On Targeting Civilians

Targeting civilians is always a war crime or crime against humanity. The leeway for incidental civilian deaths

The Boston Marathon attack, in addition to being an ordinary crime, was a war crime. It is fair to conclude now that the attackers were motivated by religion and anti-imperialist sentiments. One also seemed to have a personal grudge against America because as a non-citizen he was excluded from the national level of boxing competition, and then was further injured when he had his application for citizenship denied. Had he been made a citizen he would doubtless have gone back to boxing and done only injury to other volunteers for that brutal and uncivilized sport.

We cannot say the same for policies made and conducted by powerful politicians, including our own.

President Barack Obama seems to think that if he minimizes his war crimes, crimes against humanity, and attacks on human rights, he is okay. He is just driving a little over the speed limit because his passengers - capitalists and the corporate security state - want him to get to a preconceived goal a little bit faster than the rules allow for.

So if some women and children get blasted to pieces by a drone or a helicopter gunship or trigger-happy U.S. gunmen on patrol somewhere, Barack figures he has his ass covered. I can hear him at the trial: "I never gave orders to purposefully kill civilians."

I imagine his predecessor Franklin D. Roosevelt would have said the same thing, had anyone been powerful enough to put him on trial. Before World War II, starting with the Japanese invasion of China, President Roosevelt inveighed against any bombing of urban areas. It always involved civilian casualties, and it was a war crime, he pointed out. At least it was a war crime when Japan or Germany or Italy did it. When our ally, the British Empire did it, Roosevelt grew mute. Then he authorized the firebombing of Japanese cities, which was on a far larger scale than had ever been done up until that point. In hypocrisy, at least, the U.S. is Number One.

Or Barack could point to Harry Truman. His team of Democratic Party experts recommended dropping the first two atomic bombs on Japanese cities, after having rejected proposals for demonstration bombings that would have caused minimal casualties, or the destruction of only military targets or personnel. You can almost hear Harry's defense lawyer, "But he did not order the Air Force to bomb civilians. There were some military personnel at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We regret the civilian casualties."

It would take an encyclopedia to cover all of the war crimes and crimes against humanity since the inception of the United States of America.

So don't be surprised in foreigners take American indignation at American civilian casualties with a grain of salt.

Let's get rid of the Democratic and Republican Parties. Let's try George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and other top U.S. decision makers for the War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity they have committed.

Let's put an end to U.S. imperialism. Let's remove all U.S. troops from foreign territories.

Only then can there really be Liberty and Justice for All.

See also: war crimes

Pearl Harbor, China, and The Cable

When I was a child (I was born in 1955) the Japanese attack on U.S. military facilities at Pearl Harbor loomed large in my limited view of history. In addition to being of international historic importance, it was of great personal interest to my family.

My father was already in the Marine Corps on December 7, 1941. He had enlisted in Chicago in 1940 and was serving state side at the 2nd Marine Division headquarters. He would later serve in the Signal Corps at Guadalcanal and other Pacific Island battles, where he contracted both malaria and amoebic dysentery. Recovered he met my mother at Pearl Harbor. She had escaped tenant farming by first working in a factory manufacturing military uniforms and then joining the Women Marines. They did not get married until after Mother left the Corps at the end of he war and my father was stationed in California.

Of course I loved the Marine Corps when I was five years old. My father was a Captain, which seemed a grand thing. He had been stationed in Japan when I was younger and had made his own peace with the Japanese. We had a few Japanese art objects in the house, and my prized possessions were the postcards he had sent from Japan. 1960 was a slow year for the Marine Corps. My father had no college education, he did not qualify to move up in the ranks, so they forced him to retire.

How dare the Japanese attack us at Pearl Harbor? Well we showed them, didn't we? That was my childish attitude. To the extent that anyone in America cares about World War II anymore, that is the common attitude. Yet in exploring the history leading up to the Battle of Pearl Harbor, I found that in fact, it's complicated.

The Hawaiian islands had been a bone of contention among the Great Powers since not long after they were discovered by a British Empire naval officer. When the United States finally overthrew the sovereign, native-led government of Hawaii in a complex series of events in the 1890's, it violated a set of treaties solemnly sworn with other great powers, including Japan. The Japanese had been thrown on the world stage by U.S. military aggression in the 1850's, and had quickly emerged as a Pacific, if not global power.

The largest ethnic group in Hawaii when the U.S. grabbed it were the Japanese, with Chinese second, Hawaiian natives third, and American-Hawaiians a distant fourth. By treaty [Treaty of Amity and Commerce of 1871 between the Kingdom of Hawaii and Japan] right the Japanese (or France, Germany, or Great Britain) could have fought to throw out the Americans and restore the native Hawaiian government. The Japanese did send one of their modern military vessels there in the hope that the U.S. would honor its treaty obligations. When the U.S. made it clear Japan would have to fight a war to keep Hawaii free, the Japanese backed off. As a result a relatively large number of ethnic Japanese became U.S. subjects. Because of race laws, they were not allowed to travel to California or elsewhere in the U.S. Which is a crime against humanity and another pretext for just war.

U.S.-Japanese relations were not always bad. Both nations joined together to destroy Chinese independence during the Boxer Rebellion. The U.S. allowed Japan to grab Korea in return for not helping the Philippines in their fight for independence against U.S. aggression.

By the 1930s the rivalry was outpacing occasional attempts at friendship. The Japanese realized that after America, France and the British Empire finished digesting China they would come at Japan. They decided if China was to be ruled by warlords and puppet governments, they might as well be Japanese-owned warlords and puppet governments. The U.S. devised a plan for the conquest of China, Korea and Japan called War Plan Orange. The Japanese made their own plans. They studied the successful aggressions of the United States and the British Empire with keen, inquiring minds.

In 1932 the U.S. Navy held war games off Hawaii, simulating a Japanese attack. In the Japanese role "an American aircraft carrier, slipping past picket destroyers northeast of Oahu, attacked Pearl Harbor in a dawn raid and 'sank' the warships anchored there." [William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream, page 81]. The Japanese learned the lesson, the U.S. Navy forgot it.

By 1940 the U.S. and other colonial European powers were crippling the Japanese economy with an embargo. Both the U.S. (or at least President Roosevelt) and Japan wanted a triumphant peace and threatened war if they did not get their way.

In 1941 the U.S. was at war with Japan. The fighting took place in China, where U.S. airmen volunteered to fly in an all-American air force nominally under the control of Chiang Kai-shek, whose coalition of war lords was kept loyal with U.S. aid.

Cordell Hull, who was Secretary of State to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, throughout the year warned that State Department sources in Japan confirmed an attack on Pearl Harbor was planned if peace talks failed. Roosevelt and Hull were as determined on war as were the war faction in the Japanese government.

In what can only be described as The Cable, the War Department (now the Department of Defense) wrote to Douglas MacArthur, war lord of the Philippines: "NEGOTIATIONS WITH THE JAPANESE APPEAR TO BE TERMINATED TO ALL PRACTICAL PURPOSES ... THE UNITED STATES DESIRES THAT JAPAN COMMIT THE FIRST OVERT ACT PERIOD THIS POLICY SHOULD NOT, REPEAT NOT, BE CONSTRUED AS RESTRICTING YOU TO A COURSE OF ACTION THAT MIGHT JEOPADIZE YOUR DEFENSE PERIOD"

A reasonable interpretation of The Cable, given the situation, was that MacArthur was being encouraged to attack the Japanese Navy and possibly even its air bases in Formosa (now called Taiwan). In other words, no declaration of war needed if the U.S. started the fighting. MacArthur decided that since Roosevelt and Hull were his political enemies, and he hoped to become President of the United States, this might be a trap and he would wait for a direct order to attack.

He also thought the Japanese were military incompetents who he could easily beat once the war began. He had already been reinforced by the 4th Marines who had retreated from Shanghai. A earlier in December a huge invasion fleet had set out on its way across the Pacific to reinforce MacArthur and join the attack force from Pearl Harbor. With that force the conquest of Formosa, China and even Japan would have been much easier, but the fleet turned back mid-ocean. Roosevelt decided to use it against the German Navy first.

And so brave little Japan took on an industrial giant ten times her size. From a purely military perspective the attack on Pearl Harbor was brilliant. It should also be noted that the attack was purely military, with no bombing of civilian areas. To claim that it was a war crime because a glitch prevented the U.S. from being officially informed in advance would make all kinds of U.S. military attacks on other nations into war crimes, because we have bothered to declare war in only a few instances.

Were the Japanese militarists and capitalists a nasty lot? Certainly, they learned from the best, our American militarists and capitalists. Still, given the desire of U.S. capitalists to take over Asia, I don't see any real choice for the Japanese. They were slated to become part of the U.S. empire, and would have capitulated earlier if they had not adopted a strong warlike stance.

In the end, the blood of the Japanese was spilled so that the Chinese could be free of U.S. and British dominion. The Japanese committed war crimes in China, but they were mainly at the expense of Chiang Kai-shek. When World War II ended it was the Communist regime that finally liberated China from foreign interference. U.S. aid to Chiang just poured into a black hole of corruption, like U.S. aid to Afghanistan today.

