Tag: Nagasaki

THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA, Part 3

Posted on by kathiemm
“September 11, 1973″ by Carlos Latuff; depicts the U.S.-backed attack on democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.”

by Stefan Schindler

Disturbing facts from American history, continued:

11 – The first 9/11 occurred on September 11th, 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.

When will they ever learn?

Posted on by kathiemm
Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, at his headquarters in the European theater of operations. He wears the five-star cluster of the newly-created rank of General of the Army. In the public domain.

Kathie Malley-Morrison

As the anniversaries of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945) snuck by with little acknowledgment and limited chagrin in the US, it troubled me that those world-shattering, paradigm-changing events are, for young people growing up in this country today, basically ancient history.  Doubly unfortunately, the shared “history” is woefully incomplete, the full story never told. Little learned.

The “history” I was taught in public school, which I still hear echoed today, was that the dropping of those atomic bombs was a necessary, essential, moral way to keep those aggressive, warmongering Japanese from increasing their deadly toll on innocent American lives.

Nobody ever told me that Dwight D. Eisenhower, General of the U.S. Army and Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II, and later a highly-respected President of the United States, opposed dropping those bombs.

In his own words:

“Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act…

“During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of ‘face’. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude…”

Eisenhower’s antipathy regarding the use of nuclear weaponry did not diminish after those blood-thirsty, saber-rattling, cock-crowing events of August 1945 .  At the Republican National Convention of August 23, 1956, he warned his party, his country, and the world that:

“We are in the era of the thermonuclear bomb that can obliterate cities and can be delivered across continents. With such weapons, war has become, not just tragic, but preposterous.”

The hour is late; can’t we find a way to address the preposterousness of nuclear arms before tragedy completes envelops the planet and obliterates a large portion of living things? And while we are at it, how about doing something about obliterating lives with drones?

 

The U.S. government’s assault on children

Posted on by kathiemm

We’ve heard considerable rhetoric recently about the vileness of subjecting children to poison gas–and vile it is. So are other means by which children are maimed and murdered, and the government of the United States is complicit in vile acts against the world’s children.

For example, being burned to death–as happened to thousands of children in the World War II firebombing of cities in Japan and Germany–is ghastly, whether it kills or scars for life.

Being born with birth defects related to Agent Orange, or being killed or maimed by unexploded ordinance (a continuing scourge for children in Vietnam) is a legacy of U.S. government intervention.

An article in the Independent reports, “Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study.”

According to a 2012 Children’s Defense Fund report [opens as pdf], “In 2008, 2,947 children and teens died from guns in the United States and 2,793 died in 2009 for a total of 5,740—one child or teen every three hours, eight every day, 55 every week for two years.” Any government that does not fight the gun lobby is complicit.

There is an international chemical weapons convention to which our government has alluded in trying to make its case for bombing Syria.

There is also a convention that prohibits the use of anti-personnel mines, which the U.S. has failed to ratify. How does a government that has authorized widespread “collateral damage” have the moral authority to unilaterally punish other violators of international conventions?

Let us hope and pray that the current administration listens to the millions of American voices calling for a nonviolent alternative to raining terror on children and other innocent civilians in yet another Middle Eastern country.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology