush Palestine and revive its failing economy with anti-terror start-ups. It also demonized Islam and gave American hawks an excuse to attack, invade, occupy, destabilize, and otherwise harm Muslim countries.
ISIL is even worse. Baghdadi’s terror group has spent most of its time, energy and money attacking its fellow Muslims, spreading chaos and internecine hatred through the House of Islam. It has also slaughtered countless innocent people and broadcast its atrocities to the world, thereby defaming Islam and Muslims in the eyes of the global public.
As Mr. Spock of Star Trek would say, the legends of al-Qaeda and ISIL are illogical. They do not compute.
To understand who or what is really behind these two spectacularly successful and spectacularly counterproductive terror groups, we must begin with a simple question: Who benefits? The answer, of course, is that the beneficiaries of 9/11 and ISIL are the very people al-Qaeda and ISIL claim to be fighting: the Zionists and imperialists.
Which raises the question: Could the legends of Bin Laden and Baghdadi also be “legends” in the espionage sense, meaning false biographies crafted by an intelligence agency?
One of the odd commonalities linking Bin Laden’s and Baghdadi’s biographies is that both alleged anti-American fanatics spent a lot of time in the company of the American military. During the 1980s, while fundraising for the Afghan Resistance against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Bin Laden toured US military bases under the code name “Tim Osman” and helped procure Stinger missiles for the Afghan resistance fighters.
Osama Bin Laden’s close association with Americans linked to military and intelligence agencies continued long after he had issued his famous “death to Americans” proclamation in 1998 – the same year the CIA, through its agent Sgt. Ali Mohamed, bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and blamed the carnage on Bin Laden.
Whistle-blowing FBI translator Sibel Edmonds says that the US maintained ‘intimate relations’ with Bin Laden
“all the way through September 11th.” These “intimate relations,” Edmonds explains, consisted of using Bin Laden’s fighters as a proxy terrorist army to attack America’s competitors including Russia and China.
In July 2001 – at precisely the same time New York Zionist mafia figures Larry Silverstein, Frank Lowy, and Lewis Eisenberg were privatizing and over-insuring the condemned-for-asbestos World Trade Center – Bin Laden was being treated for kidney failure at the American Hospital in Dubai by a US intelligence linked specialist, Dr. Terry Callaway.
Dubai CIA station chief Larry Mitchell, as well as the head of Saudi intelligence, visited Bin Laden at the hospital.
On September 11th, 2001, Bin Laden was back in the hospital. This time he was getting dialysis treatment at the Pakistani military hospital in Rawalpindi, right under the noses of US military advisors.
Why didn’t the US simply ask its client governments in Dubai and Pakistan to arrest Bin Laden, then the world’s most wanted terrorist, while he was immobilized in the hospital on dialysis? The answer, of course, is that Bin Laden was a protected US intelligence asset.
Obviously the story of Osama Bin Laden the anti-American terrorist mastermind is a “legend” in both of that word’s meanings: It is a fantastic tale; and it is the concoction of one or more intelligence agencies.
The story of Bin Laden’s supposed death in May 2011 is as fishy as the story of his life. Even the New York Times admits: “It may never be possible to say exactly who fired the fatal shot or shots, with multiple armed men wearing night-vision goggles moving quickly through the Qaeda leader’s hide-out. No autopsy was performed and no video has emerged of the shooting. The military never released a photograph of Bin Laden after he was killed and said that his body had been buried at sea.”
Actually, the military said Bin Laden was buried at sea “according to Muslim custom.” Apparently they expect us to believe that Muslims customarily throw their dead into the ocean. That is no less absurd than the notion that they would simply kill an alleged terrorist mastermind, rather than make every effort to capture him alive and interrogate him. The “fish story” of Bin Laden’s assassination is an insult to the world’s intelligence.
The legend of “Caliph” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, like that of Osama Bin Laden, is highly suspicious. Like Bin Laden, Baghdadi was a long-term guest of the American military – at a US base in Iraq rather than US bases in America. And as in the case of Bin Laden, the US military has emitted transparently false statements aimed at hiding or minimizing its relationship with Baghdadi, its supposed worst enemy.
The US says it held Baghdadi in the “terrorist training wing” of Camp Bucca for less than one year. But both American and Iraqi witnesses say it was more than five years. In any case, it would appear that the self-styled caliph was groomed for his future role while in US custody.
After his release, Baghdadi and his ISIL commanders received further training, as well as weapons and funds, at a secret CIA base in Jordan. The US worked through its regional proxies to create a formidable ISIL army aimed at overthrowing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. It seems likely that the US and its proxies also provided the intelligence that allowed ISIL to overrun the Iraqi army – which the US had intentionally disarmed – and seize oil-rich parts of Iraq.
And yet the American people are still being told that Baghdadi is their worst enemy. Like the tale of the “anti-US terrorist mastermind” Bin Laden, the story of the latest bogeyman Baghdadi is a transparently absurd legend.
If the American people ever discover how badly they have been lied to, and for what purposes their Constitution has been shredded and their economy bankrupted, they are going to be exceedingly irate.
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.
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.
Australian newscast from 1984 discussing the ‘Aboriginal problem’. In this instance, Lang Hancock offers sterilisation as a solution to ‘the problem’.
The news and interview footage in this clip is from a relatively recent time in Australian history. The openness with which sterilisation is proposed as a solution to the Aboriginal problem — especially the half-castes who are not considered legitimate Aborigines — frames the way in which the Australian public felt justified in having such discussions publicly. Such opinions are very recent, and still surface in race discussions on the ongoing distinction between ‘true Aborigines’ and ‘hybrid’ Aborigines.
This clip shows footage of three men being interviewed and expressing extreme racist views about Indigenous Australians. The interviewees are mining magnate ‘Lang’ Hancock, a town mayor and a spokesperson for the Queensland Graziers Association. Aboriginal activist Mick Miller, the writer and narrator of the film from which this clip has been taken, speaks towards the end of the clip over footage of the Comalco Bauxite mine at Weipa in Queensland. Miller reports that multinational companies have not paid royalties nor compensated Indigenous people for mining on their land.
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]
Almost immediately after the proxy war erupted, ISIS-tier footage of the torture and murder of Russians in Ukrainian custody emerged.
On July 6th, the New York Times published an astonishing investigation: In Ukraine, Killings of Surrendering Russians Divide an American-Led Unit. The article documents in grim detail how Chosen Company, an international volunteer battalion for Kiev, routinely executes Russian prisoners of war. It is the very first mainstream admission that this practice – a brazen breach of the Geneva Conventions, and a grave war crime – is widespread among Ukraine’s fighters, both foreign and homegrown. … continue
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