“When people are occupied, resistance is justified!”

Élise Rivet, known as Mère Élisabeth after she became a nun, "After the fall of the French Third Republic to Nazi Germany in World War II, she began hiding refugees from the Gestapo and eventually used her convent to store weapons and ammunition for the Mouvements Unis de Résistance (MUR)."

She died in a Nazi concentration camp, and is universally considered a hero of the resistance. Tell me again about Hamas storing munitions in Mosques. Victory to the Palestinian Resistance!

Imperialism in a Bell Jar?

I wrote this polemic as part of an ongoing discussion about the attitude of revolutionaries toward imperialism and toward the military conflicts that have arisen out of the "Arab Spring." It's crossposted from Kasama, "A Reply to Pham Binh and Clay Claiborne: Imperialism in a Bell Jar?"  It's a response to an article by Claiborne and Binh on an episode late in World War 2 where the revolutionary anti-colonialists of the Viet Minh led by Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap briefly cooperated with the OSS, the predecessor of the American CIA. I've discussed many of these themes before but they remain central.

Ever since they decided to back US/NATO intervention in Libya (and later to argue for the US to arm or otherwise support the rebel forces in Syria), Clay Claiborne, Pham Binh and other folks associated with the North Star trend like Louis Proyect, have been repeatedly touting this story of US-Viet Minh cooperation. They fall back on this story as though it's some kind of stunning death-ray evidence that annihilates any argument against their position. They argue that it bolsters their case, somehow transforming their support of their own imperialist power into an act of revolutionary internationalism.

There are many problems with the attempt to enlist this historical episode as an argument for their position. Let's dismiss outright Binh's ridiculous assertion that this is just about historical "fact." We all know why he posted this article. But let's tackle a few of the problems with Claiborne and Binh's assertions.

So what actually happened in Vietnam? It's instructive to read Ho Chi Minh's 1952 article "Imperialist Aggressors Can Never Enslave The Heroic Vietnamese People," up on Marxists.org. Unlike the recipients of US armed beneficence in Libya, Ho is absolutely clear what the role of the United States was in Indochina. He rightfully called the American interventionists "masters" of French colonialism: "The U.S. interventionists have nurtured the French aggressors and the Vietnamese puppets, but the Vietnamese people do not let anybody delude and enslave them."
There was a brief historical moment when the strategy of Ho and the Viet Minh was to exploit the contradictions among imperialists. In the declaration of independence that Ho wrote, he says "The whole Vietnamese people, animated by a common purpose, are determined to fight to the bitter end against any attempt by the French colonialists to reconquer their country. We are convinced that the Allied nations which at Tehran and San Francisco have acknowledged the principles of self-determination and equality of nations, will not refuse to acknowledge the independence of Vietnam."

But there is simply no comparison, historical or otherwise, between the situation in Indochina in 1945 and North Africa and the Middle East in the 2010s. There is simply no contradiction to exploit. And while I think many debates are possible about the nature of the war between Japan and the US, the US was aiding an actual anti-colonial national liberation struggle, regardless of whether they were ultimately trying to hijack it. Binh has claimed that in Libya the US was aiding a "bourgeois democratic revolution." In the post-colonial age of neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism, this argument strikes me as dangerously flawed. Perhaps BInh would support waves of NATO airstrikes against the less-than-democratic regimes across Africa? What does he think of the French neocolonialist intervention in Mali?

Who in Libya or Syria today is calling out imperialism for what it is? It's not the people that the US and its close allies are assisting, and that Claiborne and Binh seem to be supporting.
One has only to look as far as Binh's North Star blog to see what the relationship of the pro-NATO Libyan forces is to US imperialism: In "Stage Two of the Libyan Revolution," a "Libyan Rebel" writes, unchecked by any North Star moderator, "Since the killing of Libya’s tyrant and official declaration of liberation, the Libyan people began calling for the next stage in their revolution which is state building....The attack on the U.S. consulate and the passing of the late Chris Stevens was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The act of attacking guests of Libya and the resulting death of a good friend of the Libyan people highlighted the fragility of the state and the danger these militias posed." The article is glowingly illustrated by a picture of Libyans carrying signs like "Sorry People of America" to atone for the attack on the Benghazi spy den.

Back to Vietnam, it's no stretch of the imagination to draw a straight line from US cooperation with the Viet Minh toward the end of WWII to the US relationship with French colonialism and their various puppets in South Vietnam after the war and the eventual defeat of the French, to the apocalyptic war of annihilation waged by the US against the NLF and the North Vietnamese in the 1960s and early 1970s. It would be interesting to know what Ho Chi Minh thought, from the benefit of historical hindsight much later before he died in 1969, whether the aid the Viet Minh received against the Japanese was balanced by the fact it allowed US imperialism a toehold in the independence struggle. Certainly the appeals to American conscience in the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence seem to have quickly given way to condemnations of American meddling.

