Woodrow Wilson, Eugene V. Debs, and Bashing Bashar

Double standards are the norm in propaganda, including history as propaganda. Barack Obama regularly has "terrorists" and innocent civilians near them executed without trial (and in many cases based on poor intelligence). Most U.S. citizens don't think twice about it. It is a small price to pay in order to not have to accept God (Allah), and Mohamed as his final prophet, and some self-styled Caliph as as their sole interpreter in present time.

The refusal of President Obama to work with the President of Syria, Bashar Assad, against a common enemy, ISIS, is typically rationalized by declaring that Assad is a dictator, and a brutal dictator who imprisons Syrians who oppose him. Perhaps he has executed some without trial, or at least without the kind of trial you can get in the U.S. if you are not just gunned down in the street, and if you can afford a good lawyer.

Is there a qualitative difference between leaders like Bashar Assad and American Presidents who have arrested and executed their opponents? If so, what are the factors that make the difference qualitative? Is there a meaningful difference between imprisoning or killing peaceful opposition, as opposed to armed opposition in a civil war?

Here I will examine these question in the context of World War I. That will give some historical distance. Yet it was the greed displayed by France and Great Britain during World War I that led to the Middle East being politically unstable since that era.

Woodrow Wilson was elected President of the United States in 1912. It is difficult today to imagine the politics of that era. Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party had liberal and conservative wings; on the whole I think the Republican Party was still the more progressive of the two. William H. Taft was President and ran for re-election as a Republican. Taft had been Vice-President under Theodore Roosevelt, who ran on the Progressive Party ticket after he failed to get the Republican Party nomination. These were the results:

1912	Party	Popular Votes	Electoral College Votes
Woodrow Wilson	Democratic	6,293,454	435
Theodore Roosevelt	Progressive	4,119,538	88
William H. Taft	Republican	3,484,980	8
Eugene V. Debs	Socialist	900,672	0
Eugene W. Chafin	Prohibition	206,275	0

Note that even though Woodrow Wilson was pretending to be somewhat progressive, and Roosevelt ran as a progressive, the Socialist Party candidate, Eugene V. Debs, received a very substantial number of votes, about 6%.

Woodrow Wilson is arguably the intellectual architect of modern segregation. So it should not be surprising that he won every state in the racist, conservative Old South.

Woodrow Wilson was not just a white supremacist, he was a true believer in the supremacy of Anglo-Saxon culture. When World War I broke out in Europe he favored backing the British Empire, which then oppressed about 1/3 of the world's people. But domestic politics, including large numbers of Irish-American and German-American voters in the Democratic Party, kept the President and the United States in a state of neutrality.

Socialism was meant to be an international movement for peace and justice, and before the war Socialist parties in Europe opposed their respective governments militarism. However, after the war started, each nation's Socialist Party tended to rationalize supporting their own nation's efforts.

President Wilson ran again in 1916, rallying voters to the slogan "He kept us out of war." Anyway, he was too busy invading Mexico and a variety of Latin American nations. But the voting went back to the normal Democrat vs. Republican split:

1916	Party	Popular Votes	Electoral College Votes
Woodrow Wilson	Democratic	9,129,606	227
Charles E. Hughes	Republican	8,538,221	254
A. I. Benson	Socialist	585,113	0
J. F. Hanly	Prohibition	220,506	0

Then Woodrow Wilson asked the U.S. Congress to declare war on Germany. The vote in Congress on April 6, 1917 was 82 to 6 in the Senate, 373 to 50 in the House; hardly unanimous. Thus we entered the war on the side of the evilest empire in history, the British Empire. We did not fight for democracy; most people in the British empire were not allowed to vote.

Unlike in Germany, France, and Britain, the Socialist Party in the United States did not give up its peaceful and internationalist stand. It opposed the war, as did the IWW and other organizations and individuals. Wilson's reaction? He ordered massive arrests of those who opposed him.

One of those arrested was Eugene V. Debs, who had opposed him as a Presidential candidate in 1912. In 1918 Wilson was arrested. He was found guilty on September 12 and was thrown in a dungeon. The Supreme Court of the United States, in Debs v. United States (249 U.S. 211 (1919)) ruled neither Debs nor any other American's right of free speech included the right to be for peace during wartime.

Debs ran for President in 1920, from his jail cell, and received 919,799 votes.

So how different is that from Assad putting one of his critics in jail?

Wilson is not alone among Presidents and other powerful Americans in his crimes against humanity. George Washington executed soldiers for desertion even before he was elected President. Every U.S. rebellion has been brutally put down, most notably in the Civil War. Ronald Reagan ordered peaceful demonstrators to be shot dead even before he became President. The list is finite, but large.

I might sympathize with rebels in certain cases, but I don't expect anyone in power to hand over the keys to the government without a fight. Deciding to rebel, as the American slave masters did in 1776, is a hazardous course, not to be undertaken lightly.

Bashar Assad's crime, from Obama and the American Establishment point of view, is not that he has held on to power, or how he has held onto power. His crime is not becoming a pro-American puppet. His crime is doing what he thinks is best for Syria.

Some times there are happy endings. When Warren G. Harding was elected President in 1920 he tried hard to undo Wilson's worst deeds. He made peace with Germany, and he released Eugene V. Debs from prison. Harding was a Republican, and he made the mistake of letting his corrupt friends run the nation. But I'll take him for a better U.S. President any day over Woodrow Wilson.

And I'll take Eugene V. Debs over any elected President in U.S. history.

Will anyone run for Peace in 2016?

How many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
—Bob Dylan, Blowin' in the Wind

When I was a child (in the 1960s) and realized the world was full of lies and liars, I became aware of the vast distance between the rules for goodness I was taught and what was actually going on in the world. The U.S. War against the people of Vietnam was the most glaring example, but it took me considerable time to figure that out.

Even as late as 10th grade (1969) I was conflicted as to whether the U.S. was in the right. I had heard people were against the war, but in my Marine Corps, Roman Catholic, Southern Democrat family and society, it was communists who had started the war. American soldiers were defending the freedom loving people of South Vietnam. You might believe that if you believe Jesus appointed the Bishop of Rome to be Pope and that white people are all that is good in the world. We believed American peace protesters were a bunch of communists.

Here I am, alive and bitching 50 years later. The massive genocide that was the Vietnam War has been replaced by the Bush/Obama war on terror. Some think that it is a war on radical Islam, but a quick check reveals that ultra-conservative Islam is okay if it is pro-U.S. No form of anti-U.S. Islam is okay, not even liberal or moderate. You don't have to be a terrorist. All you have to do is point out the war crimes and crimes against humanity the U.S. has committed and President Obama will put you on his kill without a trial list. You don't have to plan an attack in America or on a U.S.-allied government or local thug; all you need to commit is thought crime.

In fact, a lot of the deaths reported as victories over terrorism are what could be called "false positives." The CIA and Special Murdering Forces go out and ask around Yemen and Somalia and Afghanistan and Pakistan and Libya and Mali and the Philippines, "hey, can you finger any Al-Qaeda operatives around here?" Money is held out. Mohommed is having a feud with Muhammed, it is relatively new, just 3 generations old, so he says "sure, that Muhammed guy is the local Al-Qaeda leader, I overheard him talking to Osama on his cell phone."

The Special Forces report this "intelligence" up the chain of command until Barack Obama says "kill that MF Muhammed." The Predator drones go out and blow up his little village, killing women and children, but not killing everyone. It is a pretty good bet the young men who survive will be looking for an Internet connection to have a meet up with Al-Qaeda.

When you start looking at where Al-Qaeda is now compared to 2001, you will see they are beginning to look like the old British Empire. Expanding faster than a fast food chain backed by Goldman Sachs.