It was foreseen. In arguing that Japan should be allowed to "restore order" in China, the Japanese had invoked the threat of a Communist takeover if they failed.

Pearl Harbor galvanized the American people, but only because they had not been paying attention and FDR had no interest in helping them to understand what had happened. Did FDR know about the attack on Pearl Harbor in advance? His own Secretary of State said he did. What FDR did not know was how successful the attack would be.

Cordell Hull's World

I just finished my notes on the Memoirs of Cordell Hull. Thirty-one pages of notes, and that is with a narrow focus, the main issue being Japanese-American relations before World War II. The Memoirs themselves are in two volumes, 1742 pages. This is a guy who wrote tariff bills for Congress, and the prose of his memoirs is every bit as good. If you own an edition of the Memoirs, you own a first edition.

Despite being a Political Science major in college, I don't believe I took note of Cordell Hull until much later. Most famously, Hull was Franklin D. Roosevelt's Secretary of State, and though he left office before President-for-life Roosevelt died, he is America's longest-serving person to hold the office now occupied by Hillary Clinton.

If we are to believe Cordell Hull, he repeatedly warned Roosevelt and the War Department that the Japanese would attack Pearl Harbor. Long before that, when he was a young lad back in Congress he was the point man for the modern Income Tax. He also was largely responsible for pushing the United States away from high tariffs on imports and towards free trade.

I got the sense that Hull was more important than most of the Presidents of his era. Like all Americans, I have been trained to think of our history in terms of Presidents. Congress may make the laws, but there are way to many members of Congress to even mention in a standard high school U.S. history text. How many biographies of congress members have you read? Typically, only those who later became Presidents.

Cordell Hull was from eastern Tennessee. He served in the Spanish American War. Recall that our ancestors, after having grabbed all the American Indian territories and the north half of Mexico, were not satisfied. They continued to worship their ancestral god, More. So they engineered a war and grabbed Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Cuba. Cordell Hull saw no action, and so had all the patriotic benefits of volunteering without seeing the gory down side of war.

In Congress, Hull volunteers that he was an anti-social nerd who focused on the budget, tax policy, and tariff schedules. He was a progressive Democrat, but he does not ever mention the racism of his Democratic Party in Dixie as a problem. Aside from his lack of mentioning of civil rights issues, Hull comes across as a racist in innumerable ways in his Memoirs.

Cordell Hull was an early backer of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Hull himself was frequently put forward by others as a potential President or Vice-Presidential candidate, so his support for was critical to Roosevelt's gaining of the Democratic Party's nomination as their candidate for President in 1932.

Hull wrote a lot about international cooperation, and received a Nobel Peace Prize for creating the United Nations (even though he describes the organization as having been created to prosecute war, not for peace). When he slathers on the details, however, he reveals himself as thoroughly nationalist, and a subscriber to the idea that only Europeans have the right to colonize and exploit weaker peoples.

The rules of nationalism for Hull were simple. If the U.S. government does it, our motives are pure and whatever it is is a good thing. For instance if we keep the people of the Philippines enslaved, then it is for their benefit. They just are not ready for democracy. When Japan granted the Philippines independence during World War II, it was a heinous self-serving duplicitous Jap crime.

When the Germans rolled their armies through the neutral nations of The Netherlands and Belgium, it was a terrible international crime. When the neutral nation of Iran asked Hull for protection from Britain and Russia during World War II, Hull told them that America's allies were Good, and needed to control Iran for the good of the world. Britain and Russia then invaded Iran and installed a puppet, later to become known as the Shah of Iran. That dictator's mansion was filled with the skeletons of his enemies when the democratic Iranian Revolution finally tossed his ass out.

Amidst the platitudes you can see that while Hitler planned to conquer the world, it was America, following the plans of Hull and Roosevelt and their team, who arranged to inherit it. Roosevelt was a militarist and imperialist strategist and who had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during World War I and who had been tutored by his war-loving uncle President Theodore Roosevelt.

Hitler was not even that much of a problem, and neither was Japan. Roosevelt and Hull used those nations to weaken our ostensible allies, the British Empire, the French Empire, and the Netherlands Empire. The U.S. could have jumped into World War II and helped kick Hitler's ass as soon as Poland was invaded, or when France was invaded, but then the British and French would have continued to rule the world.

America's economic growth spurt in the 1950's is often attributed (by leftists) to the unionization of the work force and consequent growth of the middle-class consumption economy. But it was also based on imperialism. In theory the old colonies of Europe were becoming independent, but in reality they were becoming commercial colonies of the United States as the Brits and French retreated.

Just as the Spanish and Portuguese dominated world commerce in the 1500s, the Dutch (Netherlands) dominated the world in the 1600s. The British Empire took over for the 1700s and 1800s, and took a good 50 years of the 1900s to lose the board to the United States.

Cordell Hull was a great man, but not a very good man. That is the way of most great men. He fought evil when it was German or Japanese, but embraced it when it was American or British or even French.

He was also a good liar, a prerequisite of being a good Secretary of State. Strangely, in his Memoirs he often failed to censor himself, so that he tells you what he actually did in one paragraph, and then puts a diplomatic gloss on his actions in a different paragraph. Doubtless he was lying to himself, and so did not have the perspective to realize that others would be able to tell when he was lying.

Tax the American Empire

[Note: much of this article first appeared as Post-Imperial Mendocino County at MendoDay.com]

The American economy, the economic crisis of 2008, and ongoing sluggish growth, cannot be understood without first admitting that we are in a post-imperialist era.

We cannot move the economy forward again without getting out of the double-bind we are in: paying for the trappings of imperialism, without its economic benefits.

The federal government's budget is still deeply in deficit mode, yet has not provided enough stimulus to get us up to even moderate growth. So we are not really out of the crisis that swept over us starting in 2008. Food stamps and long-term unemployment benefits have staved off starvation for most citizens, but hardly amount to a long-term solution.

The idea that the United States of America ever went through an imperialist period will surprise many of its citizens. Imperialism often implies an emperor, but in our case it mainly means being able to extract wealth from foreign nations through the exercise of military and economic power.

There was no clear beginning to U.S. imperialism. Grabbing native American Indian lands was a major way of extracting wealth from outsiders even before 1776. Most historians would say modern U.S. imperialism started with the Spanish-American War in which the U.S. grabbed Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Cuba (we later sort of gave Cuba to its local elite, although the process was not really completed until Fidel Castro came to power). Or you could go back to the Mexican-American War, in which we grabbed the northern half of Mexico.

To understand how we might revive the economy and government, we should focus on U.S. imperialism after World War II. How did we get to that happy situation? From 1929 until just before World War II the United States economy was pretty sleepy . By the late 1940s and into the 1950s the U.S. economy was bustling. Why did World War II make such a difference?

The United States has had some pretty clever leaders. Even in the 1700's many of them wished for our nation to be a Great Power like the British Empire or France. Presidents like James Polk (who grabbed California), William McKinley (Spanish-American War) and Theodore Roosevelt came to symbolize U.S. global ambitions.

It was World War I, by accident or strategy, that became the template for future U.S. success. Under President Woodrow Wilson the U.S. stayed out of the war, selling all the goods our farms and factories could produce to both sides. Then, when Russia had collapsed and Italy, Germany, France and England were exhausted, the President, under pressure from U.S. bankers, found a pretext to declare war.

It was great, World War I. Not that many American soldiers died (just 117,000), but we tipped the balance for Great Britain and France. Germany was defeated. We did not grab any territory to speak of, but we became the world's bankers while leading the world in industry.

The rematch known as World War II went even better. President Franklin Roosevelt rearmed the United States while putting the British Empire even more heavily in our debt. We let the Communists defeat the Nazis and, again, came in towards the end to claim victory and its spoils. English, French, Italian, German, Japanese and Russian factories had been largely destroyed by aerial bombardment. In contrast the U.S. had built many more factories.

As the French and British empires collapsed after the war it was U.S. factories that supplied the goods for most of the world. In the U.S., in the 1950's, most Americans who wanted one could get a job that paid well. An interstate highway system was built, suburbs were built, colleges expanded and filled. The whole imperialist deal was so profitable that even though the U.S. maintained what was by far the world's most expensive military establishment, paying for it detracted little from the economy.

The Sixties were even better, with John F. Kennedy (a Democrat) engineering the biggest tax cuts for the rich in American history. Even those Americans whose race, geographical location, or just plain laziness and incompetence had prevented them from sharing in The American Dream were soon helped by President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society social programs.

The prosperity might have gone on for centuries, but America's capitalists betrayed it. Rival gangs of capitalists pursued opportunities that turned imperialism on its head. It was profitable to keep costs for consumers high in the U.S. It became more profitable to produce the goods sold in the U.S. in other sectors of the world, certain of the "third world" nations like Mexico and Korea, then later China and Brazil. Meanwhile another gang clung to the profits of the military-industrial complex, and even added profits by whipping up a Homeland Security spending bonanza.

As a result American military, homeland security, and domestic budgets had to be skimmed from a thinning layer of middle-class taxpayers. The capitalists received tax cuts, notably special treatment for dividends and capital gains, as well as no taxes on financial transactions. Factory workers, most of them, dropped back into the proletariat, losing their middle-class incomes. Low-paid service work came to make up most of the American economy.