Which brings us to another problem with Claiborne and Binh's arguments. They argue as though NATO intervention in Libya happened in a bell jar. Or now, that US arming the Free Syrian Army that they advocate would be happening in that same bell jar. Ironically they don't seem to even notice the leap from Libya to Syria. One might think such an attitude was quaintly naive, but neither Claiborne nor Binh are naifs new to the way the world works. Is it an accident that the US/NATO embrace of the Libyan manifestation of the so-called Arab spring corresponded to the US acquiescence of the smashing of Arab spring revolts in the US client state of Bahrain? Is it an accident that in the aftermath of the NATO intervention in Libya, full of the same brutal violence from the sky that NATO and the US displayed in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has now successfully established a drone base in neighboring Niger? Is there no connection between what imperialism wrought in Iraq and what they're up to now in the rest of the Arab world?

Imperialism was emboldened by its success in Libya. Obama's strategy — which, by the way, should be of great concern to revolutionaries — has been to employ clients and high-tech weapons systems to maximize US military success while minimizing the potential for domestic opposition; this has proved itself invaluable to imperialism's warchest. Regardless of the nature of the Gaddafi regime (in my opinion unmourned), US imperialism achieved a major victory in Libya. And Binh and Claiborne cheered that victory on.

Elsewhere Binh has argued that his call for arming Syrian and Libyan "revolutionaries" doesn't mean he supports U.S. "boots on the ground." But this is meaningless semantics. Everyone knows that the claim the US only facilitated actual military action by NATO members Britain and France in Libya is bullshit. And everyone knows that the claim that the FSA is being armed by Saudi Arabia and Qatar but not the US is equally bullshit.

Imperialism is a web of dependent connections, and the destructive, world-dominating force that is US imperialism is the monstrous spider at the center of that web. It's true that the US finds the presence of Salafist and Al-Qaeda-linked forces in the ranks of the Syrian rebels somewhat problematic. It's true that despite the militant rhetoric of the Assads over the years they have proved to be some of the best, non-actually-threatening neighbors the Zionist regime could have asked for, and that therefore the US and its Israeli allies are waiting to see which way the wind blows before making their next commitments. But the partial hesitation of US imperialism to throw its full weight behind the Syrian opposition, or to establish something like a no-fly zone (a thinly veiled declaration of war) shouldn't be seen as some kind of alibi for what Binh and Claiborne are calling for.

Let's get real: Pham BInh and Clay Clayborne are standing right next to the war criminal John McCain in calling for the US to send heavy weapons to the Syrian rebels. The John McCain who, by the way, didn't mind being photographed with sectarian kidnappers in his quick jaunt across the Syrian border.

In my opinion the Assad regime is not something communists have any business supporting. But as the leftish Lebanese resistance movement HIzbollah and some Palestinian factions enter an increasingly polarized conflict on Assad's side, will Binh and Claiborne really be cheering on the shipping of weapons to be used against, say, the PFLP?

What will be the legacy of avowed socialists supporting the military actions of "their own" imperialist power? Karl Liebknecht taught this to us a long time ago: "The main enemy is at home!"  The best way for those of us in imperialist countries to aid the oppressed peoples of the world is to do everything we can to defeat the ruling classes of our own countries. Solidarity that doesn't follow that basic lesson is no solidarity at all: and every failure of leftists like Binh and Claiborne to tell the truth to Libyan or Syrian rebels who might be listening to us further weakens the already damaged reputation of socialism.

It's not like the current conflicts aren't the first time leftists have gone soft on imperialism. In the US wars on Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, segments of the left all abandoned their principle to support the actions of imperialism. It's a timeworn tradition that has happened over and over again when socialists in the homeland of imperialism lose faith in their arguments and doctrines. And the embrace of "state department socialism" is usually also marked by all sorts of other accommodations to capitalism, to imperialism. It marks a shift in roads: is this shift something the fragile and tiny US left can afford?