But Obama does not care about killing innocents. Signing off on assassinations makes him feel like God and keeps the Republicans and the National Security people off his back. All those Democrats in Congress with military bases and factories in their districts love the war too. What does it matter if a few Somali women get caught in the cross fire, when it means a Senator can pretend she is keeping jobs in her state?

So what we (peace loving people) need is a Congress and a President that will close down the CIA and Special Forces hit squads, turn Predators into solar arrays, and transfer funds from the Pentagon and Homeland Security to making life better for citizens. Maybe even pay some war reparations.

Where will our candidates come from? In 2006 the nation elected a Democratic Party dominated Congress, based largely on a promise of ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That Congress evolved into what we have today. I can only conclude they were (and are) a bunch of lying politicians. They'd tell you chocolate is vanilla if they thought it would get your vote. (And sadly, most good party members would report "tastes like vanilla!")

So we would hope for independent or third-party peace candidates. But we know how that goes. The press mocks or ignores them. The donors don't donate. And the voters, well, I don't think the majority of voters are anti-war. They won't be anti-war until their own cousins are picked off by Predators. Which probably won't be long, but we are talking here about the 2016 elections.

For President we can expect Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee. Among the fire-breathing, imperialist, war mongering, lies if her lips are moving candidates, she would be my preference. Just as Barack Obama proved a sorta black man could be a President just like any white liar, Hillary would prove a woman can be President. Not a President I would like, but something lying, greedy, hypocritical young females can aspire to.

The Green Party and the Libertarian Party will each nominate someone as usual. Almost certainly it will be someone with no experience in political office. Sorry, but that is not going to win an election, or even put a dent in the American consciousness.

It gets grim beyond that. Rand Paul might be anti-war, but I don't trust him. Dennis Kucinich probably would not run as an independent; he feels safer in a war-crimes organization like the Democratic Party than out of it. Same for former President Jimmy Carter. The only real, heavy-weight peace candidate of my life-time, George McGovern, died in 2012.

But somewhere out there maybe there is a Representative or big-city Mayor or Governor who would make a credible peace candidate. I'll let you know if I hear of one. But my main hope is that the world's investors will realize the U.S. government is bankrupt and stop lending it money. Then we might finally see some serious reduction in war spending.

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.

Obama Withdraws Slowly from Afghanistan

Ah, to relive my youth, when President Richard Nixon slowly withdrew U.S. troops from Vietnam.

The Bush-Obama plan to impregnate Afghanistan with American values has failed, at least in the short run. No one in Afghanistan cared much for industrialism, capitalism, Christianity, free public secular education, or pork hot dogs. Most of the nation will go back to lamb, poppies, pomegranites, and melons. Why go through industrialization when it's just the painful, pre-apocalypse phase before non-mechanized agriculture?

Once the troops are gone, most Afghanistan families will remember one thing: their dead relatives. The carnage was fantastic. Towards the end Obama's weaponized drones attacking weddings, funerals, and hash fests gave the nation a real Terminator 3 feeling.

Why the slow withdrawal, with its implied ongoing war crimes and crimes against humanity? Did anyone tell President Barack Obama that the Nobel Peace Prize medal is not a get out of war crimes trials free card?

The slow withdrawal is Obama's trademark. He has always been a politician without substance, ever since he first ran for office backed by the Democratic Party of Chicago. Like most politicians, he knows he can't please all the people all of the time, and if he took solid positions on important issues, he'd displease most of the people some of the time. He is an artist, for sure, at saying what swinging voters want to hear. "You never wanted me in, baby? Why didn't you say so? I'm pulling out, but slowly, because I don't want it to hurt."

His core Democratic Party voters have been against the war in Afghanistan since at least 2006. He has to withdraw to please them if he wants a second term as President. But he does not want to p.o. the corporate security state people who really run things now. Those drones will be used against the American people, I guarantee you, but not until they are fully tested in Afghanistan. So instead of getting the hell out, which is what most people thought they were electing Barack to do in 2008, he rammed the U.S. in even further during his first two years in office.

Now he can pull out a few troops. The war is over! We won! Stop that media coverage! Barack Obama is both the Victory President and the Peace President.

The truth is in 2012 there will be more U.S. troops (and paramilitary types) in Afghanistan than there were when George W. Bush left office in January 2009.

What could be sicker than that? "Progressive" Democrat Party activists. They will repeat the mindless slogans of the corporate security state as long as there is a Democratic administration. They will do anything for a Democratic Party electoral win. They are a herd of ... I don't want to disgrace any mammal species here ... canaries that sing of disaster in their gilded cages, but just keep going along with the program.

When Nixon withdrew from Vietnam, he was afraid of revolution in the United States. The left in 1972 did not mean the middle of the Democratic Party. To be on the Left in 1972 you had to be at least in Democratic Socialists of America. Preferably you were an Anarchist. If your personality was bent out of shape enough you could be a Marxist, Trotskyist, Maoist or even Stalinist or SLA. We have no significant equivalent to that "New Left" of the 60s and 70s today. Maybe that is just as well, all the groups were too dogmatic to be much good at revolution, much less actual governance. But they made you feel like there were alternatives to snakes like Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.

Then again, we can always hope that between the idiot Republicans and idiot Democrats the U.S. government will reneg on its debts real soon, and implode. I'm sure the corporate security state has its contingency plans for that situation, but they probably won't need them, because the real plan is to order the right people to make the right compromises and muddle through a couple more years of American capitalism in decline.

Afghanistan War Loses Support in Congress

“If we’re going to cut programs for children who need milk in the morning, if we’re going to cut programs for seniors who need a sandwich at lunch, if we’re going to cut veterans benefits, then, for God’s sake, let’s bring back our troops from Afghanistan.” Thus said Representative Walter B. Jones in a recent speech in Beaufort, North Carolina. Jones is not a Democrat. He is a Republican, and a very conservative Republican on most matters. His district is likewise very conservative, and includes one of America's largest Marine Corps bases, Camp Lejeune (where I was born and raised).

Congress is beginning to rebel in earnest against Barack Obama's war policy in Afghanistan. Recently Jones and Democrat Jim McGovern of Massachusetts sponsored an amendment to H.R. 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal 2012, to speed the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the region. The vote on H. Amdt. 344 (follow the link to see how your Rep voted) to require from the President "A plan and timeframe on accelerated transition of military operations to Afghan authorities." That is pretty tame by my we should have never gotten in standards, but 8 Democrats joined 207 Republicans to vote against it. 26 Republicans and 178 Democrats voted for it. The amendment failed.

What is going on? Why is the Community Organizer President wasting U.S. blood, and $10 billion a year or so in taxpayer money, on occupying Afghanistan? Why are otherwise ideologically pure Republicans turning against the occupation?

I have observed that whether people are left, liberal, moderate, conservative or right-wing, some reality will seep in through ideological filters some of the time. Mostly people buy into ideological and (filtered) factual bundles because they have limited time and knowledge; it is the easy way to go. But push their noses close enough to manure, or roses, and most people can tell the difference, regardless of ideology.

Right-of-center is a bundle of people, but beware of over-generalizing. No every right-of-center person fits the leftist view of being a biblical fundamentalist war mongering anti-immigrant anti-environment racist. Very few, in fact, fit that description. Avoid talking about the Bible and even the fundamentalists can be pretty astute about real world issues.

The people of the United States of America has been in a new world of hurt since the Great Recession began. A good many people who were middle-income learned suddenly what it is like to be at the bottom. To want to work, but to have not jobs available. To need to patch something, but be unable to afford the patching material. To lived crowded in with relatives that, truth be told, they would just as soon see once a year at a family reunion.

The Afghanistan war never made sense to me and my peace movement friends. The U.S. could have saved over $100 billion and many lives by sending in the CIA, not the Marines. In the end it was the CIA that got Bin Laden.