In classic imperialism, as say run by the British Empire from about 1700 to about 1950, the economic idea is to extract wealth from the enslaved nations. The extracted wealth is brought home, and while the rich get most of it, enough is trickled down to the middle class and proletariat to keep them happy and patriotic, or at least not rebellious. It is important to keep the cost of the military used to dominate other nations low enough so there is a net, major profit for the homeland. The Brits were very good at that. They even drafted soldiers from their subject nations and used them quite effectively. The British Empire fell because England exhausted itself fighting Germany, not because the empire itself was not profitable. At the end of World War II, for practical purposes, the Brits had mortgaged their empire to American bankers. We foreclosed.

Starting in the 1990's, and accelerating this last decade, the U.S.A. has done the opposite. You can see from our Trade Deficits that wealth has been draining from the nation for two decades. At the same time we are being bled internally by the military and homeland security industries.

Look at Afghanistan. Where's the loot? We give money to the corrupt government of Afghanistan. We give them weapons. They sell the weapons to the Taliban, who then use them to shoot at U.S. troops. We get nothing out of it. Not oil, not a market for U.S. goods, not slaves or concubines or the usual imperialist loot.

There are only two solutions. One is to tax every nation in the world that we can. That is the classic imperialist solution: give unto Obama the things that are Obama's. The plan probably would not go down very well in most countries. But they would have no choice. Look what we did to Iraq, and most nations don't have the defenses Iraq did.

Taxes should be modest and imposed gradually, so as not to shock the world economy. A 1% sales or income tax on developed allies and a 0.25% to 0.5% tax on less-developed dependents would probably work for a starter. While the rate is low, by taxing some 6 billion people, quite a bit of money would flow into the United States. It would pay for our work as the world's police, and also pay for our education, welfare, bread, and circuses.

The only other solution is to Cut the Military and Homeland Securities budget. Cut it to the size needed to defend us from Mexico and Canada. Something along the size of the New York Police Force budget.
Unfortunately we are maneuvering in is a sea of continued massive stupidity by American capitalists and both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. Don't expect those bozos to start taxing England, Korea and Pakistan, or to reduce the military budget in a meaningful way, in your lifetimes.

Expect America to continue to decline. As the empire unravels, our homeland will unravel. To keep military muscle, we will loose economic muscle. If we keep on this course, at some point, our colossus will fall.

Genesis and Genocide, Hitler and Moses

"And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones, of every city, we left none to remain." - Deuteronomy 2:34 (Holy Bible)

In Jewish and Christian mythology the first five books of the Bible are said to have been written by Moses himself. Certainly Moses is a central figure, particularly in the second book, Exodus, in which he leads the Jews out of slavery in Egypt. At the end of the fifth book, Deuteronomy, Moses is said to have died at the age of 120, in Moab, never having entered the land of the Canaanites. Joshua then led the Jewish tribes, conquering the city of Jericho and, afterwards, conquering areas west of the Jordan River and Dead Sea.

It is likely that the Jewish original conquest of what I will call Palestine was not quite as clearly genocidal as the Bible indicates. The above quote from Deuteronomy is ascribed to the period during which the tribes were wanderers, before settling in Palestine. The Jews where not alone in trying to exterminate their neighbors, they just recorded it earlier than most. Enslaving the conquered was another common option, as was killing all males and keeping women as wives and slaves. The Egyptians, Sumerians and Babylonians also boasted of their skills at war and built their grand civilizations with slaves.

Many other instances of genocide are recorded in the Bible. For instance in Samuel, Chapter 15, God himself is quoted as saying: "Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass."
At one point the Babylonians did an ethnic cleansing of Judah, leading to the Exile. Most scholars think most of the Bible was written in Babylonia to keep the Jews culturally united until they could return to Judah. [6th century BCE; see Babylonian captivity]

What makes the Hebrew record different is its pretense to being a display of God's plan for the world. If you accept the Bible as a plan, you are basically stuck with approving of genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Adolf Hitler could well be said to have been the Moses of Germany. He was born in an ethnically German area of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The most fateful decision of his life was doubtless when he decided to abandon a career as an artist to enroll in the German (rather than Austro-Hungarian Empire) army at the beginning of World War I.

Germany defeated Russia in the war and still had troops in France when it surrendered. Corporal Hitler, like many Germans, went into denial. Instead of accepting that if Germany had fought on its army would have collapsed, the myth of the "stab in the back" was created. In this version of history Communists and Jews (often the same people in Germany) were blamed for the loss of the war. There was some basis for this mistaken view. The Balfour Declaration, which may have induced some German Jews to hope for a British victory in the War. After Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated, the transitional government that negotiated the surrender of Germany was socialist (of the Marxist, internationalist sort, not of the nationalist, Nazi sort).

Germans had some genuine postwar complaints. The United States piled into the war late, tipping the military balance. A just peace was promised in return for an armistice. Instead the British, French and Americans imposed a very punitive peace that essentially destroyed Germany.

For Hitler and his admirers the Promised Land was a Germany consisting of all ethnic German majority areas. For Hitler and the more anti-Semitic National Socialists these lands would also have to be purged of foreign races, including (but not limited to) Jews and Gypsies. The more aggressive version of this doctrine included invading non-German areas, purging them, and colonizing them with Germans. Not unlike the prior colonization of the United States and British Empire.

The German nationalists wandered in their wilderness only slightly more than a decade before gaining power in Germany, or the rump of Germany that had been left by the wolves after World War I. In the late 1930's Hitler's government started taking back, or incorporated for the first time, the ethnic German areas outside the official borders. To be sure, he was happy to seize some areas that were not German, like much of Czechoslovakia. The last (perhaps) piece of German pie Hitler gobbled was western Poland (which was a part of Germany taken away by the peace treaty after World War I). The mighty British Empire, itself built over the centuries by the process of military conquest, ethnic cleansing, and genocide, declared war on Germany soon after Poland was attacked. World War II was on.

Like Moses, Hitler was not to see his promised land. Other nations were not interested in accepting the Jews he wanted expelled, so he killed them in the Holocaust, which is one of the most appalling acts of cold blooded mass murder of non-combatants in modern history.

In the end Germany was dismembered, not reunited. Hitler committed suicide rather than surrendering, echoing Masada, and the concentration camps were liberated before they completed their grizzly task. Later the capitalist West put together its three bites (British, French, and American) of Germany in order to use them as a shield against the Communist Block. Only in 1990 did East Germany reunite with West Germany to form the modern (and might I add, civilized and non-militaristic) nation of Germany.

Since World War II ethnic cleansing, and even genocide, has continued here and there around the world. Nationalism, religious prejudice, and greed are still problems. Yet a new earth has grown up too where many if not most people have a modern, civilized outlook. Civilized nations do not even have the death penalty for criminal acts. In theory no nation is supposed to engage in military aggression, though in reality the U.S. has been the worst offender in the last decade or two.

We need to keep a watch out for leaders who advocate ethnic cleansing, genocide, or war. They need to be stopped before they cause harm. We need, in particular, to respect the rights of indigenous peoples and minorities. The whole world should accept the enlightenment ideal of religious toleration and the brotherhood and sisterhood of the human race.

History books are filled with wars and genocides. This makes us forget that most people have lived in peace most of the time. Most people do not murder their neighbors. Nor do villages or cities exist in a perpetual war with each other. Even mighty nations have spent most of their times in treaty-bound peace with their rivals. We have much to build on even as we remember and criticize the horrors of the past.

Neutral Nations: 1812, 1942, and 2012

Barack Obama made a big election speech last night, one of the great post-1984 speeches of American history. He proclaimed himself a triumphant war leader, and yet someone who negotiated peace with victory in Afghanistan, in time for his presumed re-election later this year. The timing of the speech was suspect: while given on the anniversary of the assassination of Osama Bin Laden, it allowed the corporate security state news outlets to avoid coverage of the increasingly revolutionary Occupy movement's activities the same day.

Pakistan would like to be neutral nation, at peace with all nations, at war with none. But the current U.S. global paradigm does not allow for that. How much the attitude of the United States of America has changed towards the concept of international neutrality can be traced through our history and corresponds closely with our shifting from being one of the world's newest, weakest nations in 1776 to being the imperialist thugs of our current era.

In American history books the War of 1812 is cast as mainly about America's thwarted desire to be a neutral nation, with the right to trade (and profit) with all nations during a time of global warfare. Ignore, for the purposes of this essay the true cause of the war, the desire of the U.S. to conquer Canada, Florida, and Indian nations. The Napoleonic Wars between Britain and France ran from 1803 to 1815, and the United States did not want to take sides.

Naturally, both the British Empire and its allies and France and its allies wanted to win the war. American entrepreneurs wanted to profit by selling whatever they could to both sides. The British wanted the U.S. to trade exclusively with them, and the French exerted similar efforts. In the U.S. political factions favored one side or the other: the Federalists preferred the British, the Republicans the French, but neither could prevail over the common wisdom to profit from neutrality.

