August 6, 1945, 8:15 A.M.

No US Intervention in Syria!

Postcard from North Vietnam, ca. late 1960s

Predictably, and just in time to attempt to redirect national discussion away from all those pesky leaks about government spying, President Obama has announced that in light of his determination that the Syrian government used chemical weapons "against their own people," the U.S. would commence openly arming the opposition Free Syrian Army. Disappointingly for those of us who love a good hack job, no proof of the alleged WMD use was offered, which means no embarrassing pictures were taken of government officials posing in front of hastily doctored and captioned photos. Who says the US government has learned nothing from its mistakes? Anyway, as of this writing there's some dispute about whether the misleadingly-named no-fly zone will be applied to Syrian airspace, since what that actually means is that presumably NATO airforces would have to bomb the crap out of Syria to enforce the grounding of Syrian jets.

I offer up this lovely postcard from Southeast Asia in the 1960s with its brilliantly mocking original caption as a model for what I believe should happen to any US or NATO military airplanes crowding Syrian airspace. Pay attention: the more powerful nation doesn't always win.

The day will come when the Syrian people will kick out brutal rulers like the Assads on their own. But meanwhile, the agenda for those of us in the United States who oppose imperialism is now clear: we must unite to stop US intervention. All you liberals and alleged progressives who united to oppose Bush's attack on Iraq, now is the time to realize that Barack Obama is just as much an enemy of peace and justice as Bush was. It's time to act.

U.S./NATO Hands Off Syria!

Without Comment: Peace Prize

Found on facebook.

Boom! U.S. Fails In Attempt To Legitimize Child-Murdering Weapons

Anybody who has read anything about war in the last fifty years knows something about cluster bombs. They're large bombs containing hundreds of smaller bomblets: the large bomb is dropped and spreads its payload over a wide area, expanding the death-dealing capacity of airborne munitions. The bomblets can kill hundreds of human beings in a wider area than a single powerful explosive. Plus, the bomblets either don't always or are designed not to go off upon impact, but lie around waiting to explode and kill some unfortunate who stumbles upon them or picks them up. As you can imagine, said unfortunates are often children who live in an area and come out to play after a battle has moved on. Some countries have been accused of designing the bomblets in bright and shiny ways meant to actually attract children to them. The Soviet Union was heavily condemned for using them in Afghanistan as was Israel for using them in Lebanon. Cluster bombs are the deadly child-murdering gift that keeps on giving.

And so I read an article on the BBC that seemed confusing at first until I really read it. Then it becomes outrageous. It was titled "UN rejects US-backed cluster bombs regulation bid", and at first glance you would think it's the story of the nasty United Nations failing to endorse a brave American attempt to limit the use of cluster bombs: "UN member states have rejected a US-backed plan to introduce new regulations on cluster bombs - munitions which break up into hundreds of smaller bomblets. The plan would have eliminated all cluster munitions made before 1980. ... The US said that it was "deeply disappointed" by the decision..." But if that's what you thought was happening you would be wrong, dead wrong.

Because it turns out this American resolution is an age-old sleight of hand trick: by feigning moral outrage over older cluster bombs, it legitimizes the modern production of these fiendish weapons. The resolution was meant not to eliminate cluster bombs, but to undercut the Oslo Convention, signed by 111 nations, that actually prohibits the production, distribution and use of cluster bombs. Guess what countries have not signed the Oslo Convention? Here's a few: China. Russia. Belarus. Israel.... and the United States of America.

Yes, read on: "'The protocol would have led to the immediate prohibition of many millions of cluster munitions [and] placed the remaining cluster munitions under a detailed set of restrictions and regulations,' the US embassy in Geneva said in a statement.... A senior US official said the bombs were a military necessity for when targets were spread over wide areas, and that using alternative armaments would cause more collateral damage and prolong conflicts."

The world has seen through this transparent hypocrisy. The article continues: "though the proposal would have eliminated millions of ageing cluster munitions, even military allies of the US, like Britain, chose not to support it. Many UN member states felt, she says, that getting rid of some cluster weapons while officially sanctioning others would set a dangerous precedent, and might even legitimise their use in the long-term. The US move was also opposed by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the top UN officials for human rights, emergency relief and development."

Thank you Ambassador Susan Rice via Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for your strong moral stand in favor of murdering innocent children. Oh yes, did I forget to mention? The U.S. is the largest manufacturer of cluster bombs in the world.