You wouldn't know it from reading Claiborne and Binh's writings up on North Star, but there are Syrian leftists who recognize the danger from imperialism, while also completely opposing the Assad regime. From the Syrian Leftist Coalition's statement "A Marxist Perspective on Syria: A letter from the Syrian Left Coalition to the Leftists in the Arab Countries" (definitely worth a read in its entirety):

"The media is trying to represent the people’s revolution by the forces of current political “opposition”. This media does not focus on the fighting people, but it considers an “opposition” is combating the regime. This shallow logic reflects a shallow “Marxism” that considers this opposition to represent the people, and thus approaches the revolution through the opposition... No doubt these “opposition” parties should be criticized. Parties that called for an imperialist military intervention, and published an ethnic, fundamentalist speech, in alliance with imperialists and reactionary Arab regimes, should be condemned. These parties are very harmful for the revolution as much as they delay the growth of this mass movement by posing the a speech that frightens the minorities, and also frightens the wide spectrum of people that supports resistance and defiance against imperialism and Zionism...In this situation, a Marxist should be with the people against the regime. At the same time, a Marxist should also fight against this liberal elite “opposition” and against all these fundamentalist forces that threaten a derailing of the revolution into an inter-ethnic and inter-religious struggle, and this is the exact aim the regime was trying to achieve since the beginning of the popular uprising. This can only be achieved first by improving the role of the oppressed masses in this struggle, expressing their demands in a clear program, organize the revolution, and stating a strategy for this revolution in order to overpass its spontaneity into an organized conscious movement.... We should reject any calls for imperialist military intervention, and on this basis also we should reject the intervention of Russia and Iran."

Yes, this is a harder, more difficult position to maintain. The conflict in Syria has taken thousands and thousands of innocent lives. Lives that the United States doesn't actually care about, not one bit. Communists must take the side of the Syrian people, and that means telling some truths that might be unpopular and hard to hear: that intervention of the US into the Syrian civil war, which is already happening, will not free the Syrian people. US weapons come with long strings attached.

So that story about Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Minh, and the American OSS is an interesting historical tale. But as a rationalization for abandoning everything revolutionaries know to be true about imperialism? No thanks. The first gut response of revolutionaries in the U.S should be to bristle with rage against the machinations of our imperialist ruling class.

Vietnam, Libya, Syria, different stories, different times. But the enemy remains the same.

Crimes Against Humanity

When reminded of today's grim anniversary, I thought I had something to add on the topic. I re-read my entry last year, and realize the same exact thing needs to be said again. We as Americans have this strange idealized image of ourselves: ever quick with a qualification or an excuse for the actions of our nation and its politicians that conflicts with our imaginary view of ourselves, I think we'd be happier if we'd go with our first gut impulse. Killing hundreds of thousands of people in an instant is just wrong. Start from there and work backwards. There's no rationalization for atomic weapons that holds up, if you're honest with yourself and any reasonable sense of morality. When you start to make an excuse, work forward again to the incineration of thousands of innocent children and find your way back. From last year:


One nation has actually used the ultimate weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons. That nation is the United States of America.

Sixty-five years ago today, the United States bombed the city of Hiroshima in southern Japan. Nearly a hundred thousand lives--mostly civilians--were instantly snuffed out as the city itself was flattened. Tens and tens of thousands of others had their lives cut short, condemned to dealing with painful burns and other injuries and to the slow but equally fatal poisonous effects of lethal radiation exposure.

The big lie of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki, bombed three days later) is that the United States had no choice: it traded the lives of two cities worth of Japanese civilians for the shortening of the war. But for the four years of the war the American government and its loyal cultural institutions had churned out massive amounts of dehumanizing racist anti-Japanese propaganda like the poster at left. Loyal American citizens of Japanese ancestry had been sent to internment camps. It is not surprising that the American military and scientific establishment would use the last days of a war obviously almost over to experiment on a civilian population it had already deemed subhuman. The United States made its deadly mathematical calculation because it believed that dropping the bomb on Japanese civilians would be like crushing so many cockroaches. Many -- though certainly not all -- scholars believe that the Japanese government was ready to surrender, especially anticipating the obviously imminent entry of the Soviet Union into the war. The Japanese imperialists had a record of military cruelty to civilians dating back to the attack on Shanghai in 1937; that's undeniable. But with the nuclear attacks on Japan, the United States became fully committed to that same club.

From the story of survivor Setsuko Thurlow:

"I turned around and saw the outside world. Although it was morning, it looked like twilight because of the dust and smoke in the air. People at a distance saw the mushroom cloud and heard a thunderous roar. But I did not see the cloud because I was in it. I did not hear the roar, just the deadly silence broken only by the groans of the injured. Streams of stunned people were slowly shuffling from the city centre toward nearby hills. They were naked or tattered, burned, blackened and swollen. Eyes were swollen shut and some had eyeballs hanging out of their sockets. They were bleeding, ghostly figures like a slow-motion image from an old silent movie. Many held their hands above the level of their hearts to lessen the throbbing pain of their burns. Strips of skin and flesh hung like ribbons from their bones. Often these ghostly figures would collapse in heaps never to rise again. With a few surviving classmates I joined the procession carefully stepping over the dead and dying.