So what is wrong with President Obama? We aren't in community organizing mode anymore. Barack is now in the eye of the corporate security state. He has not visited the grieving parents of the children the U.S. military has "accidentally" killed in Afghanistan. He has not stood as a soldier and watched people watching him, hoping he would step on an IED. He lucked into the Presidency without having any real accomplishments before arriving in that esteemed office. He wanted to be President, and for that he was more than happy to become the most important piece on the military-industrial complex chess board.

Community Organizer has lately shown willingness to take lunch away from American children to appease two bullies, the Pentagon and the super-rich Americans who are happy to deduct heavy taxes from their employee's payrolls but don't want to (and mostly don't) pay taxes on inheritance, dividends, and capital gains.

If you can't smell what's happening here, you have lost your sense of smell. In a contest between Barack Obama and Walter B. Jones, I'd vote for Walter. Hopefully more Republicans will join Jones in the next vote on funding Afghanistan that comes before Congress. After all, the Constitution says Congress is supposed to make policy. The President is only supposed to carry out the laws and policies enacted by Congress.

See also the NY Time article, An Antiwar Republican, No Longer His Party's Pariah

Obama Raids Peace Activist Homes

The FBI, acting on orders from President Barack Obama, raided the homes of eight antiwar activists on Friday, September 24, according to the New York Times [see FBI Searches Antiwar Activists' Homes]. The homes were ransacked, but rather than arresting suspects they were asked to report to a Grand Jury. The victims appear to be highly respected peace activists. The office of the Minneapolis Anti-War Committee was also raided.

Doubtless President Obama felt empowered to attack his leftist critiques because of the failure of civil rights activists to defend right-wing militia members who were previously arrested on phony charges. Any failure to respond to the current provocation will doubtless lead to Obama trying to use further arrests and intimidation to prop up his failing presidency.

Over the years the ruling elite of the United States, including the national security apparatus and every President and Congress, Republican and Democrat, has tried to use "national security" as a rational to limit citizen's rights of free speech and assembly. I assert another right: to give material support to anyone I feel justified to give it too. The elite's enemies are not my enemies. I may not like the religious fervor of Hamas, for example, but if I want to give to a Hamas charity, that is my human right. If the U.S. government tries to deny that right, I say they have no right to govern me.

Of course I don't know the particulars of the case the FBI is prosecuting. "The warrant said agents were gathering evidence related to people “providing, attempting and conspiring to provide material support” to terrorist organizations, and listed Hezbollah, the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia." I have no fondness for any of those three organizations, but I see no reason why each American citizen should not make his or her own judgment. The activists say they were just protesting U.S. foreign policy. Is that now grounds for harassment, as it was during the Vietnam War?

The judgment of the security apparatus, and their current puppet Obama, is bad. The U.S. security apparatus like the rulers of Saudi Arabia, even though they are dictators pushing radical Islam and oppressing their women subjects in particular. They love Israel, even though it ignores the private property rights of Palestinians. They hate Cuba, because that government ignored the private property rights of American organized crime syndicates and allied itself with Stalin's apprentices. I could go on and on, but the point is: what is the point of freedom of speech if we can't differ with the Federal Government on foreign policy? The U.S. government used to be allied with Joseph Stalin's regime (from 1940 until 1946); it has supported and even installed numerous right-wing dictatorships over the decades. That is good judgment? That represents the American people?

At times the U.S. has insisted on elections in other nations, only to overthrow elected governments when the voters chose leaders the U.S. did not like. It happened in Algeria in 1991, and more recently it happened in Palestine. If the Taliban won an election in Afghanistan, what would Barack do?

I don't have very much material support to offer to any group out in the world that I think will make the world a better place. Nothing that would begin to counter the billions in aid the U.S. gives annually to Israel, for example. But I repledge myself to dismantling the security apparatus of the United States and our mis-ruling class. It is a long shot, but it's what is right.

The only U.S. foreign policy worth pursuing is the complete withdrawal of all U.S. military forces back into the United States. At least if they waste our taxpayer dollars in the United States, it would provide some local employment for civilians.

I am thinking I am going to, if I can get the "free" press to turn out, put a dollar bill in an envelope and send it to Hamas through the U.S. mail. Will Obama's thugs arrest me over a dollar? Will anybody join me? I'll supply both the dollar and the stamp!

Adolf Hitler, Peace Maker?

I like bizarre bits of true history, bits that don't fit into how we normally look at historical figures and institutions.

You have to be careful about saying anything nice about Adolf Hitler, mostly because he did not do very much that was nice, and partly because you get attacked as being a simpathiser even if you are just trying to clarify the historical record so people can be objective about history. While I have made it clear in many other essays that I hate Fascism, some one reading this one essay in isolation might miss that point.

I found this historical detail in John Toland's The Rising Sun, volume 1, page 65. In December, 1937, after Japanese troops captured Nanking (see Battle of Nanking), the Japanese government really, really wanted peace with China, which is to say with its leading war-lord, Chiang Kai-shek. They had already made peace with a number of war lords in northern China, and had no intention of making peace with the other claimant to Chinese governance, the Communist Party of China, which back then was actually holding elections in the areas it controlled.

In 1937 Adolf Hitler was busy in Europe trying to unite all German-speaking people into a consolidated German state; he had threatened war but not conducted it. But, for all his racism, Adolf Hitler had friendly relationships with both Chiang Kai-shek and the Japanese government headed by Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoye (or Konoe, according to Wikipedia). In Chiang Kai-shek's case, the German military had been training and advising Chinese troops for decades, and a little war with Japan was a good chance to test weapons and tactics. In Japan's case, both nations were very anti-communist and afraid of Russia (then the U.S.S.R.), and had joined together in the Anti-Comintern Pact.

Had Hitler succeeded, he might have won a Nobel Prize. And having won a Nobel Prize, maybe he would have thought twice before using military force to take back the areas of Poland that had been taken from Germany at the end of World War I.

But probably not. Giving the Peace Prize to Obama did not stop him from escalating the U.S. wars of aggression in Afghanistan or Somalia. Barack Obama, I am pretty sure, likes to think about himself as a peace-loving guy. It is just that like the Japanese leaders of the 1930's, he just wants peace his way. Who doesn't?

Why did Hitler not bring peace to East Asia in 1937? Franklin D. Roosevelt decided it was not in the interest of the United States, and encouraged Chiang Kai-shek to keep fighting. During the relatively pacifist Republican administrations of the 1920's (Presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover) the United States had partially disarmed, and during the Depression the military was further weakened by the need to shift the federal budget to New Deal welfare programs. Roosevelt was keen to make Japan and China both part of the U.S. commercial empire; the more they fought, the easier it would be for the U.S. to knock them both over when it became convenient. The more trouble Chiang was in, the more dependent he would be on the U.S.

Hitler did not seek peace because he was a good guy. He wanted the Japanese and Chinese to stop bickering so they could both fight his own arch enemy, the Soviet Union (and Chinese communists). Whether Roosevelt's intentions were good or bad can be debated, but his decision to push China to continue the war meant that China would be torn by war until the victory of the Chinese Communist regime in 1950. Given how demolished China was by 1950, it is remarkable that this year its economy will become the second largest in the world.

In effect in December 1937 Chiang was weak, and had to decide whether he would be a U.S. puppet or a Japanese puppet (a third realistic choice was becoming a Soviet puppet). Being the U.S. puppet, all he got in the end was Taiwan.

Theodore Roosevelt got a Nobel Peace Prize for helping the Japanese and Russians negotiate and end to their war in 1904. Given Roosevelt's belicosity and role in the Spanish American War and the Philippines genocide, apparently there is no barier to highly aggressive past and future war criminals receiving the prize.