In not unrelated news, Egyptian dock workers are protesting the shipment of tear gas shipments being unloaded in the port of Suez. The tear gas is destined for the military government's repression of demonstrations of Tahrir Square. Oh yes, where is this tear gas coming from? That would be its point of manufacture at Combined Systems Inc. in Jamestown, Pennsylvania, U.S.A. Among CSI's other leading clients are the Israeli Defense Forces.

Notice any patterns?

Those with strong stomachs may click here for a google search which shows the diversity of cluster bombs and the cold reality of what children look like after they have been murdered or maimed by them.

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.

A Love Letter to Ronald Reagan: Butcher, Murderer, Criminal. Not Dead Enough.

Dear Ronald Reagan:

Tomorrow is your 100th birthday. You know, we thought, back when you were alive, when you were the president, we wouldn't survive you. In fact many of my friends did not actually survive you; and I miss them. I don't miss you. It was a terrible time, those Reagan years, no matter what they pretend now. No, we are not nostalgic for that time. It was a dark time, a painful time, an awful time knowing someone so genuinely evil had so much power.

I remember your disdain for us. In April 1987, you said: "Let's be honest with ourselves, AIDS information can not be what some call 'value neutral.' After all, when it comes to preventing AIDS, don't medicine and morality teach the same lessons." We knew what you meant. You meant we deserved to die. You couldn't even bring yourself to say the word gay in polite conversation. That health crisis you were being so smugly self-righteous about happened on your watch and you did.... nothing.

Some people thought it was funny when you joked about starting a world war. "We begin bombing in five minutes," you said. Your lackeys laughed. I remember the chill down my spine. How dare you joke about obliterating millions of people when your finger is actually on the button.

Ronnie, you were a big fucking fake. You were a terrible actor in bad movies when you worked in Hollywood, and you were a terrible actor in a bad nightmare when you were picked by the military industrial complex to work in Washington. It comes as no surprise to me that your son -- remember him, the GAY one? -- he said you showed signs of senility and dementia in the late 1980s. Trust me, he was being kind. You showed those signs in the early 1980s. But somehow they wanted to believe you so badly, those people who voted for you. They hoped you were a kindly old grampa, miraculously adding one plus one and coming up with three.

I remember the way you tilted your head, the way you laughed at your own jokes, your honed sense of Hollywood timing. Your smugness. Oh I give you credit for remember a few actor's tricks.

A lot of people were burned out by the 1970s, seeing the scabs picked off the open wound that was America. When you lied and said you would make it all better people ate that shit up. All you had to do was keep lying. Oh yes, we remember the lie of "trickle down economics." We remember who got rich. We're still paying for that now.

We remember what you did to the people of Nicaragua. Of Guatemala. Of El Salvador. Of Grenada. Of Libya. We remember who you tried to kill. Who you actually killed. We remember who your friends were. We remember that you thought Nelson Mandela belonged in jail and that you thought apartheid made South Africa a great American ally. We remember how much you loved Ferdinand Marcos. We remember that you gave money to a nascent Islamist movement so it could fight communism for you....no that could never come back to bite the U.S. in the ass, could it? We remember your double dealing, your criminal cronies like Oliver North.

I survived you. I remembering hearing Maya Angelou's poem at Bill Clinton's inaugural in 1993 after 8 years of your rule and 4 more of your CIA crony George Bush the elder. I cried today rereading this poem, like I cried when I heard it the first time, the catharsis of knowing your nightmare was over. She spoke for all of us back in 1993:

"A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon.

The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,
But seek no haven in my shadow.

I will give you no more hiding place down here.

You, created only a little lower than
The angels, have crouched too long in
The bruising darkness,
Have lain too long
Face down in ignorance.

Your mouths spilling words
Armed for slaughter.

The Rock cries out today, you may stand on me,
But do not hide your face.

Across the wall of the world,
A River sings a beautiful song,
Come rest here by my side.

Each of you a bordered country,
Delicate and strangely made proud,
Yet thrusting perpetually under siege.

Your armed struggles for profit
Have left collars of waste upon
My shore, currents of debris upon my breast.

Yet, today I call you to my riverside,
If you will study war no more. Come,

Clad in peace and I will sing the songs
The Creator gave to me when I and the
Tree and the stone were one.

Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your
Brow and when you yet knew you still
Knew nothing.

The River sings and sings on.

There is a true yearning to respond to
The singing River and the wise Rock.

