Henry Kissinger – Engaging Peace

Newly recognized clinical syndrome: American Dementia

Posted on May 5, 2017 by kathiemm

by Kathie MM

“Dementia is progressive loss of cognitive function, marked by memory problems and confused thinking.” Although Psychology Today claims that the “most common form of dementia is Alzheimer’s Disease, a fatal condition that affects more than 5 million Americans,” there are much more serious and more widespread forms of memory disorder with extremely high mortality rates.

I am referring here to the disease that John Dower labels “Memory Loss in the Garden of Violence: How Americans Remember (and Forget) Their Wars.” Dower attributes selective memory loss regarding the country’s role in deadly wars to “victim consciousness.”

To illustrate, he says: “Certain traumatic historical moments such as ‘the Alamo’ and ‘Pearl Harbor’ have become code words…for reinforcing the remembrance of American victimization at the hands of nefarious antagonists. Thomas Jefferson and his peers actually established the baseline for this in the nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence, which enshrines recollection of ‘the merciless Indian Savages’ — a self-righteous demonization that turned out to be boilerplate for a succession of later perceived enemies. ‘September 11^th’ has taken its place in this deep-seated invocation of violated innocence.”

In his powerful essay, Dower provides appalling evidence of U.S. “terror bombing” around the world. Regarding the Korean War, he quotes General Curtis LeMay, who acknowledges, “We burned down just about every city in North and South Korea both… We killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes…”

As for the infamous war in Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), Dower comments, “’targeting’ everything that moved’ was virtually a mantra among U.S. fighting forces, a kind of password that legitimized indiscriminate slaughter.”

Dower also diagnoses the current symptoms of saber-rattling between the U.S. and North Korea, suggesting, “To Americans and much of the rest of the world, Kim Jong-un seems irrational, to say the least. Yet in rattling his miniscule nuclear quiver, he is really joining the long-established game of ‘nuclear deterrence,’ and practicing what is known among American strategists as the ‘madman theory’…. most famously associated with Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger during the Vietnam War, but in fact. .. more or less imbedded in U.S. nuclear game plans.”

My prescription for treatment: Let’s work on developing an antidote to the dementia enshrouding the country’s military aggression and spreading symptoms of victimization and self-justifying heroism regarding its aggression—from the genocide of Native Americans in yesteryear to today’s bloody flag waving.

THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA, Part 3

Posted on December 5, 2016December 3, 2016 by kathiemm

by Stefan Schindler

Disturbing facts from American history, continued:

11 – The first 9/11 occurred on September 11^th, 1973, when Nixon and Kissinger overthrew the elected government in Chile, the longest running democracy in South America, beginning’s America’s subsequent support of the 16-year Pinochet dictatorship and slaughter of liberal activists.

12 – The Carter administration launched a terror campaign against the newly elected social democratic government of Afghanistan in 1979, leading to the Russian counter-intervention in 1980, which led to Reagan’s eight-year creation, arming and financing of Al Queda to fight “the godless communists” occupying Afghan territory and preventing the installation of American pipelines for the transport of Iraqi oil.

13 – In the first five years of his administration, Ronald Reagan transformed America from the largest creditor nation in the world to the largest debtor nation in the world.

14 – Ronald Reagan conducted an eight-year terror campaign against the social democratic government of Nicaragua, which had finally overthrown 40 years of American supported dictatorship.

15 – The Bush-Cheney wars against Iraq and Afghanistan were an updated repeat of the lies that led to America’s Indochina Holocaust (euphemistically called The Vietnam War to obliterate memory of U.S. devastation of Laos and Cambodia).

16 – The Bush-Cheney Administration’s continuation of Reagan’s attempt to unravel Roosevelt’s New Deal for the American people, with its regulatory safeguards, led directly to the all too predictable economic meltdown of 2008: the largest stock market crash since 1929, from which millions of Americans, and many people around the globe, are still suffering.

17 – The single greatest factor leading to the outbreak of World War Two was the U.S. stock market crash of 1929. That crash had ripple effects around the globe, including the implosion of Germany’s already impoverished economy. In desperation, the German people elected a charismatic lunatic named Hitler.

18 – America’s neutrality during the so-called Spanish Civil War (actually a coup d’état) from1936 to1939 – the only place in Europe where ordinary citizens were actively fighting the rise of fascism – led to the overthrow of Spanish democracy by a cabal of Hitler-supported bankers, bishops and generals, and persuaded Hitler that he could continue Nazi expansion into other parts of Europe, including Czechoslovakia and Poland.

19 – American banks and corporations (including Ford and General Motors) helped Hitler build his war machine, and sanctioned Hitler’s persecution of German socialists (hoping that Hitler would invade Russia and put an end to the Soviet experiment in communism).

20 – Japan was begging to surrender in late 1945, asking only that their emperor, Hirohito, be left in place as the nation’s nominal leader. Truman refused to accept Japanese surrender because of that single condition. No American troop invasion of Japan was necessary to end the war. Truman dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki primarily as a warning to the Soviets. After Japan’s surrender, Hirohito was allowed to maintain his nominal political title.

21 – During World War Two, the American air force was ordered not to bomb Nazi war-making factories owned by Ford and General Motors. After the war, the CEOs of Ford and General Motors were awarded millions of taxpayer dollars in compensation for “collateral damage,” instead of being tried and convicted for treason.

Co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a recipient of The Boston Baha’i Peace Award, and a Trustee of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey Foundation, Dr. Schindler received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College, worked one summer in a nature preserve, lived in a Zen temple for a year, did the pilot’s voice in a claymation video of St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, acted in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and performed as a musical poet in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City. He also wrote The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Awards for Howard Zinn and John Lennon. He is now semi-retired and living in Salem, Massachusetts.

Why the U.S. doesn’t prosecute its war criminals

Posted on October 13, 2016 by kathiemm

Why doesn’t the U.S. prosecute its war criminals? This has been on my mind for a long time, and I’m reminded of it anew after seeing Donald Trump’s threat to prosecute/jail Hillary Clinton should he become president, not to mention the chants of “Lock her up” at Trump rallies.

One bulwark against fascism in the U.S. has been our cultural adherence to “insure domestic tranquility” in the preamble to the Constitution. That adherence has in turn become part of our political culture. In particular, elections in the U.S. are ways to change leaders and policies without violence; unlike in other countries the winners in the U.S. are not expected to threaten to jail or execute the losers. Or prosecute them by bypassing the presumption of innocence. Absent these protections, history shows that not only leaders but also their followers leap to civic violence when elections do not turn out as they like.

It may be true that we carry the political custom of insuring domestic tranquility too far. I’d certainly like to see the U.S. join the International Court of Justice. I’d like to see Henry Kissinger, for example, brought before it. But as a matter of justice, not the result of an election.

So of all the things I don’t like about Trump’s candidacy, the one that’s most frightening is that a great deal of his constituency seems to believe that the fascism embodied in his statements to jail his opponent is OK. I hope that this doesn’t turn out to be an eerie replay of the destruction of the Weimar Republic. I don’t usually panic by claims that, say, electing a warmongering president will destroy the country; the country seems to get through these things, at least domestically. But now I worry that even if Trump fails, what will those fellow citizens who agree with him do? And what should reasonable citizens do to discourage the dangerous extremism of Trump and his excitable followers, who after all are our neighbors?

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Ed Agro, an occasional contributor to Engaging Peace, is administrator of the online war tax resisters online forum wtr-s. The above essay is a slightly edited version of the one that recently appeared in that forum.