Democrats Are

I keep being forced to the conclusion that ordinary, rank-and-file Democratic Party members, or voters are scum. By scum I mean every and any bad word you can think of.

Given that there are tens of millions of these so-called "people," you would think there would be a few Good Democrats out there among the pimps, whores, faux-greens and moral vacuum heads that constitute the Democratic Party. But there aren't, because a good person would simply leave the party. A good person could not stand to be stewed in the corrupt muck of the party.

I knew, during the Bush era, that this was the truth. Yet under President George W. Bush many Democrats, sometimes even Democratic Party politicians, said things that made them sound human, even humane. Democrats in Congress criticized Bush and the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan. They criticized the health care system. I knew the Congressmen and Senators were lying, thieving sons of hyenas, but I thought maybe some of the ordinary people who voted for them really wanted peace and justice. I thought they might abandon the Democratic Party when it failed to deliver on its promises.

I heard them myself, the two-faced personifications of dishonesty, here in coastal California, saying they would elect Democrats, they just needed a few more seats in the House and Senate, and a good President, and then we would see that they were good people, with good hearts, in a good party.

I knew they were deluding themselves, but I deluded myself too. I thought when the Bush Administration policies, which after all are just ruling class policies, continued under a Democratic administration, they would turn against their sacred Democratic Party.

But no. While I have seen former Green Party members who made the mistake of voting for Kucinich and then Obama come back to the Green Party, I have not seen a single long-term Democrat stand by what, only a year ago, they professed to be their principals. I have yet to see a Democrat around here leave the party. They aren't even acting disgusted. They are still acting like teenagers drunk on beer and a local football game victory.

I have seen the lot of them start talking the way Republicans talked just two years ago. They support Obama's war crimes against the people of Afghanistan. They do it by flipping some neural circuit, I guess. Now that the war in Afghanistan is led by a Democratic Party President, and in particular a black one who talks like a member of the intelligentsia, they think it is a good thing to spend billions of dollars in Afghanistan imposing Western culture on a people that don't want it. Now they seem to really hate the Taliban. A year ago, they might not have liked the Taliban, but at least they had common enemies, George W. Bush and the Republicans. Today yesterday's Peace Democrat would roast a Taliban baby on a spit if Barack Obama hinted he wanted a nice meal to go along with this Peace Prize.

A few Democrats I know, a very few, are still saying things like "but what I really support is Single Payer (health insurance)." But for the most part they will eat whatever donkey manure Obama feeds them, and whiney "just as good as single payer."

Did the Democrats hold hand with the Republicans to make the most massive transfer of public funds to the super-rich since the founding of this Republic? If the Republicans had done that alone the Democrats would be screaming. Since the leading Democrats were at the table, gobbling campaign donations and tips from hedge fund managers, the following Democrats can only hope that their homeless encampments, Obama-villes, aren't too cold this winter.

It is way past time to admit that the electoral process in the United States of America is a sham. The two parties just take turns shoveling whatever the ruling class decides onto the backs, and into the brains, of the American people.

I feel like I am in a zombie movie, only zombies come in two types. Democrat and Republican.

Nobel Peace Prizes for War Criminals

If you want to get a Nobel Peace Prize, your best shot comes from committing war crimes or crimes against humanity. This is not a pathway for the low-level soldier who kills a few POWs or women and children. You have to think big to get the Nobel Peace Prize. I popped up the list of Peace laureates at Wikipedia. Here are some of the historical highlights. Forgive me if I don't list every single war criminal, and detail all their war crimes. That would require a book.

United States President Theodore Roosevelt received the prize in 1906 for arbitrating an end to the Russo-Japanese War. But Roosevelt was a life-long war monger. He was one of the architects of the Spanish-American War. After that war was over he was President while the U.S. waged a genocidal campaign against the independence movement in the Philippines (which became a U.S. colony and base for further military intervention in Asia). He originally encouraged the Japanese and Russians to fight, and he allowed the Japanese to grab Korea in return for their not challenging U.S. rule of the Philippines. He wanted to end the Russo-Japanese War while the Japanese were still ahead because he believed Russia was the greater threat to the U.S. in Asia.

Woodrow Wilson, another United States President, was an avowed racist who kept African-Americans in legal chains. Even Theodore Roosevelt attacked him for being a racist. He won the Presidency in 1912, then in the 1916 election promised the American people to keep us out of the war (World War I) in Europe. After the war he did help create the League of Nations, but he established it on a racist basis, personally blocking a Japanese proposal to treat non-white nations on an equal basis with white folk.

You probably have not heard of Cordell Hull, Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Secretary of State who helped create the United Nations. Cordell Hull did everything he could to force Japan into fighting the U.S. in World War II. The United States had ten times the industrial capacity of Japan, so the outcome of a war was never in doubt. FDR wanted to prevent Japan from enabling Asian nations to gain independence from the United States and the European powers. [See also 1937 to 1940: U.S. Economic and Proxy War with Japan]

Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973. He got it for negotiating an end to the War in Vietnam. Of course, that was a U.S. war of aggression. Negotiations should not have been necessary. Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon plus their leading henchmen should have been tried and sentenced like the Nazis at Nuremberg. How many people, mainly Vietnamese, died while Kissinger spent four years negotiating? And why give the prize to Kissinger instead of President Richard Nixon, his boss?

On the other hand, the committee does give Peace Prizes to genuinely good people: Jane Addams, the American Friends Service Committee, Martin Luther King, Doctors Without Borders, etc.

Does inheriting a war make you a war criminal? Only if you keep prosecuting the war.

My criteria for giving a peace prize to a United States President is this: when one withdraws all U.S. troops from non-U.S. territory, she'll deserve a prize. If she prosecutes past U.S. Presidents, generals, and leaders of Congress for their war crimes and crimes against humanity, I might agree that peace and justice have finally come to America.

Magic Obama

He gives great speeches. I will grant President of the United States Barack Obama that. I like a good speech as much as anyone. But I am an analyst by profession, and the old analytic cynicism runs in the background thread of my brain even during an Obama speech.

Today's speech on Islam at Cairo University in Egypt is a great example. It flatters Islamic culture. At the same time it reminds those few Americans who have a slight grasp of history that after the fall of Rome it was Islam, not Christianity, that maintained and developed civilization for almost a millennium.

But there are iron knuckles under the glove. "We will, however, relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security. Because we reject the same thing that people of all faiths reject: the killing of innocent men, women, and children." Unless it helps us. We are the nation of Wounded Knee, the Republican Party's genocidal campaign in the Philippines, of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and napalm-soaked Vietnam. We destroyed civilization in Iraq even though its leaders, including Saddam Hussein, were enemies of al Qaeda.

President Obama wants us to remember some nice history, and forget the blood on American hands. At a time when our nation's economy is in trouble, he is wasting more money on the U.S. military than any previous President of the United States.

That part about Thomas Jefferson owning a Koran is cute. I bought a Koran (in English) and read it in college as part of trying to understand the world (I was also interested in Sufism, Zen and the like for a while). Note Barack does not say he has a Koran in his library - that would not go over well with American voters. Has he ever read the Koran? He did not say.

"America is not the crude stereotype of a self-interested empire." That is a three-pointer. We are a complex empire, filled with do-gooders who are frustrated by the Pentagon's bewitching every President we elect.

"And despite the costs involved, America's commitment will not weaken." There, you see, is the policy statement. We like you, we really do. But our policy is to kill you if you disobey us, no matter how much it costs American tax payers who voted for the Democrats hoping they would bring the troops home.

If Islam is not bad, if it is violence that is bad, why is only American violence good? And included here is violence by our allies and puppets. Tell me oh great Obama, why is it okay for you to be the most violent leader on earth? "The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind." Thank the Lord Jesus Christ he has an exception for innocents killed by aerial bombardment.