The difference between the rival empires was that after the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 the British really did rule the waves. Beginning in 1806 they stopped U.S. ships bound for French-controlled territories. They also began "impressing" U.S. seamen, capturing them and forcing them to work in the British Navy. If you are willing to listen to the British side, you might note that captured U.S. citizens had allegedly signed contracts with the British Navy, and had bugged out of them, and were not really U.S. citizens, except in cases of mistaken identity.

The right of neutral nations not to be caught up in more powerful nation's wars proved difficult for the United States to maintain. After trying a self-imposed embargo (refusing to export U.S. goods to any nation), probably the stupidest policy in U.S. history, and endless negotiation, the United States declared war on Britain in June, 1812. It was a controversial declaration of war, passing the House with a vote of 79 to 49, and the Senate 19 to 13.

Without being explicit about it, the U.S. was fighting side by side with the French dictator Napoleon Bonaparte. The U.S. failed to conquer Canada, and France lost the global war, so pretty clearly the U.S. lost the war. However, we did steal huge amounts of Indian Nation lands in the process, so the land speculation faction had a happy day.

Having fought alleged slights to it's neutrality, you might think the U.S. would honor the neutrality of other nations. That was true so long as it was some other nation that was having its neutrality trampled on, like Belgium during World War I. When neutral nations got in the way of U.S. war aims, however, a different story line emerged.

Cordell Hull, who was Secretary of State under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, documents this in excruciating details in his Memoirs. At the beginning of World War II the U.S. establishment planned to repeat its triumphant accomplishments of World War I: make a lot of money being a neutral nation, then join the war towards the end, on the victorious side, grab while the grabbing is good, and mask mercenary aims behind high-sounding peace and democracy rhetoric. Before the British, German, Japanese, and Russian empires could totally destroy each other, however, the Japanese made U.S. involvement in the war official on December 7, 1941.

The United States immediately ordered its Latin America puppet nations to enter the war on its side, and many did. A number of other nations were determined to be neutral, however. Cordell Hull recounts how starting in 1943 he pressured Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Argentina, Ireland and Turkey to either officially enter the war on the side of the United Nations (originally, and still really, a fighting organization of U.S./British puppets) or at least cut off crucial war materials to the enemy Axis nations.

Of course, Americans think: but was not Hitler really evil? Is it not okay to bash neutral nations when they are refusing to fight evil?

What, exactly, you might want to ask, made Hitler so evil that the rules could be broken by the U.S.? He was a racist. Oops, so were Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, their Democratic Party, and the British Empire. He conquered non-German territories, not allowing each nation of Europe to determine its own destiny. The U.S., in contrast, liberated the American Indians and bossed around Hawaii, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico through entirely peaceful means, and the British Empire was not built on the blood and bones of millions of citizens of defeated nations. Why were the Irish neutral? Are you kidding? Because as much as they would have liked to smash the British Empire, or at least kick the Brits out of Northern Ireland, actually declaring war against Britain would have just ended up with another round of genocide at British hands in Ireland.

Sure, Hitler was a bad guy. But you will notice the U.S. did not send troops to fight Hitler (or any other Catholic Four leader: Mussolini, Franco, Petain and Hitler) when war first broke out in 1939. Even after the U.S. declared war Roosevelt kept building up the U.S. economy by selling to the both our allies and, in many cases documented (and rationalized away) by Hull, to the Axis powers too! Churchill and Stalin begged the U.S. to actually send troops to fight. Twenty million Russians died defeating Hitler. Only then, when Hitler was clearly defeated in 1944, did the U.S. invade France and mop up the seniors and teenage conscripts who manned Germany's army on the eastern front.

The U.S. global empire does not like neutral nations today any more than King George or Napoleon did in their day.

Pakistan, in particular, is bashed for trying to remain neutral and at peace with its neighbors. Pakistan has plenty of problems of its own without the U.S. butting in with its political manipulations, its drones, its attacks on the army of Pakistan, and its threats. The U.S. puppet government of Afghanistan is not some shining light of the region. It is corrupt to the core. Those who doubt that billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars will be able to prop up this regime in the long run have history on their side.

President Obama plays the smiling predator game well. He's about as complex as Tony Soprano. He says the new agreement with Afghanistan will "build an equal partnership between two sovereign states." Within that equal partnership the U.S. has assigned our Afghan puppets the job of "patrolling its cities and mountains" to kill anyone who is not a U.S. puppet. "Others will ask why we don't leave immediately... our gains could be lost ... I refuse to let that happen." [Full Barack Obama Afghanistan Speech]

What gains? A higher national debt? The deeper entrenchment of the corporate security state in the U.S.A.? Gains for who? 99% of American citizens have lost a lot in this past decade, Mr. President. We lost it mostly to banks and speculators, not to the Taliban. If only you had declared war on investment banks, Mr. President, I might not be neutral. But of course they financed your 2008 election campaign, so you have directed us to look elsewhere for enemies.

Pius XII and the Cordell Hull Lacuna

It is a mystery, and a lot of secret history may hinge on it.

I came across it last night while reading The Memoirs of Cordell Hull. Or rather, I did not come across it, because it is a lacuna, or gap in the record.

Cordell Hull was one of the most important figures in American history, though he is now largely forgotten. The highest office he obtained was Secretary of State, under Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR). But why was he appointed to that high office? He is the man who brought us the income tax, back when he was a Democratic representative from Tennessee. You would think at least the Tea Party would want to know about the guy. He also brought us Free Trade, or at least a major step in that direction. As Secretary of State he was largely responsible for an unnecessary war with Japan, while evading as long as possible doing anything about Adolf Hitler.
I am reading his Memoirs as my last major research task before drafting my U.S. War Against Asia. His Memoirs are vast: two volumes, 1800 pages of fine print. Only one printing was made [MacMillan, New York, 1948], with most copies doubtless bought by libraries. So far I am only to page 718, in the opening days of what later would be called World War II.

I mention the size of the book because it emphasizes the gap. Hull loved to document and explain his actions in glorious detail.

On page 713 Hull begins recounts his initiative to get Pope Pius XII involved in a peace process, starting in July 1939, well before Germany invaded Poland (regaining the territory lost in the peace settlement after World War I). This account goes on to page 716, corresponding to March 1941. While interesting of itself for the light it throws on U.S. and Vatican war aims, it flashed in my mind that I thought Vatican Secretary of State Eugene Pacelli, before he became Pope Pius XII, had relations with the FDR regime .

I pulled out my copy of Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII by John Cornwell, and sure enough, Cardinal Pacelli had visited the United States from October 1936 until November [see pages 176-178]. He met with FDR on November 6, just after FDR had won a second term. They had made a deal, possibly set up and executed by Francis Spellman, then a bishop but later known as Cardinal Spellman. The Roman Catholic Church silenced Father Charles Coughlin, an influential radio-based critic of FDR. Pacelli, in return, received a promise that FDR would work to restore direct relations between the U.S. Government and the Vatican, which had made a treaty with Mussolini in 1929 (see Lateran Treaty) to become a sovereign state as well as the center of a global religion business.

The context for this is important and mostly forgotten. There were two core constituencies of the Democratic Party. There was the southern, racist, white, mostly conservative and Protestant southern wing. In the northern and western states, normally majoirty Republican, the Democratic Party was mainly urban, working class, and Roman Catholic. Holding that coalition together from the Civil War until the 1970s was a great political feat. FDR needed the Roman Catholic Church to stay in power. But the southern democrats did not like that very Church. At the same time, the Depression and popularity of the New Deal (or at least the blaming of Herbert Hoover) brought many former Republicans into the Democratic Party.

So why the lacuna? The Vatican Secretary of State visits America, makes some deals, even has a documented meeting with President Roosevelt. Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, who in his own words ran most American foreign policy with only moderate direction from the President, has nothing to say about it?

You can call it speculation, but I call it analysis. Pacelli had been working on a long-term plan for Roman Catholic domination of the globe, starting with Europe. Mussolini was cooperating in Italy, but Adolf Hitler, a Catholic, had been chosen by Pacelli to lead God's work, which included converting or exterminating atheists, socialists, communists, and even democrats, republicans, protestants, and of course Muslims, Jews, and other religious sects. Roosevelt had a different agenda: American imperialism, on the model of the British Empire, with democracy in the home company serving as a cover for a global dictatorship. Both Roosevelt and the Pope (as well as Hitler and Stalin) knew the biggest global prize was the British Empire. The Popes wanted it brought back under their religious sovereignty, but that would be second step, after Hitler defeated Russia. FDR wanted it to collapse just enough to allow the U.S. to take it over.

The Popes hoped important men in the U.S., even if not religious themselves, would eventually make the U.S. a Catholics-only nation. In the meantime, they did not want the U.S. economy used to build up the armies of anti-fascist governments and groups in Europe. In 1936 the issue was Spain, where the Pope's pet General (Francisco) Franco had launched a civil war, murdering everyone who disagreed with him, including Roman Catholics who supported the democratically elected government. Probably Pacelli and FDR agreed the U.S. would not arm the elected Republican government of Spain, thus ensuring Franco's eventual victory.