At the foot of the hill was an army training ground about the size of two football fields. Literally every bit of it was covered with injured and dying who were desperately begging, often in fain whispers, “Water, water, please give me water”. But we had no containers to carry water. We went to a nearby stream to wash the blood and dirt from our bodies. Then we tore off parts of our clothes, soaked them with water and hurried back to hold them to the mouths of the dying who desperately sucked the moisture. We kept busy at this task of giving some comfort to the dying all day. There were no medical supplies of any kind and we did not see any doctor or nurse. When darkness fell, we sat on the hillside, numbed by the massive scale of death and suffering we had witnessed, watching the entire city burn. In the background were the low rhythmic whispers from the swollen lips of the ghostly figures, still begging for water."

More survivor testimony can be read at Voices of Hibakusha.

Remember this: when the U.S. campaigns against weapons of mass destruction, when it marches into Iraq, threatens Iran and North Korea, raises the spectre of rogue nukes, this is not because it believes WMD are wrong, it's because it wants exclusive use of these monstrosities for itself and its allies.

WW2 poster snagged from Maximum Advantage in Pictures blog.

Belief Without Doubt?

"Stones from the River" is the story of a young German woman growing up before, and living through, the Second World War. Written by German-American author Ursula Hegi, it's not a new book: a copy has been floating around my office and it was my turn to read it. It was published in the early 1990s and at some point achieved the dubious award of being an Oprah book club selection. Anyway the perspective of the book's heroine, Trudi Montag, is quite unique. She's an outsider in her community since she was born a "little person," or dwarf. It's a satisfying story with, of course, more than its share of tragedy given the setting. Trudi isn't an international spy or resistance hero, she's just a person trying to live her life, though her personal morality helps her to make important decisions to reject the national chauvinism and anti-Semitism rising with the Nazification of the world around her.

Anyway one passage caused me to fold up the corner of the page it resonated so clearly. It's about the time she hears Hitler give a speech shortly after he took over the government. At the risk of invoking the dread Godwin's Law, I thought this little bit of fiction shined a spotlight on a phenomenon I worry about in our own trying times. Which isn't to say any of the current wave of political demagogues out there are quite so genocidally single-minded or precipitously bound for dictatorship as was Hitler. History doesn't repeat itself exactly, but it makes one grateful that the current crop of hateful idiots out there in the public square seem to lack the charisma necessary to truly rise above the mobs in which they are ensconsed.

Here's the excerpt:

"He was not nearly as tall as she'd expected from newspaper photos, and he look straight at her when he talked, not excluding her like the assistant pastor, Freidrich Beier, who spoke above her head as if she were too insignificant to be included.... Herr Hitler's mouth moved independently of his eyes. There was something wrong with his face: the features didn't work together. But he looked directly at her — at everyone in the swollen crowd — like a magician performing some amazing trick of singling out everyone at once, and it was that gaze — filled with an immeasurable greed — that held all of them while his high-pitched voice spun silken ropes around them.

She fought the excitement of his gaze and voice because what he wanted from her was only too familiar — belief without doubts — something she'd resisted since first grade.

She fought him by reminding herself what her father had said to Emil Hesping — that they lived in a country where believing had taken the place of knowing..... Trudi had a sudden image of him, alone in his bedroom.... The greed she'd felt in him, the greed which had sucked all those people into his influence, was still in the room with him, and she was seized by a deep fear for the world." [emphasis added by me]

Isn't that it exactly? "Belief without doubts" and "a country where believing has taken the place of knowing" seem to sum up exactly what I find so terrifying about the right-wing in America. There is no factual discussion to be had; no argument that can be won on its own merits. In line with yesterday's musings on lies and liars, today's demagogues are free to say whatever they want because people are greedy for easy solutions, for easy answers, and they know that there is an audience out there who will not question or doubt what they say. Trying times indeed.

Image is a 1933 German propaganda postcard from the online German Propaganda Archive.

A War Resister's Plea

What does it mean to be committed to peace, to be fully committed to resisting the folly of war? I found an amazing document. It's an article written by my father, Peter Horst, during the time he was fighting the draft as a conscientious objector in the late 1950s. Frustratingly missing the first two pages and an unknown number of concluding pages, it details the basis for his refusal of military service. It seems to date from late 1956 or 1957, written either right before or during his chosen alternative civilian service with the American Friends Service Committee.