"And that is why we are providing more than $2.8 billion to help Afghans develop their economy and deliver services that people depend upon." Heck, didn't we give even more than that to the CEO's of a few U.S. banks known for causing the global economy to implode? Think of it as the Widow's Mite.

As to Palestine, occupied and unoccupied, "Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed." It succeeded for the Israelis, and it worked like magic for them while Barack was patiently waiting to become President. But it is wrong for the Palestinians. They don't give anywhere near enough in donations to the Democratic Party to make it right. "It is time for these settlements to stop." Wow, what a verbal tongue-lashing of Israel for the Cairo University audience.

As to Iran, "we are willing to move forward without preconditions on the basis of mutual respect. But it is clear to all concerned that when it comes to nuclear weapons, we have reached a decisive point." In other words, we will talk nicer, but our policy is the same as the Bush administrations. Only our allies like India, Pakistan, and Israel can have atomic bombs. If Iran wants atomic bombs, it must first become an American ally.

At the end of the speech there is a flurry of talk about Peace, with quotes from the Koran, New Testament, and Torah. Nothing like a little gift-wrapping of the same old American policy package for the Moslem world.

For years I have heard Barack Obama cast a magic spell with his speeches to the American people. And yes, there have been some minor policy changes since Barack has taken office, and it is early in his administration. Maybe, having cast a spell over the people of the world, he will start working to make it a better place.

But the world does not work by magic. You cannot resurrect the civilians killed by orders from Barack Obama in Afghanistan with a speech.

Still, I liked the part of the speech reminding us of Islam's contributions to civilization.

Korea, Barack Obama, and Theodore Roosevelt

Korea, historically, has benefited and suffered from being located between two major civilizations, China and Japan. These last couple of days Korea, or at least the northern Kingdom (let's call it what it is), the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, has been in the news because it detonated a nuclear device. President Barack Obama made vague threats to do something about this terrible evil.

In North Korea they probably are concerned, because they know Barack Obama's party, the Democratic Party, is the only political party in the world to ever actually use a nuclear device in a war. Not only that, but there was a conscious decision by former President Harry Truman to use the first atomic bombs against civilian targets with only symbolic military significance.

To the extent that Americans have historical memories of Korea at all, they start after World War II, when we invaded southern Korea, thus taking it from the Japanese empire and adding it to our own. In 1948 the North Korean government almost succeeded in freeing South Korea, but the United States invaded again and captured almost all of Korea, for a few days. Then the Chinese caught General MacArthur napping, and drove the U.S. troops back to about the midpoint of the Peninsula. There an uneasy armistice emerged that has left Korea divided in half to this day.

American interest in Korea long predates Harry Truman. It was seen as another part of Asia ripe for trade, exploitation, and perhaps even conquest at about the same time long-sighted, greedy Americans began coveting Japan and China. By 1900, when Theodore Roosevelt was elected Vice-President (he became President when Saint Czolgosz took out the war criminal William McKinley), some business men based in the United States had large businesses in Korea. Notable among them were Collbran and Bostwick, which also operated in China, and Leigh Hunt in mining, who was a sometimes guest Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. In 1900 Russia and Japan were struggling for control of Korea, but the British and Germans were also interested in its commercial exploitation.

Roosevelt decided that Russia was the greater threat to the overall interests of the United States. He encouraged Japan to fight with Russia over Manchuria, resulting in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, which Japan won. Recall that the U.S. was still in the genocide business in the Philippines at that time. In order to keep Russia out of North China, secure Japan as a regional ally, and secure the Philippines, Theodore Roosevelt gave his permission to the Japanese to take over Korea [See Theodore Roosevelt and the Rise of America to World Power by Howard K. Beale p. 279].

Attitudes of the U.S. ruling class towards Japan changed as Japan became a more powerful economic and military competitor. At the end of World War II the U.S. thought it would gobble up the Japanese empire, but it was not so easy. Nationalist sentiment in Asia resulted in a long transition from colonial states to independent states.

What actually happened between 1880 and 1950 has been obscured by the economic separation of the two Koreas since then. South Korea was built up as an economic powerhouse by Japan (then a U.S. underling) and the United States. North Korea's promise was stifled by an increasingly rigid ruling class that put most of the country's resources into its defense budget.

The common appraisal of the North Korean nuclear development program is that both its first and second nuclear explosions were substandard even compared to the primitive U.S. explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It sounds like making a nuclear bomb is simple: just get enough fissionable material together for a few microseconds. But in fact the teams that developed the original atomic bombs for the U.S. had to confront multiple technological problems in diverse areas such as electronics, metallurgy, conventional explosives, as well as atomic physics. They included the world's best scientists of that era. But sooner or later, if they keep at it, the Koreans will have an atomic bomb. The problem with having an atomic bomb is that if you use it, you no longer have it as a deterrent. I don't see how a nation with North Korea's resources could ever mass manufacture atomic weapons.

What should President Obama do? Instead of enlarging upon the over 100 year history of the U.S. threatening and betraying Korea, he should say:

"On behalf of the Democratic Party I sincerely apologize for our long history of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including our use of atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki and our invasion of Korea after World War II. I welcome northern Korea into the community of nations. I am pulling all U.S. troops out of Korea and promise that the U.S. will allow Korea to follow its own destiny. I hope that Korea will refrain from continued development of nuclear weapons, but in any case I am ordering an immediate major reduction of the U.S. arsenal. If Russia, China and other nuclear powers follow this path, we can eliminate nuclear weapons from the global arsenal by 2010."

The chances of that happening?

Can we serve Democratic Party brand militarist swill and say it is a Change from Republican Party brand militarist swill?

Yes We Can!

Barack Obama and Woodrow Wilson

Barack Obama was not the favorite Democratic Party primary candidate of the hard-core peace advocates within the Democratic Party (and duly noting that most serious peace activists are outside the Democratic Party). Hillary Clinton, who looks to be the next Secretary of State, had voted for the illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan back before Barack made it to the United States Senate. She was the presumed winner, and so kept a moderate stance on continuing the wars in order to be ready to go up against the Republican nominee. Barack kept saying "hope" and "change," and pointed to his not voting for beginning the wars (he did vote regularly to continue funding them). When he became the nominee, he not only assumed the Clinton "moderate" position but promised to send more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to make sure, by slaughtering even more Afghanis on their own soil, that our puppet government in Kabul would hold onto power.

But, so far, he can't claim to be as bad as Woodrow Wilson. President Wilson is one of the Presidents we are usually told was a "great" President. During his presidency the U.S. joined the great imperialist powers France and Great Britain in defeating Germany in World War I. We are told this was a victory for Democracy, even though Great Britain was demonstrably less of a democracy than Germany at that time.

U.S. historians, even those who might better be called propagandists, do not fail to mention that in the 1916 campaign Wilson sought re-election on the basis of having "kept us out of war," but then pushed our nation into the war (See Woodrow Wilson and the Lusitania [December 4, 2006]). In contrast the U.S. government is already slaughtering the innocents of Afghanistan, and note Barack Obama never promised to get us out of Afghanistan.

But there are lesser known aspects of Woodrow Wilson that will be interesting to compare with Barack Obama, the first non-white to be elected President of the United States. Notably, Wilson was a racist. A tried and true racist. Not a gun-toting, Ku Klux Klan racist, but very clear on the idea that Europeans were a superior people and that non-Europeans did not deserve full citizenship status under law. For instance, "The federal government showed little or no interest in civil rights, and indeed, Woodrow Wilson, a Southerner by birth, was only too eager to promote segregation in Washington, D.C." [p. 525, Lawrence M. Friedman's A History of American Law, Third Edition]

Moreover, Wilson's alleged love of peace is usually "proven" by his promotion of the League of Nations. While Wilson was too busy in Europe to devote America's energies to the War Against Asia, he did manage to remind the Japanese (and all Asians) that the Europeans did not consider them to be fully human. The Japanese were U.S. allies in World War I (because they wanted to grab German colonies in east Asia). They had defeated both China and Russia in earlier wars. They felt they were as civilized and capable as Europeans. The Japanese delegation to the League of Nations proposed that the Preamble to the Covenant include a declaration for "the principle of equality of nations and the just treatment of their nationals." Which, if it had passed, might have meant a gradual end of colonialism, and a peaceful Japan.