What Pacelli wanted long term was for Hitler, when his armies were ready, to have the freedom to attack Russia (aka the USSR) and destroy Communism and Atheism with one blow. But it's a complex world. While Hitler did eventually attack Russia, and engulfed that region in an Atheist Holocaust, the Pope and Cardinal Spellman were not able to convert Roosevelt to Catholicism. With the defeat of the fascists Catholicism suffered a major setback. The Popes had to spend 30 years trying to convince people that they had never even liked Hitler, Petain, Mussolini and Franco. America did inherit the British empire, got the French empire thrown in as well, occupied Japan, and would have gotten China for good measure if it had not been for the Chinese Communist Party.

The negotiations with Pacelli in 1936 probably continued after he became Pope Pius XII; certainly Spellman retained the ear of both FDR and the pope. The peace negotiations of 1940 went nowhere because there were several very different versions of peace involved. Hitler wanted peace if he could keep Poland and prepare for further advances to the east, in line with the papal plan. Britain and France wanted peace if they got to keep their empires and Germany had to give Poland back. America wanted peace because it was good politics, but we know FDR was hoping the European powers would do a World War I repeat: draining each other so that the United States of America would become the new global imperialist power.

Kenya Invades Somalia: World War III?

On Saturday, October 15, 2011, Kenya invaded Somalia. Earlier in the week President Barack Obama announced he was sending U.S. combat troops to Uganda [See Obama Sends U.S. Gunmen to Uganda]. Uganda and Burundi already have troops occupying part of Somalia. Meanwhile the U.S. occupation army has not quite left Iraq. The U.S. is now in an undeclared war with Pakistan [as I predicted in U.S. Close to War with Pakistan on April 23, 2011] and has operations in Oman and other nations. Iran, too, is on U.S. target lists.

Note that the United Nations (U.N.) is not going to protect Somalia. The U.N. does not exist to protect weak nations from invasions by stronger ones. The U.N. exists mainly to further the agendas of the Great Powers, and right now the only powers of any global importance are the U.S., Europe, and China. None of them care for the current de facto government of Somalia, the militia/political party Al Shabaab. Surprisingly the Kenya military did not announce it was "invited in" by the "provisional government" of Somalia, a hand-picked group of U.S. puppets backed by hundreds of genuine supporters and those Ugandan troops already mentioned.

Maybe the U.S. forgot to order President Sharif Sheikh Ahmed to invite in Kenya as an ally in the civil war. Don't forget the formidable Ethiopian army invaded Somalia in 2006, financed by the U.S., with the same purpose, with the brilliant result of destroying the moderate Islamic de facto government, leading to the rise of Al Shabaab as the dominant popular government. [Sharif Ahmed, now a U.S. puppet, was a leader of the regime destroyed by Ethiopia, the Islamic Courts Union.]

Sure, there are a lot of moving parts to keep track of, but this is really beginning to look like World War III, with the United States playing the role Britain played in World War II: an imperialist power about to be bankrupted.

Neither World War I nor World War II started on a single day. Both had their preludes and aftermaths. A smart and strong U.S. President could defuse the situation by withdrawing from Afghanistan, apologizing to Iran, Pakistan, and Oman, recognizing Al Shabaab, and recognizing the state of Palestine and the right of Palestinians to have their private property returned to them. Obama can't do that; he has become a subservient tool of the U.S. corporate security state, and was certainly vetted for that role before being allowed to become the Democratic Party frontrunner in 2008.

A single incident, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, is said to have started World War I. More important than the spark were the stacks of powder kegs all around: the rivalries of the imperialist, industrialist powers, most notably between the British capitalists and their German cousins.

World War II is more instructive. It is generally marked as starting when German armies attacked Poland on September 1, 1939, or when Great Britain declared war on Germany the next day, escalating a regional conflict into a global war. But in East Asia the anti-imperialist war of Japan and its allies against the European colonialists had long been underway, and would last until the United States withdrew, defeated, from Vietnam in 1975. In Europe World War II probably became inevitable when Britain, France, and the United States refused to support the democratically elected government of Spain in its civil war with General Franco (with support from his fellow Catholics Pope Pius XI, Adolf Hitler, and Benito Mussolini), leading to Franco's victory in March 1939.

Al Qaeda is not a great industrial power that can have its factories bombed into impotence, as happened to Germany, Italy and Japan in World War II. The strategy of Al Qaeda has always been based on Osama Bin Laden's analysis of the fall of the Soviet Union. It was caused by a lopsided militaristic economy, aggravated by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Al Qaeda's goal has always been to cause a similar collapse of the United States economy by irritating the U.S. into asymmetrical expenditures. It has largely succeeded. At this point the only way Al Qaeda can fail is if the U.S. severely cuts back its military and homeland security expenditures and starts taking care of its own people. Instead our leaders continue to fall into the Al Qaeda trap.

Al Qaeda, however, will not be the ultimate winner in this global contest. Al Qaeda has proven it knows how to fight, but not how to govern. When Germany and Britain fought for world dominance in World War II, it was the U.S. that inherited the earth. Who will dominate the economy and culture of the next century is not easy to predict, although the easy bets are on India and China. Hopefully no nation will be stupid enough, after the lessons of the 20th century, to try to become the global superpower. That is just a recipe for eventual bankruptcy.

The Soviet Union invaded Poland on September 17, 1939, only two weeks after the German invasion (in fairness, Poland did not exist before the end of World War I, so both Germany and the U.S.S.R. claimed to be reclaiming lost territory). Yet the British Empire did not declare war on the U.S.S.R. Germany was seen as more of a threat to the British Empire, short run. Britain (and its ally France) was in no position to fight both Stalin and Hitler at the same time. So they chose to fight Hitler. Even that kind of pragmatisim did not save the British Empire (or the French, or Dutch empires) in the long run. When the French, after the briefest face-saving hint of battle, were brought over to the German side (by Marshal Petain, another Roman Catholic fascist), that should have meant global dominance for Germany. That, in turn, would have required more patience than Hitler had. The Catholic armies of Europe, instead of finishing off the British, attacked the athiest U.S.S.R., cheered on by the Pope. Everyone forgets that some 30 million athiests died before Hitler's Catholic hords were defeated.

If the United Nations were about peace, it would sanction Kenya and, if necessary, send in troops to expel the Kenyans from Somalia. Watch it do nothing, just as its predecessor, the League of Nations, consistently did nothing to prevent World War II. Again, there was a reason: Woodrow Wilson designed the League of Nations to be a racist, imperialist institution, and it stuck to that design.

Forget Pearl Harbor

Tomorrow, December 7, 2010, Americans are supposed to remember the Battle of Pearl Harbor. The following day, December 8, 1941, the United States Congress declared war on Japan, thus officially entering what came to be called World War II.

We are supposed to remember it was what Franklin Delano Roosevelt called a "Day of Infamy" because the Japanese military attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, without having declared war first. Actually, the Japanese had declared war first, and if they had declared war the previous day, or the previous week, it would not have mattered. The American Navy was looking for an attack on Hawaii from the southwest. The Japanese attack was a surprise because it came from the northwest. The idiot in command of Hawaii had not bothered to send out submarines, surface ships, or even scout planes to warn of an attack from the northwest. Look at a map of the Pacific, look at the relative positions of Japan and Hawaii, and think about how stupid this guy [Husband Edward Kimmel] was.

There are larger issues involved in the Asian-American war that we should remember. They are far more important to remember than the specifics of one particular battle. They address the question: what causes wars? Another larger issue is, if the Japanese attack without declaring war was so bad, why has the U.S. fought so many undeclared wars?

The Japanese attacked the U.S. armada at Pearl Harbor because the two nations were already at war. In addition, President Roosevelt had previously sent orders to General MacArthur in the U.S. slave colony of the Philippines giving him further permission to attack the Japanese, without waiting for Congress to declare war. MacArthur was a fine general, but he wanted more planes and ships at his disposal before making his attack. In addition to the invasion fleet at Pearl Harbor, the U.S. had a huge fleet sailing for the Philippines on December 7, and an even larger fleet under construction. The U.S. in 1940 had ten times the industrial capacity of Japan, and Roosevelt was hell bent on conquering the world with it, which he did. You don't conquer the world by accident.

Japan and the U.S. were already fighting a proxy war in China. The Japanese intervention in China, I believe, was wrong, but Japan was not doing anything the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the Netherlands had not done in China or East Asia. If Japan was wrong, they were all wrong. And the Japanese argument for intervention, while self-serving, was really quite strong. China had been misgoverned for over a century. Japan had, everyone admitted, largely caught up with the White racist powers because she was well-governed (and was, in fact, about as much of a Democracy as any of the other great powers). Japan's leadership sought to bring good governance to China, but instead their crazed military had committed war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The U.S.A. was also deeply involved in using military force, and crimes against humanity, to gain control of China. While Chiang Kai-shek had been a courageous fighter for the independence of China in his youth, by 1940 he and his Kuomintang Party were corrupt puppets of the United States, with little or no actual support from the Chinese people. Chiang was sustained by American money and American armaments. He always had an excuse for not holding elections and for backing up his war-lord partners in crime. In the summer of 1941, long before Pearl Harbor, Claire Chennault began leading "volunteer" American pilots, flying American-made fighters, in attacks on the Japanese and their Chinese allies. This force, the Flying Tigers, was formally incorporated into the U.S. Air Force in 1942. That is war, if by deception.