So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew
The African and Native American, the Sioux,
The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek
The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh,
The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher,
The privileged, the homeless, the Teacher.
They hear. They all hear
The speaking of the Tree.

Today, the first and last of every Tree
Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the River.

Plant yourself beside me, here beside the River.

Each of you, descendant of some passed
On traveller, has been paid for.

You, who gave me my first name, you
Pawnee, Apache and Seneca, you
Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then
Forced on bloody feet, left me to the employment of
Other seekers--desperate for gain,
Starving for gold.

You, the Turk, the Swede, the German, the Scot ...
You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, bought
Sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare
Praying for a dream.

Here, root yourselves beside me.

I am the Tree planted by the River,
Which will not be moved.

I, the Rock, I the River, I the Tree
I am yours--your Passages have been paid.

Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need
For this bright morning dawning for you.

History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, and if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.

Lift up your eyes upon
The day breaking for you.

Give birth again
To the dream.

Women, children, men,
Take it into the palms of your hands.

Mold it into the shape of your most
Private need. Sculpt it into
The image of your most public self.
Lift up your hearts
Each new hour holds new chances
For new beginnings.

Do not be wedded forever
To fear, yoked eternally
To brutishness.

The horizon leans forward,
Offering you space to place new steps of change.
Here, on the pulse of this fine day
You may have the courage
To look up and out upon me, the
Rock, the River, the Tree, your country.

No less to Midas than the mendicant.

No less to you now than the mastodon then.

Here on the pulse of this new day
You may have the grace to look up and out
And into your sister's eyes, into
Your brother's face, your country
And say simply
Very simply
With hope
Good morning."

Fuck you Ronald Reagan. Stay dead. Liar. Monster. Burn in hell.

Love,

A Survivor

(Top graphic is a legendary poster from the AIDS activist organization ACT-UP. Maya Angelou's poem is called "On The Pulse of Morning," and seems to be generally reprinted in full on the net but of course it's her copyright.)

Bang Bang

Thoroughly a creature of cities, and a child of polite middle-class intellectuals, I was not raised around guns. The only time I saw them in real life was in the holsters of cops. I didn't grow up around hunters, in a military family, around criminals, or around people excessively paranoid around criminals. I was raised by pacifists, and was taught that there was something profoundly unnecessary about having a relationship with guns. And I grew up in the years of the Vietnam War, of police massacres of Black Panthers, of Kent and Jackson State, of assassins: The people with the guns were the bad guys.

I've had three personal encounters with guns.

When I was a young leftist, a number of left-wing activists and members of a rival left-wing sect were shot down -- murdered -- at a rally in cold blood by armed Klansmen in Greensboro, North Carolina. The group I was with made a point of protesting KKK and Neo-nazi rallies in the Chicago area and around the midwest, and at the time there were a lot of these. So we were a bit terrified: it could have been us. It was decided not that we should arm ourselves, or start carrying weapons around with us, but that we should at least know how to shoot a gun. We all went to a shooting range to get a lesson in how to do it. I guess we thought this was some kind of protection, some kind of power. A couple of my comrades were familiar with guns and they showed us what to do. I will never forget how all of a sudden what had been abstract to me felt in my hand: surprisingly heavy, much more substantial than a staple gun. And jesus if you pointed it the wrong way you could kill somebody or yourself. I don't remember if I was a good shot -- I doubt it -- but I remember feeling like I had my hand around a powerful writhing serpent struggling to get away from me. And it was loud. It wasn't very much fun, and I didn't want to do it again.

Flash forward a few years and I had moved to New York City. I was riding an empty subway late at night with a friend when a guy came up to us with what appeared to be a gun draped in a handtowel. He pointed it at us and mumbled something. We were, for a flash, terrified, until the "gun" started to droop beneath its cloth. It wasn't a gun at all but a length of rubber tubing. The three of us watching this happen were silent for a moment when me and my friend laughed disdainfully and our would-be assailant slunk sheepishly away. He had no power and we had no fear.

In the late 1980s I lived in a neighborhood in Brooklyn that went from being quietly residential to being violently stricken by crack. One night I went to my local Chinese takeout place to get a late dinner. I placed my order through a roughly-cut hole in a thick plastic partitition and sat in the untidy waiting area. There was this complex little arrangement where the food would be placed on a turntable with an inner door closed and an outer one opened. It was creepy; but the owner of the place had been badly beaten up in a robbery a couple years before. Two teenage kids were also waiting for their order. They were playing around with each other loudly, but like buddies do, and certainly without anger. One was waving around a 5-dollar bill. His friend jokingly snatched the bill out of his hand. At which point the other guy reached into his coat and pulled out a pistol and pointed it at his friend. No longer joking. He was going to kill his best friend for playing a little joke. While I was watching. While the Chinese family behind the partition was watching. I didn't wait for my food. And I left that neighborhood within a couple months.