He believed that what he called "Brotherly Love" could be elevated to the moral principle of religion, and that this devotion to living out what might be to some an abstraction was to him a call to refuse actions that violated his beliefs. The first part of the document I found is a measured theological defense of what he called the religion of brotherly love. He cites Christianity, Hinduism and Buddhism without suggesting that his beliefs were the doctrines of any single faith. But what I'd like to present here is a section toward the end on the reasoning behind rejecting, behind resisting, violence and war.

I know that he defended his conscientious objection for years and years in the courts; I assume that this document was written to support his legal case by codifying his position. I find the document not only personally inspiring but tremendously relevant. In discussions on The Cahokian and elsewhere on the meaning of war in a historical sense and on confronting the challenges of today's wars in an absolute real sense, I find much here that validates my own beliefs. And above all, at a time when the military's proscriptions against gays may finally end with the possible repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell (DADT), this document reinforces my view of why as important as it is to struggle against discrimination, struggling against militarism and war should be a moral imperative that leads justice-seeking people to reject the military itself. Here is an extended excerpt:

WHY I MUST REFUSE TO BE A SOLDIER
by Peter Horst

I believe that one must love one's enemies, and that by so doing they will cease to be enemies, since Love begets Love. If a person in a situation of violence attempts to use Love as his weapon, and fails, I believe it is the fault of imperfect use, not the fault of the weapon. In the case of an individual citizen in a nation committed to the use of violence, it is possible that he might never face the enemy to test that weapon, especially in this age of long-range electronic and atomic weapons. But to regard the belief as worthless, simply because other weapons are in official use, would show a lack of faith in the true worth of Love.

Military weapons, unlike the religious belief of Love, have been tried, and proved worthless by the number of wars to end wars in this century alone. But Love has converted enmity to Love in many cases: Christ's crucifixion, Gandhi's crusade in India, countless individual cases of the use of non-violent defense, have all proved that Love is a power excelling hatred.

Committed to Brotherly Love, I must therefore refuse to kill. I believe an army is organized in direct opposition to my religious values, and promotes only hatred and violence. Therefore I must refuse to participate in any military activity. It is foolish to think that an army can make room for Love of enemy. Even though there are non-combatant positions open in an army, they only further the military cause; therefore I refuse to accept any military position.

My belief in the power of Love is such that, when ordered to act in opposition to it, I must refuse. I do not deny allegience to the state, but because I believe there is nothing superior to Love, and that nothing of value cancome from contradicting it, my duty to it takes precedence over any other.

This is true not only in a situation where the state makes a demand upon me, but in any case where a course of action is demanded that violates my belief. To cite the traditional case, if my wife were attacked by a maniac, or any person bereft of reason and therefore unable to be dealt with reasonably, I would not take his life in defense. I would be willing to use a minimum of non-violent force to restrain him, realizing that he could then be dealt with therapeutically. If he were dead, there would be no dealing with him at all. In this instance, there is no reason to assume I must assent to war. In war, one does not not forgive, but murders his trespasser, and his family and friends as well; the victor then imposes his own order upon the vanquished.

In case of attack by a sane person, or an army, I would use no force beyond the reasonable power of Love. I am fully aware that my practice and knowledge in this is limited, and that I would therefore be liable to injury or death. I accept this as necessary, until the art of Love is fully perfected. Because violence is so dangerous, I do not think there is any excuse for using it. Neither self-defense nor defense of loved ones is sufficient cause for violating the rule of Love. If I were to deny my religion and make an exception in some instance by returning violence for violence, there would be that much less chance for the ultimate worth of my belief to be shown.

There can be no world peace and security without loving forgiveness, and will never be as long as men consider anything more valuable than Brotherly Love. I do not believe the practice of this can be put off into the future, until some less 'dangerous' time. I believe the danger of violence far outweighs the danger of placing one's defense in the practice, even though not perfected, of Love.

I have shown that my religion rests on a loving and peaceful attitude in myself. It may be worthwhile to show a few of the resulting reasons why and how I believe in non-violence.

A strong reason stems from World War II. I believe that a man is, and must be, personally responsible for what he does. The Allied governments expressed this same belief when they initiated the Nurenburg trials for war criminals. They announced that each soldier and citizen was personally responsible for carrying out orders later defined as criminal and atrocious. It is thus impossible for a person to subordinate the demands of his individual conscience to those of the collective state, since he himself, and not the majority of citizens, must answer for every life he takes, every order he follows that results in what the victors can later define as a "war crime." My conscience makes it impossible for me to accept the responsibility for what a soldier must do; therefore I must refuse to be a soldier.