The Japanese declaration of war accurately describes the reasons for its campaign to liberate East Asia from the colonial powers, including the United States:

Although there has been reestablished the National Government of China, with which Japan had effected neighborly intercourse and cooperation, the regime which has survived in Chungking, relying upon American and British protection, still continues its fratricidal opposition. Eager for the realization of their inordinate ambition to dominate the Orient, both America and Britain, giving support to the Chungking regime, have aggravated the disturbances in East Asia. Moreover these two Powers, inducing other countries to follow suit, increased military preparations on all sides of Our Empire to challenge Us. They have obstructed by every means Our peaceful commerce and finally resorted to a direct severance of economic relations, menacing gravely the existence of Our Empire. Patiently have We waited and long have We endured, in the hope that Our government might retrieve the situation in peace. But Our adversaries, showing not the least spirit of conciliation, have unduly delayed a settlement; and in the meantime they have intensified the economic and political pressure to compel thereby Our Empire to submission. This trend of affairs, would, if left unchecked, not only nullify Our Empire’s efforts of many years for the sake of the stabilization of East Asia, but also endanger the very existence of Our nation. The situation being such as it is, Our Empire, for its existence and self-defense has no other recourse but to appeal to arms and to crush every obstacle in its path.

How does that compare to declarations of war by the United States of America? Even excluding wars to exterminate native American Indians and seize their private property, the U.S.A. has fought in well over 50 wars (defining wars as American soldiers fighting on foreign soil) during our brief history.

The Congress of the United States of America (the Constitution does not allow the President to declare war) has declared war precisely five times. Admittedly, these were the big wars of U.S. conquest:
War of 1812 (Our attempt to conquer Canada; we got Florida instead)
Mexican-American War (We grabbed New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California)
Spanish American War (We grabbed the Philippines and Puerto Rico, but gave back Cuba)
World War I (We charged interest on loans to our allies and became the worlds leading industrial power)
World War II (We grabbed South Korea and Japan and world economic control since everyone else's factories were destroyed)

How does the Japanese declaration of war against the United States stack up? On the whole it is in the same ballpark. In the War of 1812 we had similar complaints about embargos by Britain and France, as well as Native Americans not obeying white men, much as some Chinese were not keen on obeying the Japanese, even discounting the American puppet government of Chiang Kai-shek.

Bringing us back to the present, I don't think very many Americans want to hate the Japanese any more. In that sense we should forget Pearl Harbor. But I don't think the current agreement of the U.S. and Japan to pretend that Japan is not a colony of the U.S. can last too much longer. General MacArthur, by almost anyone's reasonable standards (Stalinists excluded) did a very good job as American viceroy after World War II. The quasi-independent status of Japan has even had some real benefits for the Japanese, as they have been able to focus their economy on production. As the U.S. spins into the whirlpool of war-related debt, if I were Japanese I'd be thinking of cutting loose at the first opportunity. Getting the offensive U.S. military bases off Okinawa would be a good start towards true independence.

Humboldt County, Localization and Imperialism

Yesterday my dear friend Kaitlin Sopoci-Belknap, matriarch of Democracy Unlimited of Humboldt County, posted this on Facebook: "At SBDC's Technology Bootcamp for biz owners and one of the 1st recommendations we're getting is to outsource and hire "virtual assistants" in India for $4/hr or Georgia for $8/hr. And bonus, they can be paid as contractors - so no benefits! Hmmmm."

I have complained about outsorcing in the past, and have actually had work I did, and got paid well for, outsourced to India. But since Kaitlin already expressed that outrage, I took it to the next level, commenting: "An Internet downside for U.S. workers for sure. After 65 years of being privileged workers inside an imperialist economy, we Americans are being tossed back into the international proletariat. Who woulda thought." Lots of other people left interesting comments too.

Of course, a person could offer their services in the $4 to $8 an hour range in Humboldt County. You can't be someone's employee at that scale, it violates the minimum wage laws, but you can freelance for as little as you want. And as long as you don't get sick or have a family to support, and know how to live very frugally, you can live on that scale even in the U.S. I know, I have done it, but I hope to never do that again.

American workers' share in the enjoyment and production of American wealth has had a complicated history. Indentured servants and African slaves obviously produced much but consumed little. The vastness of virgin lands "liberated" from Indian tribes meant family farms could do pretty well until about 1870. Then we had the period of robber capitalism until the Great Depression. A lot of people think the Democrats and New Deal paved the way for the Great Prosperity of 1940 to 1970, but a lot of variables were involved.

Americans forget, or do not know, that two of the world's most historically evil people, Adolf Hitler of Germany and Joseph Stalin of the U.S.S.R. (Russia), nevertheless deserve a lot of credit for ending the Great Depression. Because the U.S.S.R. was communist, its economy continued to grow through the 1930s. Germany had a very bad economic meltdown, which is one reason Hitler came to power, and he basically ordered everyone back to work, so Germany recovered from the Depression years ahead of the United States.

Then World War II came along. Germany destroyed Russia's factories. Their bombers tore up Great Britain pretty well too. German and American bombers destroyed Germany's factories. China was pretty well destroyed, and Japan's factories were bombed, in some cases vaporized, by the U.S.

Come 1946, almost all of the factory capacity of the world was in the United States, and a great deal of what was abroad was owned by American capitalists. Making wage concessions to union, or even non-union, workers in the U.S. was no big deal. Buy peace at home, extract wealth from abroad.

I believe that workers should share the wealth that they produce and that democratic government should be used to control the excesses of capitalism. In fact, I would prefer an anarcho-syndicalist social system, in which people work cooperatively and don't need much in the way of governance.

Localism posits that a healthy economy and society can be built up apart from the global economy and society. Certainly historically some areas have prospered and some areas have failed and most have been somewhere in the middle. So it is a gamble. Make yourself an island and maybe you can pay your workers $20 an hour for work that has a global scale of $4 per hour. On the other hand, you might be setting up a downward spiral towards being one of those places where people would be happy to get $1 an hour and not starve, rather than not working at all.

In 1700, China and India were the wealthiest nations in the world. Their highly paid artisans were reduced to poverty in the next two centuries as manufactured goods from Great Britain replaced local crafts. Today Chindia is rapidly become the world's most important economic region. Contrary to U.S. propaganda, that growth is not particularly fueled by exports. It is mainly fueled by infrastructure development and a growth in internal consumption.

Unionism in the U.S. failed for a variety of reasons, but the main one was that unions never took power from capitalists. Instead, using the profits from imperialism, the U.S. capitalist class bought off sectors of the U.S. workers with middle-class levels of pay. And in the case of AFL-CIO bureaucrats, upper-management levels of pay.

The times they are a changin. Worker pay relative to management and capitalist pay has been declining in the U.S., which should upgrade revolutionary potential. But culture usually lags, rather than leads, economics. Worker culture in the U.S. is mostly looking to a return of the glory days of 1940 to 1970, when you could get a good paycheck without becoming a radical or even joining a union. Unless the U.S. blows up everyone else's factories again, those days are not going to return. The workers' movement has to be based upon the new economic realities. A key question is: can it be a national struggle, a local struggle, or must it be an international struggle?

Paul Krugman's Blind Eye: 1938

Paul Krugman's September 5, 2010 New York Times Op Ed, 1938 in 2010, turns a blind eye on many of the economic and political realities of both 1938 and 2010. I don't think this is because space in an op ed column is short, and the realities were (and are) two complex to cover completely in a short essay. He ignored what contraindicated the pie he is selling. Paul Krugman is a pretty astute guy, even the Nobel Prize committee thinks so, so let's take a look at his blind side.

Krugman's basic thesis in 1938 in 2010 is that in 1938 the Great Depression had a comeback because of lack of federal deficit spending. He goes on to say that the massive deficit spending during World War II (the U.S. officially entered the war in December, 1941, but began re-arming seriously in 1939) led not only to the end of the Depression and prosperity, but also to the long-term success of the U.S. economy during the second half of the 20th century.

Economic cycles are not really simple downward or upward slopes. Even in aggregate (on the macroeconomic level) they exhibit short-term changes of speed and direction. If you look at sectors (for example housing, or medical services, or steel production) they are typically not fully synchronized, and each sector has its ups and downs on a monthly or even weekly basis.

In the 1930s two command and control economies were growing: the communist economy of the U.S.S.R. and the German economy under National Socialism. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal failed to produce similarly spectacular results mainly because it was not as centralized or as well thought out. Of course command economies do not always do well; sometimes they fail spectacularly. Same for capitalist free-market economies, and even for mixed economies. But in the late 1930's the global economy was reviving mainly because of the expanding German and Russian economies, which were about as command-control as you can get.

Germany was also re-arming. Eventually other European nations felt they also had to re-arm, and eventually even the U.S. re-armed. This stimulated the economies of the re-arming nations. But the nation that benefited most was the United States. The British Empire, that cruel monster, borrowed money from the U.S. and bought armaments or the makings of armaments (steel, in particular). This external stimulus, plus the fact that the U.S. economy was already in a late-Depression natural economic upswing, is what caused the U.S. economy to be clearly in an up cycle in 1940.