Which brings us to the "Tucson Massacre" and the shooting of Rep. Giffords by Jared Loughner.



There's a really creepy video that went up this morning in which Sarah Palin calls herself a victim of "liberal blood libel" for the insinuation that teabagger rhetoric -- her rhetoric -- was in some way to blame for the shooting. Hilariously she suggests that people should be held to their words: "Each individual is accountable for his actions." Her narcissism and denial and manipulative opportunism is in full display. It's extraordinary. And frankly, frightening.

It's true that we don't (yet?) really know exactly what was going on this latest political murderer's probably deranged head. We know that he owned and used a handgun and thought it would be okay to go out and kill a bunch of people. We also know the culture around him: the culture of the state of Arizona, of much of white America, of people who love conspiracy theories, of people who want to own guns, of people who grow up loving guns.

I have acquaintances -- not apparently crazy nor rightwingers -- who claim to love and enjoy guns. But I don't love guns. I don't want to own one, for hunting, for supposed protection, or for anything else. And frankly I don't entirely trust people who do love guns. I certainly don't like or trust Sarah Palin. And if her crosshairs campaign poster was in such good taste, so far removed from the actual shooting that came to take place, why was it so completely scrubbed from her website?

Everything about Sarah Palin's world of patriotic posing, of fake reverence, of faux down-home just folksiness disgusts me. As her relationship to guns disgusts me. As her offensive posture in the wake of the Tucson shootings disgusts me.

But if only it stayed that simple. The world, whether we like it or not, is indeed at times a violent and terrible place. For all the guns in the hands of the wrong people, it must be said that sometimes the good guys having guns has ended very very well. The heroic people of Vietnam whose propaganda art I have featured here for much of the past year learned to love guns. Those guns gave them liberation.

For all the moral beauty of the teachings and commitments of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Mahatma Gandhi and Tich Nhat Hanh, we seem as a species to lack the necessary patience for the doctrine of nonviolence to win out over the armies of evil men armed to the teeth. And how sad that the attempts by King and Gandhi to write nonviolence on a large canvas were cut short not by the forces of evil empire but by small men alone with their guns.



And as we ponder guns, it's hard, ultimately, knowing about the terrible war machines slumbering in bunkers and silos and occasionally unleashed upon sleeping innocents to think that the biggest problem in the world today are laws allowing an occasional crazy person to buy a handgun and start killing people. I don't want to be the innocent bystander visiting a shopping mall in Arizona -- or a Chinese takeout joint in Brooklyn -- to pay the price for somebody's combined antisocial behavior and gun ownership. I don't want to pay the price for Sarah Palin's irresponsibility, for the rhetoric of the teabaggers. But I'm not sure where the small actions of living our lives and trying to escape being shot for whatever reason fits into that large canvas.

And here's the ugliest reality: President Obama who gave a moving speech in Tucson this evening touching on cosmic themes like love and innocence; this thoughtful intelligent man preaching respect has his finger on the button and has ordered his armies to steal the lives of many more innocent people on the other side of the world than the six who lost their lives last weekend. It's cold comfort that his intelligence and professed compassion is a blessing compared to what Sarah Palin might do with her fingers on that same button, her orders going out to the brute force of gun lovers that is the U.S. war machine. It makes me sad that Obama, who I often like, especially when he gives a speech like tonight's, is in some scary way closer to the world that Sarah Palin lives in than the one I want to live in. I don't want to be the innocent victim -- or not-so-innocent enabler -- of a rain of missiles or predatory drones or attack helicopters sent by President Obama, who I voted for, or by Sarah Palin who I dread.

I can't condemn the people in this world who have used weapons, violence, to free themselves from oppression and tyranny. But I can't help feeling that we are deluding ourselves to focus on the weapons of deranged individuals and not on our failure to notice something systemic and foundational about our allegedly free society. Hint: America is not the innocent bystander.