Every war is one of defense, and both sides claim to be defending. Hitler said so, Tojo said so, and we said so. Israel said so and launched an attack [in 1956 --ish]; Egypt said so and fought back; England said so and joined in, along with France whose purpose was also "defense." A country uses the weapons it believes in and has on hand; thus it is likely that this country may be forced to resort for defense to the atomic weapons she has specialized in. In contradiction of this, I will defend myself only as far as Love will allow. If necessary, I would prefer to die for a cause I hold equally as high as that held by whoever chooses to bomb me, or whoever choose to go to war for whatever country he calls his own. I will not violate my religion by seeking to destroy my enemy, or by helping those of my own country whose different belief leads them to bear arms.

I am not willing to be defended, or to defend anyone else, by a series of Nagasakis and Hiroshimas. Aside from being contradictory to Brotherly Love, the price to be paid in such cases makes defense worthless. Some have called our past dropping of the A-bomb, and the possibility that we might drop a bigger one in the future, the lesser of two evils. The greater evil is supposed to be the occupation and plundering of our land by the enemy, and the death of some of our own people. My religion teaches different values. All men are to be loved equally. It is not a lesser evil to kill a Russian than for a Russian to kill an American. Human lives, not nationalities, are involved. If an A-bomb were dropped on Detroit, it would only compound the evil and destruction to retaliate in kind. The only way to diminish the evil is to forgive, and to cultivate Love.

(The above graphic is the logo of the venerable War Resister's League, a pacifist organization founded in 1923. I don't believe my father was affiliated with that group but he did work with the Central Committee of Conscientious Objectors.)

The Good War?

I'm slowly reading the late Howard Zinn's epic A People's History of the United States. It's such clear thinking; an amazing book. A loss not to have him around any longer. I'm amazed in chapter after chapter at how clearly he identifies the established historical myths about American history and then harpoons them with a reordering of the facts and a change in perspective from that of the rulers to that of the people.

This couldn't be clearer in his description of World War Two. Even many who think of themselves as radicals and pacifists wind up giving that war some kind of pass. It was the defeat of fascism! It was done to save the Jews from genocide! The U.S. was attacked!

Here are some excerpts from the People's History that put that war in context:

"For the United States to step forward as a defender of helpless countries matched its image in American high school history textbooks, but not its record in world affairs.... What seemed clear at the time was that the United states was a democracy with certain liberties, while Germany was a dictatorship persecuting its Jewish minority, imprisoning dissidents, whatever their religion, while proclaiming the supremacy of the Nordic 'race.' However, blacks, looking at anti-Semitism in Germany might not see their own situation in the U.S. as much different. And the United States had done little about Hitler's policies of persecution.....It was not Hitler's attacks on the Jews that brought the United States into World War II, ant more than the enslavement of 4 million blacks brought Civil War in 1861...It was the Japanese attack on a link in the American Pacific Empire that did it....

"Was the war war being fought to establish that Hitler was wrong in his ideas of white Nordic supremacy over 'inferior' races? The United States armed forces were segregated by race. When troops were jammed on the Queen Mary in early 1945 to go to combat duty in the European theater, the blacks were stowed down in the depths of the ship near the engine room, as far as possible from the fresh air of the deck, in a bizarre reminder of the slave voyages of old. The Red Cross, with government approval, separated the blood donations of black and white....

"The war not only put the United States in a position to dominate much of the world; it created conditions for effective control at home. The unemployment, the economic distress, and the consequent turmoil that had marked the thirties, only partly relieved by New Deal measures, had been pacified, overcome by the greater turmoil of the war."

That's key sentences in something like ten pages. The whole thing is really required reading, especially today as we find ourselves repeating so much that happened in the 1930s, without, thus far, the class struggle.

(Photo of the Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz at Oswiecim, Poland, taken by me in 1976)

Racism, The Great American Tradition

"Careless matches aid the Axis...Prevent Forest Fires!" U.S. government flyer, 1940s.

The Biggest Terrorist Attack of All Time

One nation has actually used the ultimate weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons. That nation is the United States of America.

Sixty-five years ago today, the United States bombed the city of Hiroshima in southern Japan. Nearly a hundred thousand lives--mostly civilians--were instantly snuffed out as the city itself was flattened. Tens and tens of thousands of others had their lives cut short, condemned to dealing with painful burns and other injuries and to the slow but equally fatal poisonous effects of lethal radiation exposure.