Of course the massive U.S. debt run up during World War II stimulated the economy. But the debt was not what was responsible for postwar prosperity. Our global imperialist-industrialist rivals had their factories bombed to smithereens. Or in the case of Japan, vaporized.

If anyone in the world wanted to buy anything made of metal, after World War II essentially the only source would be the U.S. Even to rebuild their own factories Japan, Germany, Italy, and France had to buy machine tools and steel from the United States. Only the U.S.S.R. retained significant industrial capacity at war's end, and they had lost 20 million people in the war, which knocked back their economy but good.

If Mr. Krugman wanted to engage in historical re-enactment arguments, he could urge Obama to bomb factories in Germany, China, Japan, Korea ... That would be a lot more effective than even greater deficit spending.

Krugman used a false historical analogy, but he still could be right when he says the U.S. economy would benefit from more federal stimulus. On the other hand, maybe when you have economic rivals that are not prostrated by war, stimulus backfires because it almost always uses resources inefficiently. The argument will go on. But using 1938 as a 2010 comparison is comparing two very different situations.

America, Artillery, and Crimes of Passion

Today I finished adding my notes on the second volume of John Toland's outstanding The Rising Sun to the U.S. War Against Asia section of this site. Re-reading the highlights of U.S. and Japanese diplomatic decision making during World War II (volume 1 covered the events leading up to the war in the Pacific), my purpose was to do more than gaze (so to speak) in horror at the scale of destruction involved.

Before the U.S. was engaged in the war President Franklin D. Roosevelt criticized the conduct of Japan (in China) and General Franco in Spain. He dispatched messages to all belligerents urging them to refrain from the “inhuman barbarism of bombing civilians.” But his preparations for war included a massive expansion of the bombing capabilities of the United States.

Roosevelt built a reputation on caring for the common man, but his record is mixed. He was an imperialist in the mold of his relative, President Theodore Roosevelt, at an early age. As President, FDR challenged Japan's incursions into China, but refused to grant independence to the U.S. colony of the Philippines. He supported French retention of Indochina and the Netherlands retention of Indonesia. Still, in his calm moments he probably understood ethics and compassion as well as the average man he claimed to represent, so his pre-war anti bombing statements were doubtless sincere, at the time.

Long before World War II broke out it had been well established, as international law, that artillery was to be used only against enemy soldiers. Bombarding civilians is a war crime. By extension aerial bombardment should only be used against soldiers, not against civilians.

In war itself, however, passion combine with the cold logic of seeking military victory to change how Roosevelt and Americans saw attacks on civilians, when it was American bombers that were doing the attacking.

For American citizens and soldiers, this is often attributed to beliefs that Japanese soldiers were merciless to civilians and POWs. There were plenty of incidents that supported this view, but for the most part Japanese officers, with a few exceptions, restrained their men as best they could. There were some cultural differences: Japanese soldiers (or at least officers) were trained to prefer to die than be captured, which leads to contempt for surrendering enemies. It is wise to remember that many if not most of the Japanese generals and admirals Americans were told to hate had received some schooling in the U.S.

But the central event of American anti-Japanese propaganda was the Bataan Death March. The problem with the propaganda is that it blamed the Japanese for the actions of President Roosevelt. American troops (including Filipinos) in the Philippines were essentially starved to death on orders by Roosevelt. He believed their resistance in Bataan would slow the Japanese advance elsewhere, giving the U.S. time to rebuild the invasion fleet that had been sunk at Pearl Harbor. While some Japanese soldiers acted cruelly during the march (they too had been fighting, had seen their comrades killed, and were tired and hungry), for the most part the Japanese failed to save many American lives, despite considerable effort, because commanding officers did not realize how seriously starved the American soldiers were before they surrendered.

Numerous witnesses have recorded the widespread killing of Japanese POWs by GI's during World War II, in particular during the campaign to recapture the Philippines (which lost their independent nation status when MacArthur reconquered them). This was not simply a matter of men gone mad. According to Toland, posters were printed urging GI's to "have no mercy on yellow bastards."

No mercy at all.

Then came General Curtis LeMay's plan to firebomb Japanese cities. President Roosevelt approved it. Hundreds of thousands of civilians, mostly women, children and elders, died.

When Roosevelt died the atomic bomb was almost ready for testing. President Truman heard arguments about whether to use it against the Japanese or not. The Japanese were trying to negotiate a surrender, but Truman wanted an unconditional surrender.

Asked later if it was difficult to make the atomic bomb decision, Truman said it was just like deciding to use a more devastating artillery. If you have it, you use it, the objective is to win the war.

So much for international law about the use of artillery against civilians.

See also: Notes on Rising Sun by John Toland

Read the book:

Hong Kong Thoughts: FDR, Chiang Kai-shek, and the Mont Tremblant Conference

I can assume you've heard of Hong Kong, and most of you know FDR stands for United States President-for-Life Franklin Delano Roosevelt. You should know that Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975), the Generalissimo, was the generally acknowledged leader of the Chinese government (such as it was) during the era of Roosevelt and Hitler. Chiang even went on to a ghostly existence as the leader of the rebel island province of Taiwan once he lost mainland China to the Chinese Communist government.

I'm pretty sure you don't know about the Mont Tremblant Conference, because I only learned of it a few days ago while reading A History of Hong Kong
by Frank Welsh. Nothing like reading a Brit book to learn some things about American history that are ... not in American books.

Before we get into Mont Tremblant, let me mention that on page 424 I learned a new fact about the D. in FDR. During World War II, President Roosevelt's "visitors were reminded that his maternal grandfather, Warren Delano, had been a partner in Russel's [Hong Kong establishment] and that his mother had spent part of her childhood in Hong Kong. The fact that Russel's had been active in the opium trade ... did not seem to cross the President's mind." But I'm sure all you FDR fans already knew that. I just missed it somehow.

Today the Mont Tremblant conference is a mystery, it does not even have its own Wikipedia page [another item for my To Do list]. According to Welsh, scattered about pages 423-427, the conference took place between December 4 and 14th, 1942 at Mont Tremblant near Quebec, Canada. I learned elsewhere it was sponsored by a non-governmental organization, the IPR (Institute of Pacific Relations). The Chinese nationalists were doing little in the way of fighting the Japanese at that time, but Roosevelt was giving them a lot of money and arms that the British thought could be better used to fight for British dominance of Europe and North Africa.

Some American leaders were playing the anti-colonialism card, notably Vice-President Wallace. But Roosevelt stated he was willing to give the French colony of Indochina as well as Hong Kong to Chiang Kai-shek. The Brits present had no problem trading rhetoric. When FDR referred to the Brits grabbing Hong Kong, Oliver (Lord) Stanley retorted "Mr. President, that was about the time of the Mexican War, wasn't it?" The British, less blinded to certain realities than the anti-communists in Roosevelt's regime, in 1942 already suspected that Chiang Kai-shek would not be able to hold onto power if the Japanese left China. Recall that the number 2 man in the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party) had been set up as the head of China by the Japanese, a pretty cozy relationship that no one any longer seems to want to talk about.

David MacDougall, formerly a member of the Hong Kong government, attended Mont Tremblant and reported that there was a division in the British delegation between those who were willing to pacify the U.S. by giving up Hong Kong, and those who believed that after the war a general settlement on colonialism in the Pacific would be necessary. In such a conference the British might give up Hong Kong if the Dutch and French gave up their colonies. And it the U.S. gave up the Philippines and Hawaii. Welsh does not mention it, but the U.S. had grabbed quite a few smaller Pacific islands during its colonial expansion. [FDR repeatedly turned down the requests of the Philippines for independence during his regime. The Japanese granted the Philippines formal independence.]

Now, as part of my research into the U.S. War Against Asia, I feel I need to read in more detail about this Mont Tremblant conference. No treaties were signed, but that should not relegate the conference to the dustbin of history. Are there minutes of the meetings somewhere? All this sort of stuff should be on the Internet now, where scholars and the merely curious can access it easily.

Rise and Fall of the Japanese Empire

I just finished placing my notes on John Toland's The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire on the net. Actually, just the notes on Volume 1. I read volume 2 already, but have note taken notes. It is studded with sticky tabs.

There were a lot of surprises in the book. It mainly covers the Japanese side of the story, but there is a lot of detail about the Roosevelt administration's internal decision making process. At times it seems Franklin Roosevelt (FDR), aided by Cordell Hull and Stanley Hornbeck, was purposefully trying to get into a war with Japan. His uncle, Theodore Roosevelt, had grabbed the Philippines for the American Empire. Ruling Japan and China, either directly or by proxy, had long been a goal of American imperialists. But Roosevelt had another side; he wanted to get what he wanted without a war, and wanted to be seen as peaceful. So he vacillated.

In Japan men vacilated as well. There were militarists who were looking for an excuse for war. There were powerful men who wanted to avoid war at all cost. And there were those who did not want war, but did not want Japan to become a third rate nation like China.

Japan felt encircled by enemies. Russia was a traditional antagonist, and communist to boot. Britain, France, the Netherlands and the United States all had colonies in East Asia; all had looked ravenously at Japan for decades.