Woodrow Wilson was chairman of the committee hearing the proposal. Wanting to defeat it, he ruled that the motion could only be approved by a unanimous vote. Eleven of the seventeen nations on the committee voted for the proposal, six against, with the U.S. and the "democracy" of Great Britain not voting for it. So the League of Nations was an openly imperialist, racist organization. [Meribeth E. Cameron et al, China, Japan and the Powers, The Ronald Press Company, New York. Pages 377-379]

In short Woodrow Wilson was a disgrace. And the history of the Democratic party is disgraceful.

You can argue the Barack Obama situation two ways. Democrats like the idea that the past is no concern of theirs, that the party is what they say it is today. Forget about all those votes for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; forget the lack of protest against the U.S. paying allies to trample on the sovereignty of Somalia. Hope for a new, brighter future in which even black men, as long as they are inoffensive and have two parents with graduate degrees and somehow get themselves a degree from Harvard Law School, can become President.

Or you can ask: why would Barack Obama devote himself to the Democratic Party when he knows it is the primary racist institution in the United States? If you are going to forget the past and reform a war crimes organization, why not work within the Republican Party, which at least has the merit of having opposed slavery and segregation?

Of course, what Barack and the Democratic majority in Congress do in the next four years will at least define the true, honest, current state of the Democratic Party. Maybe it will turn out better than I think.

If this democratic republic still exists a century from now, with the same system of two-party rule, rest assured that American citizens will be told that Barack Obama was a great President. Just as they will be told that George W. Bush was a great President. No matter what Barack does or does not do in office.

Cynthia McKinney Rallies Greens in Fort Bragg, California

On Saturday I drove up to Fort Bragg see Cynthia McKinney, who is seeking the nomination of the Green Party to run for President of the United States of America. Cynthia McKinney, a former Democrat, served in the Georgia state legislature and then four terms as Georgia's 11th district Congresswomen. Saturday night she was scheduled to speak in Ukiah, California, where she would be joined by another former Democratic Party congress person, Dan Hamburg, who is also now in the Green Party. Here I am with Cynthia:

Local singer/songwriter Chris Skyhawk started off with some political folk songs, and Cynthia pulled shakers out of her purse and got with the rhythm:

Peace activist Dr. Carol Wolman spoke next about why she decided to challenge the local Democratic Party incumbent for his congressional seat. She said that the possibility of nuclear war has increased greatly, that the incumbent (Mike Thompson) has voted for all funding bills for the war in Iraq, and that he also supported all of George W. Bush's tax cuts for the rich. She promised represent this mainly liberal district's pro-peace, pro-economic justice, pro-environment citizens. She also explained why we need to impeach both George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Cynthia gave an excellent speech touching on many of America's problems and their solutions. She pointed out how racism can still be a problem in the United States. She recounted how she was attacked by the press and both the Republican Party and Democratic Party when she stood up on the floor of Congress and asked the obvious question after the 911 attacks on the World Trade Centers: "What did the administration know and when did they know it?"

She said history has shown a nation can't have both Guns and Butter without crippling its economy. Joining the Green Party was her own declaration of independence from participation in war crimes and crimes against humanity. She also talked about how hard it is to take on the political establishment. Her father had begun protesting against racism in Georgia (an all Democratic Party state back then) when he returned from serving in World War II. Supporting the Green Party now is difficult, but it is creating a path to a United States that is at peace with the world and where there is true democracy, social justice, and an environmentally sustainable economy.

Cynthia McKinney with Carol Wolman while taking questions from the audience:

The audience of about 50 people gave over $500 to Ms. McKinney's campaign. Run Cynthia Run!

More data:

Cynthia McKinney's campaign web site: www.runcynthiarun.org
Carol Wolman's campaign web site: http://www.carolwolmanforcongress.com/

Vietnam, Iraq, and the U.S. Senate

"...Congress lagged even farther. The legislature's main instrument was its constitutional authority to appropriate money for the war, but senators and representatives ... consistently balked at using that prerogative, lest they be charged with shunning their patriotic obligation to furnish funds to the fighting men in the fields."

We can say this about the Democratic Party majority in the United States House and Senate post the 2006 elections. But the Democratic Party had an even larger majority in 1967, which is the year intended by this quote from Stanley Karnow's Vietnam, A History.

And who were the leaders of the Senate from 2007 until today? Presumably the three Senators who are still possible presidential candidates, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama.

At the end of 1967 Senator Eugene McCarthy declared himself an anti-war candidate for president against the incumbent, Lyndon Johnson. Because he had served almost two full terms, Johnson announced he would not be a candidate on March 31, 1968. Then Vice-President Hubert Humphrey and Senator Robert (Bobby) Kennedy jumped into the race. Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 6, 1968. Kennedy, like his big brother and former President John, had been an eager communism fighter earlier, but had turned against pursuing the war in Vietnam. Humphrey became the Democratic nominee, but narrowly lost the election to Republican candidate Richard Nixon, who said he had a peace plan.

Unfortunately Nixon's peace plan consisted of threatening to drop atomic weapons on North Vietnam. When the Vietnamese government called his bluff he just amped up the conventional war. When that did not work he made a deal to withdraw U.S. troops. Not long after troops were withdrawn Vietnam was reunited under the North Vietnamese government.

At this point the U.S. is in Iraq because the U.S. is in Iraq and no one has had the courage to pull the plug on the idiocy. Nothing particularly bad is going to happen if U.S. troops are withdrawn. Maybe democracy will work, maybe a new un-democratic leadership will emerge, maybe the nation will break into pieces.

It just is not any of the U.S.'s business. We can't even fix problems here. We have wasted an astonishing amount of money that we will never get back.

Things might change after the 2008 elections. But don't be surprised if the Iraq War goes on in some form or another. Because George W. Bush is not particularly stupid or cowardly as U.S. politicians go. What we have is a stupid system. Stupid in, stupid out.

More on Iraq by William P. Meyers

The Truman Show

I'll probably be writing a fair amount on former U.S. President Harry S. Truman during the next few weeks. I picked the two-volume Memoirs by Harry S. Truman and a used book sale recently. Many people, including myself, have overlooked the Truman era. Mostly we know he became President when President-for-Life Franklin Roosevelt died on April 12 1945. He ordered the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Everyone thought he would lose to Thomas Dewey, who ran with future liberal Supreme Court justice Earl Warren as the Republican Presidential candidate.

I picked up the book because I wanted to know more about the period of Truman's presidency on three counts. I am writing a book, The U.S. War Against Asia, and want to know more about the circumstances of the U.S. invasion of Korea and support for the Nationalist government in China. President did some good, even some brave things, but he is best known for being the war criminal, the only political leader who used atomic weapons. I want to know more about the circumstances of that decision. And I want to know more about the civil rights situation in the U.S. and the Democratic Party's ongoing failure to support civil rights for African-Americans during the New Deal and until Lyndon Johnson became President.

But my book is accumulating sticky tabs, some about these issues but mostly marking facts that give the lie to typical U.S. mythology. Memoirs is very detailed, with practically daily ramblings on who Harry met with and what they said. In this entry to my blog I'm going to mention some of what I found. In future entries I hope to follow up in detail on some of the issues raised.