The big lie of Hiroshima (and Nagasaki, bombed three days later) is that the United States had no choice: it traded the lives of two cities worth of Japanese civilians for the shortening of the war. But for the four years of the war the American government and its loyal cultural institutions had churned out massive amounts of dehumanizing racist anti-Japanese propaganda like the poster at left. Loyal American citizens of Japanese ancestry had been sent to internment camps. It is not surprising that the American military and scientific establishment would use the last days of a war obviously almost over to experiment on a civilian population it had already deemed subhuman. The United States made its deadly mathematical calculation because it believed that dropping the bomb on Japanese civilians would be like crushing so many cockroaches. Many -- though certainly not all -- scholars believe that the Japanese government was ready to surrender, especially anticipating the obviously imminent entry of the Soviet Union into the war. The Japanese imperialists had a record of military cruelty to civilians dating back to the attack on Shanghai in 1937; that's undeniable. But with the nuclear attacks on Japan, the United States became fully committed to that same club.

From the story of survivor Setsuko Thurlow:

"I turned around and saw the outside world. Although it was morning, it looked like twilight because of the dust and smoke in the air. People at a distance saw the mushroom cloud and heard a thunderous roar. But I did not see the cloud because I was in it. I did not hear the roar, just the deadly silence broken only by the groans of the injured. Streams of stunned people were slowly shuffling from the city centre toward nearby hills. They were naked or tattered, burned, blackened and swollen. Eyes were swollen shut and some had eyeballs hanging out of their sockets. They were bleeding, ghostly figures like a slow-motion image from an old silent movie. Many held their hands above the level of their hearts to lessen the throbbing pain of their burns. Strips of skin and flesh hung like ribbons from their bones. Often these ghostly figures would collapse in heaps never to rise again. With a few surviving classmates I joined the procession carefully stepping over the dead and dying.

At the foot of the hill was an army training ground about the size of two football fields. Literally every bit of it was covered with injured and dying who were desperately begging, often in fain whispers, “Water, water, please give me water”. But we had no containers to carry water. We went to a nearby stream to wash the blood and dirt from our bodies. Then we tore off parts of our clothes, soaked them with water and hurried back to hold them to the mouths of the dying who desperately sucked the moisture. We kept busy at this task of giving some comfort to the dying all day. There were no medical supplies of any kind and we did not see any doctor or nurse. When darkness fell, we sat on the hillside, numbed by the massive scale of death and suffering we had witnessed, watching the entire city burn. In the background were the low rhythmic whispers from the swollen lips of the ghostly figures, still begging for water."

More survivor testimony can be read at Voices of Hibakusha.

Remember this: when the U.S. campaigns against weapons of mass destruction, when it marches into Iraq, threatens Iran and North Korea, raises the spectre of rogue nukes, this is not because it believes WMD are wrong, it's because it wants exclusive use of these monstrosities for itself and its allies.

WW2 poster snagged from Maximum Advantage in Pictures blog.

UPDATE: Some devastating new photos from a few weeks after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are up at Life.com

In review of HBO's "Pacific": No More Great Wars!

I've been watching the new HBO TV miniseries "Pacific." Produced by Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks, who also produced the series "Band of Brothers," it aims to tell the story of the Pacific theater of the Second World War using the same combination of ultra-violent realistic action sequences combined with small-scale intimate character development that made that earlier series such a compelling watch. "Band of Brothers" largely avoided discussion of the larger issues raised by the war: it followed the story of a paratroop company in the last year of the war, from the Allied invasion of Normandy through various ill-fated attempts to invade Germany through the liberation of the concentration camps and the surrender of German forces. Although it portrays its characters as brave and heroic, and they were, it doesn't glamorize what being at war was about. It looks hellish. It makes occasional attempts to humanize the foot soldiers of the "enemy," but as one would expect doesn't step away from the standard narrative of what the war was about.

I'm not finding "Pacific" quite as compelling. Something about the story-telling isn't as successful. The expensively-filmed action sequences are that convincing combination of violence-voyeurism and dangerous excitement that most of us who were once little boys find irresistible; but so far the characters seem undeveloped and confusing to me. Nevermind that, of course, I'll keep watching it through. But if the traditional narrative of the WW2 and a miniseries like "Band of Brothers" is able to claim a sort of moral high ground by focusing on the forces that fought the embodiment of evil Hitler and the Nazis, fer crissakes, and touches on the liberation of the concentration camps, it seems to me that the same moral high ground is missing in a depiction of the Pacific war.