To the extent I have heard history debated in the U.S., the most common question is whether FDR knew about Pearl Harbor in advance. Certainly U.S. intelligence services had broken the Japanese diplomatic and military codes, and knew a lot. FDR and George Marshall knew the Japanese were breaking off relations in plenty of time to warn Hawaii, and in fact Marshall sent a message that was delayed, then ignored. But they were sure the Japanese attack would be on Singapore and Malaya; the U.S.-occupied Philippines might also be hit in the first wave. The Japanese really did a good job at hiding their preparations for the attack on Pearl Harbor. Even the Emperor was not informed until just before it happened. American military men were largely contemptuous of Japanese military skills. Douglas MacArthur, commanding in the Philippines, was sure he would have no problems repelling the Japanese. General Homma proved otherwise.

All appearances are that war could have been avoided if Roosevelt had just excepted Prime Minister Konoye's offer to meet for face-to-face negotiations. The Japanese offered to withdraw from Indonesia and all of China except the independent state of Manchukuo (Manchuria). But because Cordell Hull prevented Roosevelt from seriously considering that offer, by the time Roosevelt finally sent a nice, personal note to the Emperor of Japan, the bombers were heading towards Pearl Harbor.

Gaza, Blockades, Embargoes, Pirates and Privateers

Some people are in an uproar because Israel used what anyone else would call excessive force to capture a Turkish aid ship headed for Gaza in Palestine. Some people are just beginning to notice that most post-Holocaust Israelis adopted the core Nazi values of racism and killing anyone who gets in your way (which were core American values until the 1960s, truth be told). Palestinians just happened to be in the way of Jews who wanted to resurrect the ancient kingdom of Judea.

My analysis is that the Israeli high command probably gave advance orders to their gunmen raiding the charity fleet to use lethal force because they wanted to disrupt the impending settlement talks with the Palestinians. They think President Barack Obama will be weakened by the November elections in the United States. They think they can get another postponement, or a better deal after November. They are willing to take the short-term hit for the perceived long-term gain.

If indeed some of the passengers on the Mavi Marmara tried to stop the Israeli gunmen from boarding their ship, it was within their rights of self-defense. Pacifists would say it was wrong, and with their weird non-violence logic (see Non-violence and its Violent Consequences) would have blamed the victims on the ship, not the gunmen. If the point was to show the brutality of the State of Israel and bring attention to its illegal blockade of Gaza, however, those who defended themselves, and made the ultimate sacrifice, did the right thing.

Turn it around to see the justice. A bunch of German liberals decide to take supplies to a concentration camp or ghetto to feed Jews during World War II. Nazi gunmen stop them, first with beatings, then with bullets. Who would justify such Nazi actions, except the Nazis themselves?

Many wars have started with embargoes or blockades at sea. Embargoes are not in themselves acts of war, although they certainly can provoke wars. Blockades are acts of war. If a war has not already begun, a blockade is a good start. Remember the American War of 1812? The British blockade of Europe (they were at war with France and its allies) was one of the main factors.

The American Revolutionary War is thought of as a time of sacrifice, and for most of both the terrorists (I mean patriotic ancestors) and those Americans who remained loyal to Great Britain it was. But some Americans made out like bandits: privateers. They were authorized by Congress to seize British ships, and captured a lot of profits in the process. If the loyalists had won the war, in retrospect we would call them pirates.

Self-defense is a right, but it is a tricky right that runs up against the self-defense and private property rights of others. Surely Jews in Europe had a right to defend themselves against Adolf Hitler and his gunmen in the 1930s and 1940s. Surely the Palestinians had a right to defend themselves against the mainly German, Jewish invaders in the 1940s. So where should the Jews in European camps have gone? In retrospect, back to Germany. Anti-semitism was discredited and the Nazi Party was banned. They would have been safe there, but they did not feel they would be safe there, which is understandable.

As I said, choosing to not sell to a nation through an embargo is not an act of war, whereas a blockade usually is an act of war. But there are gray areas. After World War II started in Europe the United States, the Netherlands, and the British Empire joined in an embargo against Japan. The Japanese felt this was an act of war, since it meant they could get no petroleum, which they needed to defend their own empire. Attempts at negotiations failed largely because President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted a war to cement American dominance in East Asia, while Great Britain wanted a war because that would also involve America in the fight against Germany. Sure, if the embargo had caused the Japanese to surrender without a fight, America would not need to declare war. In 1812 Britain had the embargo, but America declared war. When you are a global economic superpower, I think it is fair to say that an embargo is a de facto declaration of war.

I believe the United States bears much responsibility for the situation in Gaza. We demanded free elections as a condition for statehood for Palestine. Then, Hamas won the elections. The United States then reneged on its promises. Americans may have missed that hypocritical song and dance routine, but Palestinians and Moslems in general did not.

I see no ethical distinctions between Hamas and Likud. In American politics the practical distinction is in the number of Jewish voters in swing states like Florida and New York, and the ability for American Zionists to contribute to election campaigns.

General MacArthur, the Philippines, and Japan

I just finished posting my notes on Ameican Caesar, a biography of Douglas MacArthur by William Manchester. This is part of my Asian War book project. So the notes are not particularly for military buffs, or MacArthur history junkies. They reflect my interest in the historic relations (mainly war) between the United States and the nations of Asia.

General MacArthur's story is most relevant to the history of the Philippines. His father, Arthur MacArthur, Jr., would now be classified as a war criminal by any fair-minded person. The U.S. invaded a nation, which is a war crime, and Douglas MacArthur killed both Filipono independence fighters, and civilians, for daring to not go along with the conquest. The Filipino upper class, themselves exploiters of their lower classes, were happy to collaborate with American occupiers just as they had collaborated with Spain. When Douglas MacArthur in turn became military commander of the Philippines he had good relations with these upper-class Filipinos. Guerrilla insurgents were a minor problem for America by the 1930s.

Before World War II every Asian nation had an independence movement. All these movements felt betrayed by the League of Nations, which was dominated by the British Empire and which, in practice, supported "national self-determination" only in white-majority nations. U.S. presidents often used independence rhetoric, but always supported colonial powers like Britain, France, and the Netherlands in practice. Of the Asian nations only Japan was truly independent. China was a particular trouble spot. It had numerous governments, including one run under Japanese protection and the government (if you can call it that) of Chiang Kai-shek, who was essentially an American puppet, but whose government really was just a collection of war lords.

MacArthur's job was to defend the Philippines against Japan. Because the U.S. had about ten times the industrial capacity of Japan, President Franklin Roosevelt knew that Japanese civilian leaders did not want war with the U.S. By insulting and bullying Japan, however, Roosevelt was able to bring the Japanese military leaders to greater influence. If Japan had not gone to war, the U.S. would have been in a position to take over Japan and China at a minimal cost.

Men like Roosevelt and MacArthur were, however, overconfident of easy victory. They were shocked by the successful military strategy and tactics of Japan in the opening days of the war. The Japanese quickly liberated Vietnam from the French, the Philippines from America, the British from Singapore and Burma, and the Dutch from the East Indies (later Indonesia). The problem for the Japanese was that they probably needed another decade of eocnomic development to make this new "Co-prosperity" sphere into something that could stand up to the imperialist powers in a war. In America, even before Pearl Harbor, planes, tanks, and war ships were rolling off assembly lines in numbers the Japanese could not match. Only the need to train new recruits and to send most military material to help the British Empire fight the new German Empire prevented the U.S. from quickly kicking the Japanese out of their new possessions.

Within two years of Pearl Harbor, U.S. submarines had sunk almost all Japanese merchant shipping. The Japanese military, for all its faults, did not think any honor accrued to commanders that killed civilians or sank civilian shipping. So they failed to create an effective submarine fleet. With almost no internal deposits of iron, oil, or coal, and no ships to bring those materials in, the Japanese could produce planes and battle ships only from reserves already on their islands. At first the Japanese sank more U.S. Navy vessels than vice versa, but those were hollow victories. When a Japanese vessel sank, it could not be replaced. Every American vessel that sank was quickly replace by three or four more.

In the end, we had Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Strangely, General MacArthur, usually thought of as a right-wing zealot, wrote a very liberal constitution for Japan and even did a land redistribution program that was right out of the communist handbook. His motives, however, were not liberal. He wanted to weaken Japan's military capability and military culture.

Meanwhile, America's military culture was greatly stengthened by our victory in World War II. We quickly betrayed the peoples we made promises to during the war. No one got immediate independence except Burma. But in the Japanese wake the independence movements were much stronger. The U.S. granted the Philippines independence. Then the Netherlands decided the cost of war was too high, after trying it, and granted independence to Indonesia. Mao and the communists created an independent China. Vietnam, however, was returned to colonial status under the French.

Another interesting note for me was having to add another senior policy advisor to those who opposed using atomic weapons on civilian cities in Japan. I already knew that Eisenhower opposed using the atomic bomb. According the Manchester, MacArthur also opposed using these weapons of mass destruction. So, for all of you who want to get out your partisan scorecards, all Democratic Party senior officials involved favored committing these war crimes. The two Republicans who were consulted, Eisenhower and MacArthur, were against committing these particular war crimes.