Adolph Hitler died on April 30, 1945, just 18 days after Roosevelt. Hitler became Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. Roosevelt became President on March 4, 1933, just 32 days after Hitler became Chancellor.

Biggest surprise to Harry when he became President: the atomic bomb project. Even though he had been vice-president and had been on the Senate committee that had oversight of the astronomical funds for the project, he had never been told the nature of the project.

Neither Roosevelt nor Truman had any problems meeting face to face with Joseph Stalin to divide up the world. Funny that Americans are not allowed to go down to Cuba and talk to non-Communist people. But then big fish make different rules for themselves.

Stalin and his Russian Communists supported Chiang Kai-shek in the closing days of World War II. That surprised me. Apparently they underestimated Mao's Chinese Communists. But then everyone did. It was noted by Truman that the Japanese were being forced to give up their colony in China, but Winston Churchill and the British were not willing to give up Hong Kong.

Truman, by his own light, was neither a corrupt politician nor a nobody when Roosevelt selected him for the vice-presidential spot. Harry had been chair of the U.S. Senate committee that had investigated fraudulent and wasteful practices in the U.S. military, and did a good job at that. He always supported Roosevelt's New Deal legislation.

My favorite Truman quote so far: "When the underdog gets power, he too often turns out to be an even more brutal top dog."

There is a lot of discussion of the creation of the U.N. The main take away so far is that it was designed as a mechanism for the Big Three victors of World War II (Britain, United States, and Russia) to get their way. True, they wanted peace, but only if they could keep their colonies and spheres of influence. The veto power of the permanent members of the Security Council was set up to insure that.

Truman was against colonialism and pushed for the independence of the U.S. colony of the Philippines. However, there was no question of giving up U.S. bases in the Philippines.

I have found only one case of a clear-cut lie by Truman so far. Japan had suffered some setbacks in the war at this time, but was nowhere near defeat. Truman writes, "There was no way for us to get troops into China to drive the Japanese from the Chinese mainland. Our hope was to get enough Russian troops into Manchuria to push the Japanese out." But by then the U.S. had naval and air superiority plus control of the Philippines. A glance at the map shows there should have been no problem with conveying U.S. troops to the south China coast. Elsewhere Truman reveals that he and Winston Churchill hoped to avoid English and American casualties by letting Russians die, just as had been done against Germany.

Again, in May, soon after taking office, with Hitler dead and mopping up going on in Germany, Truman notes that the "Russians have 2 Korean divisions trained in Siberia." Koreans had been fighting guerrilla warfare against the Japanese since the turn of the century. They had a pro-west government-in-exile in China and a large underground network in Korea itself. In U.S. and South Korean history books it is stated that the Russians invaded what would become North Korea, so to prevent them from grabbing all of Korea the U.S. had to invade what would become South Korea. Now I'm wondering if it wasn't actually Koreans who invaded North Korea. They were certainly communists, trained by the Russians, but Koreans invading Korea with Russian advisers looks a lot different than an invasion by Russians with a few token Korean communist hacks.

There is more, but clearly I'll have to do another installment just to hit the high points. So far I've noted the grabbiness of France, as pointed out by Stalin; attitudes towards the fascists in Spain and Argentina; how the same standards of ethics were not applied by Truman to the British and the Russians (one of my notes says "our puppets v. your puppets"). I'm sure there will be more because I am only two months into the Truman regime (but about 1/3 of the way through the Memoirs by volume).

If It Is Not a Crusade, What Is It?

We are told that the United States government is engaged in a War on Terror. We are told specifically that it is not a Christian Crusade against Islam. Does what the government tells us match up to reality?

Take a look at U.S. policy in Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Ethiopia has a Christian government but the country has substantial number of Moslems. Sudan has a Moslem government but the nation includes regions that are mostly Christian or at least not-Islamic. The U.S. government criticizes the Sudan government for its war against Christians in southern Sudan and in Darfur. But there is no criticism of the Ethiopian government for its attacks on its Moslem tribes. In fact the U.S. considers Ethiopia a key ally and gives economic and military aid.

You could argue that the governments of Sudan and Ethiopia have no choice but to fight rebel groups. Doubtless fighting spills over to attacks on tribes that support or sympathize with the rebels. Or you could argue that both governments should be condemned until they treat all of their citizens better. But to praise Ethiopia while attacking Sudan is practicing a double standard, one that is pro-Christian and anti-Islamic.

I have written a a fair amount about U.S. and Ethiopian war crimes against Somalia (See my Somalia page). The U.S. has set up a puppet government of former Somali war-lords. Since the Ethiopian army helped defeat the Islamic Justice Courts, this puppet government has terrorized the population of Ethiopia, encouraged a return to local gangsterism, and made no progress towards holding elections. If it holds elections and honors them it likely will be immediately cast out of power. But if the Justice Court supporters win the U.S. will stage another coup or invasion.

You don't actually have to be a Christian to be a U.S. puppet. The "provisional government" of Somalia is not Christian. Neither is the PLO. Neither is the government of Afghanistan. But you do have to support U.S. policy aims. What are those aims? That the U.S. get its way everywhere in the world, all the time, no matter what other people may want.

George W. Bush's Crusade Against Islam has hardened many Moslems against a more enlightened view of the world. This is a reflection of the reaction against enlightenment we have seen in the United States, with Christians in denial of basic realities like the Evolution of Species through Natural Selection while crusading against perceived evils like homosexuality and abortion. The problems of the modern world cannot be solved by religious zealots toting around cultural baggage from small desert tribes fighting over scraps of land near the Dead Sea.

Islam and Christianity both have components that can serve as a bridge to more reality-based systems of knowledge and ethics. Moderate, tolerant, inquisitive strains of Christianity and Islam, however, are losing out to fanaticism in many nations.

The American people have to stop the Crusade if we want to live in peace. We need justice applied equally to all people on a global scale. A century ago what bond traders did in New York City or London could kill people in Afghanistan or Sudan. The world has shrunk; we have seen that an angry person Kandahar can kill bond traders in New York City. What goes around comes around. George W. Bush has simply thrown a bunch of fuel into the fire.

More data:

Sudan
Ethiopia
Somalia

And the War Goes On

At what point does a nation, in particular the civilians of a nation, take on the collective responsibility for the evils ordered by their leaders?

The War in Iraq goes on. No doubt there will be suffering if U.S. troops leave. No doubt there was suffering before U.S. troops got there. But there is also no doubt that the starting of the war was a War Crime; that Democratic Party politicians, with extremely few exceptions, supported it along with Republican politicians. And there is no doubt that hundreds of thousands of people have died, both Iraqi military and civilians. The sum total of suffering rose because of American action, and it will subside when our troops leave.

The Democratic Party politicians want to wear their peace symbols and have their war too, and they have succeeded. They allowed the Republican minority to vote with substantial minority of Democratic congressmen to pass, 280 to 142, the funding needed to continue the war crimes without any significant restrictions or a timetable for withdrawing the troops. Complex maneuvers were required: the actual vote, on roll call 425, was to concur in a Senate amendment to H.R. 2206, which makes "emergency supplemental appropriations" for the 2007 fiscal year. The Senate passed H.R. 2206 as amended too, so now George W. Bush will sign it.
To stop the war in Iraq the Congress would have had to just pass no funding at all. That would not please their donors and the people whose votes are bought with your tax dollars.

The guy from my district, Representative Mike Thompson, is a good illustration of how this vote had to be engineered. Mike is popular, known for his work on the Wine Caucus, but of course against drunk driving. He states he is a Catholic, but in this northern California district he finds it best to be pro-Choice. To this day he derides the Peace Movement from the Vietnam War era; he fought in the war and will not admit he committed war crimes. But vast majority of voters here want out of Iraq, and not in 2008. So Mike supports our troops, but voted against the appropriation because he was assured that it would not pass. He's tired of those peace protests outside his office. I hope he is having nightmares, I hope the ghosts of the Vietnamese are prioritizing haunting his dreams at night. Maybe that is why wine is so important to him.