The photo above (taken by me) is from the massive Soviet war memorial at Treptow, outside Berlin. Built on the scene of Soviet triumph against the Nazis, and hosted for decades by the now obsolete satellite regime of the German Democratic Republic, the memorial glorifies the Russian military machine. Surrounding an eternal flame there are many concrete panels like the one shown, all with depictions of heroically unstoppable Soviet legions, with occasional hovering Communist icons like the floating head of Lenin shown here. The memorial is stirring to visit: and it's true that millions of Soviet citizens were killed in the Nazi onslaught; and millions heroically braved incredible hardship to push the fascist forces back and liberate eastern Europe and the Russian homeland. I'm well aware of the various historical positions on the left about this conflict: my own pacifism and anti-imperialism is certainly challenged by the nihilistic brutality of Nazism. I suppose we're let off the hook by history and what actually happened. I think it would require a certain amount of pretzel logic to suggest it didn't matter that Nazism was defeated.

But I'm left with much less certainty about the war between Japan and the various European and American colonial powers. It's true that Japan was allied with the European fascists. And it's true that in China and Korea Japan acted with brutality and a colonial mentality. But in much of South East Japan bolstered anti-colonial independence forces. In the Philippines, Indonesia, Burma, India, and other places the Japanese were throwing off American, English or Dutch rule for Japanese sponsorship of supposedly local independent governments. Japanese imperialism, as a new player on the stage that was making up for lost time with aggressive military force, but was, say, Japanese occupation of the Philippines so much worse than Spanish or American occupation of the Philippines?

I read one reviewer of "The Pacific" say that watching war movies once made him feel patriotic, causing him to entertain fantasies of running off to join the army, even now so many years later. But to me the miniseries emphasizes not the heroism of the fight, but the futility, the utter waste of human life. Here young Americans fight young Japanese on islands they had never previously heard of so that Japan could dislodge England and America as master of the East and exploiter of the region's resources. Was what Japan was doing so much worse than the self-entitlement exercised by the western colonialists? When you consider the role of Europe and America in destabilizing China in the first half of the 20th-century, it may have been less militarily brutal than Japan's attacks on China, but it was not occupying any better moral place. The righteousness of the Chinese struggle against foreign domination ultimately needed to vanquish the Western powers as well as Japan; and the fighting there was not over til the end of the forties as the war of liberation against Japan was transformed into a war of liberation against the Kuomintang.

Indeed it's hard to separate American fury against Japan from American racism. The Japanese were demonized and dehumanized in American consciousness in a way that the Germans were not. And many have speculated that experimental weapons of mass destruction, the atomic bombs, would not have been used against European civilians as readily as they were used against Japanese ones. If the destruction of Japanese militarism was ultimately a good thing for the Japanese nation, it's hard not to think it would be better still if all those Japanese who died...hadn't.

From the heyday of Soviet propaganda and socialist graphic art in the 1930s come these Russian stamps marking the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of the First World War, then just called "Great." Showing bombs falling on a city; the flight of refugees, and ranks of strong young men turned into cripples these images get at some of the stupidity and futility of that war. It was popular rejection of the vast human waste of that war that sparked the waves of social transformation that marked much of the twentieth century. Both the good changes and the bad can be laid at the feet of that war, from the revolutionaries who rid Europe of a handful of repressive monarchies to the reactionaries and revanchists who were invigorated to a new level of military adventurism. If as historians we can now look back at the Second World War and see similar transformative events, I for one can not forget about the terrible cost in human life. And I refuse to quantify the loss of American life as more tragic than the loss of Japanese life.

Are we beyond all this now? Or how many smaller-scale local but brutal wars does it take to add up to a new global conflict? In today's post-ideological world, aren't we back to the sort of mindless brutality of self-interest exemplified by the First World War? Where is the new egalitarian or pacifist consciousness that will prevent the next global conflagration? Does war porn like HBO's "Pacific" turn people into pacifists or turn them into willing cannon fodder for the next American military adventure? Perhaps the reason this TV series isn't as compelling as the previous one is that stripped of the veneer of fighting the inhuman Nazi war machine, the paroxysm of violence in the islands of the Pacific is revealed to be pointless.

There's a message in the past; we ignore it at our own risk.

Newly released photos of weapons of mass destruction

A fascinating set of photos, found on an unknown camera, has been released after a 60-year embargo on publication. They're of the aftermath of the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and unlike most published photos, show the human aftermath and not just damaged buildings. They're hard to look at, but as we contemplate Hillary Clinton's pledge to obliterate Iran they're a useful reminder that one nation--not Iran, not the old Soviet Union--has used nuclear weapons of mass destruction against civilian targets and that nation is the U.S.A.

The collection can be seen here.