But we are collectively responsible for allowing this to happen. I don't want to go too far with the idea of collective responsibility. The Democratic Party, headed by President-for-Life Franklin D. Roosevelt and his successor Harry Truman, decided collective responsibility made it okay to firebomb German and Japanese urban centers. Then they committed the most famous war crimes in history, the vaporization of the civilian populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

If the Islamic fundamentalist warriors hold the U.S. collectively responsible for supplying military aid to Israel, does that justify an attack on a basically civilian target like the World Trade Center?

I don't expect the American people to do much thinking. It would be nice, but historically it is not a trend. But to the limited extent that thought takes place that is not the mere echoing of stupid TV shows (and YouTube), I think we all should think about collective responsibility.

The communists of Vietnam may not be my cup of tea from an ideological standpoint, but I think they got it right as far as national responsibility. They had a responsibility to throw out the French. They had a responsibility to throw out the Americans. But they did not need to attack the French in France or Americans in actual United States territory.

Self-defense, or collective self-defense, should not be waived as a right and duty. But using it as an excuse for aggression is an old trick, used by petty criminals and Presidents of the United States alike.

Iraq is not about self-defense. Afghanistan is not about self-defense either.

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Dem Pols Just Can't Stop the War

Power to do good eludes Democratic Party members of Congress. Whether they are in the House of Representatives, or in the Senate, they just can't stop the War in Iraq. Some of them say they would like to stop the war. They would prefer peace. But they just don't have the power to stop it. If only there were not a Republican President. If only there were a few more Democrats in the Senate. If only the people of Iraq would stop fighting the U.S. soldiers and the U.S. installed puppet government. If only the Shiites and the Sunnis would stop their 1300 year-old feud.

Of course the Democratic Party members of Congress could stop the war. They aren't willing to make the sacrifices necessary. They are not willing to risk their careers. They are not willing to risk a backlash that might put a Republican in their own job, or a pro-war Democrat, or that might tip the 2008 Presidential election into the hands of pro-choice, pro-gay former New York Mayor Rudoph the-red-state-reindeer Giuliani.

Because what is it to Hillary, Obama, or Nancy Pelossi if a few more U.S. troops die, or a whole bunch of Iraqi rebel nationalists or even a few hundred thousand more innocent Iraqi civilian women and children? Nothing is more important than a career in politics. Nothing is more important than being able to reward your campaign contributors, and being in turn rewarded by them.

The real job of the Federal Government of the United States of America is economic allocation. The real job of the Democratic Party is to tax the middle class and give enough of the taxes to corporate America to keep the campaign contributions coming, and give enough of the money to poor Americans to keep them voting for Democratic Party politicians.

Iraq is a distraction for the Democratic Party politicians, but it has begun to really bother the activist base of the Democratic Party. That base might ask itself what it is doing registered in a Party that was founded on the principal of Slavery by Indian Killer hero Andrew Jackson; what are they doing promoting the Party of War Crimes like Hiroshima and the U.S. invasion of Vietnam; why do they think the party that gave birth to the political-military-industrial complex under Franklin Roosevelt is going to become a peace party?

Democratic Party peace activists believe the lies and are trying to hold the liars to their word. From what I gather there is a pretty sophisticated campaign for peace going on that is separate from the kinds of peace rally activity promoted by the Green Party and non-partisan activists. Lots of Democrats in Congress are feeling they have to find ways of voting for peace, without actually gaining the reality of troop withdrawal. That they are doing a good job of.

This week presidential candidates Hillary Clinton (the Senator from Wall Street) and Barack to-the-barricades Obama voted on a motion in a way that was considered anti-war. This will help them, particularly Hillary, with Democratic volunteers in this primary season. But of course it did not stop the war. [See Obama and Clinton Back Ending Iraq Combat by March 31, New York Times, March 16, 2007]

People who have not studied political science often don't know about the vote-visibility shuffle. This is an old, well-worked out technique. The parties allocate the votes that can be on the losing side to the politicians who need them the most to impress their constituencies. It is done all the time, in all fifty state legislatures and in Congress. The outcome is decided in advance; everyone gets re-elected, most of the time, under this system.

So there are two ways to stop the illegal and immoral U.S. War Against the People of Iraq. It could be stopped by the Democrats in Congress if they were willing to refuse to pass any appropriations of money. End of story: it won't happen. Too many Democratic voters and contributors depend on that money.

The war will end, more or less, after a new President is sworn in, which would be January 2009. Rudolph Giuliani is a pragmatic guy. No matter what he promisses to who in this campaign, as President he will say he doesn't care who wins the civil war in Iraq, so what is the point of keeping troops there? The oil sitting in the ground just gets more valuable as the years pass; the U.S. should not care who gets the royalties for allowing it to be pumped.

See also:
Brief History of the Democratic Party

Hawaii, Iraq, War and Peace

What does Hawaii have to do with the U.S. War Against Iraq?

This morning I posted the draft chapter The U.S. Conquest of Hawaii and Other Pacific Islands, which is part of my larger work The U.S. War Against Asia. I probably will not include the Iraq War I and Iraq War II or the War Against Terrorism or Afghanistan in the Asian War book. But I could, since technically Iraq and Afghanistan are in Asia. That goes back to those crazy Greeks, who defined Asia as all the lands to the East of their homeland.

In the U.S. war against Asia it is important to note that the broader context of the war is political, economic, and cultural. Before the Hawaiian Islands were invaded by the U.S. military they were invaded by U.S. Christian missionaries. Several of the major figures in the U.S. seizure of Hawaii were children of those missionaries who were born on the islands and became lawyers or businessmen.

While Hawaii was desirable as a way station for U.S. merchant shipping, it also began to produce an important crop, cane sugar. I am indebted to Luzviminda Bartolome Francisco and Jonathan Shepard Fast whose book Conspiracy for Empire details the role of the sugar industry in the Spanish American War and seizure of Hawaii. It is a sad commentary on the American book publishing industry that this book is quite rare, having never been published in the U.S. and being out of print in the Philippines, where it was published by the Foundation for Nationalist Studies in 1985.

At times the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans saw "missionary" efforts as a prelude to colonization by European nations or the United States. The same is true of commercial relationships. Yet closed door policies proved to be even more disastrous than trade and cultural exchange. The military weakness of the Asian nations encouraged military aggression by, in turn, Portugal, Spain, Holland, England, Germany and the U.S.

The tragedy of Japan's westernization is a sad, related tale. To resist the Europeans the Japanese decided they had to control, and eventually conquer, their Asian neighbors.

Iraq too has been a victim of a system where all roads lead to failure. The collapse of the Turkish (Ottoman) Empire during World War I, while it liberated many subject states, meant that no single subject state could successfully resist Great Britain, Germany, France or the U.S. At best the Islamic nations could hope to play one off against the other. Iraq was at first a client state of Britain and then of the United States. Saddam Hussein started as a socialist, but became a U.S. puppet. While he did the U.S.'s dirty work invading Iran, he led a military and economic buildup of Iraq that also followed Turkey's lead in creating a secular, non-Islamic culture. He thought he had grown strong enough to cut the puppet strings, but he was wrong.

The key to solving the problems of the world is disarming the United States of America. It is true that some other evil empire might emerge, but disarmament is a likely course to a peaceful world. Sadly, Japan is now run by politicians who want to re-arm.

I hope that countries like Japan, China, Iran, Korea and Japan will only use their armies and navies for self-defense. But military establishments grown powerful create their own dynamics, as we have seen in the U.S.

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