Anti-American Art: When Wars Were Cold

Here's a cold-war era Soviet cartoon, I'm guessing ca. 1960. That's a giant Soviet Warrior wielding an enormous nuclear missile and a massive shield labelled "Warsaw Pact." Funny that he's supposed to look modern and menacing when he's decked out like a medieval knight and his hat is a cross between a Russian knight's helm and an early Red Army cloth hat. Anyway he's facing down a pint-sized chubby American with a puny little nuclear missile, riding a funny mule/missile headed hybrid labelled "NATO." Six years of Russian study and I don't remember what "Nadezhny Strazh" means, there on the bottom.

Somehow the world survived that nightmarish confrontation without nukes actually being used after the opening shot laid across the Soviet Union's bow by the United States in 1945. (You know, by the "good guys.")

See, there IS a God.

Anti-American Art: Beyond Thunderdome

Here's the cover of an early 1970s Chinese Cultural Revolution booklet calling for preventive measures against imperialist weapons of mass destruction: it urges preparation for chemical, biological and nuclear attack. The booklet itself contains all sorts of instructions for building bomb shelters and carrying on the struggle. While the title doesn't mention the U.S. by name, little doubt is left as to who might be pointing these WMDs at the People's Republic. While the central motif features the typical resolute trio of resistance, waving AK47s and the quotations of Chairman Mao aloft, the background is darkly hilarious. Like some kind of post-apocalyptic revolutionary tableaux the typically diverse crowd massing under the red flags is now clad in a combination of haz-mat suits and surgical masks. One wonders how they would operate their AKs with their toxin-proof mittens. China itself has had nuclear weapons since 1964.

Anti-American Art: UN Dismembership

This stamp was issued by the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1983. It shows a sword with the icon of the Islamic Republic dismembering a hand labelled "Veto" emerging from the United Nations building in New York. Each finger of the clawed hand is named with a country on the Security Council: UK, USA, USSR, France and China. Iran was then defending itself against an invasion by Saddam Hussein's Iraq in a conflict that took hundreds of thousands of lives.

I was unable to figure out which security council veto of which UN resolution this stamp is protesting; the UN security council passed several resolutions urging cessation of hostilities. But I did discover that all the security council nations were involved in arming Iraq, including the United States under President Reagan. It might come as a surprise to anyone naive enough to actually believe the U.S. was twenty years later attacking Iraq for suspected WMD, but the U.S. vetoed numerous resolutions attempting to curb development and use of chemical and nuclear weapons. (The US also vetoed a resolution in 1981 that "Affirms the right of every state to choose its economic and social system in accord with the will of its people, without outside interference in whatever form it takes." Ouch!)

Anti-American Art: Masters of War

This incredibly difficult to look at image is actually another stamp from a series issued by Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 2001 to protest the lingering effects of the use of depleted uraniam (DU) weapons during the gulf war. The caption reads "DU Bombing crime against Iraqi people" and shows a horribly deformed child with bombs labelled "UK" and "USA." There's a website that documents the extreme birth deformities caused by DU in Iraq, it's here. Depleted Uranium is used by weapons manufacturers because it is incredibly hard; used in shells it increases their destuctive ability. Like the monsters who develop and use cluster bombs shaped like toys (I'm looking at you, USA and Israel), the masters of war who use DU in their armaments don't seem to worry about the longterm genetic damage caused by exposure to DU dust released by its military use.

As Bob Dylan sang way back in 1963,

Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin’
But build to destroy
You play with my world
Like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand
And you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther
When the fast bullets fly

...

Let me ask you one question
Is your money that good
Will it buy you forgiveness
Do you think that it could
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul

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

Anti-American Art: Holy Crap It's Coming This Way

"We will sweep away the US from the globe" reads this modern poster from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea showing a nuclear missile making a beeline for the star-spangled-banned coated US of A. Gone from this poster are the righteous Koreans workers and soldiers: this one is a pure military revenge fantasy. I'm pretty sure -- and pretty happy -- that North Korea's advancements in nuclear weapons technology don't include the successful development of the kind of offensive intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) that would make this kind of attack a reality. That said, the DPRK is a tiny impoverished country being totally bullied by the U.S.; ringed by Japan, China, Russia and South Korea that's a pretty tough neighborhood and North Korea oughtta be allowed to invest in self-defense. It oughtta provide food, electricity, and information to its citizens also but that's another story.

Don't Forget This Axis of Evil: USA, Israel & Apartheid South Africa

This is an interview from the RT network with Sasha Polakow-Suransky of the Council on Foreign Relations discussing his revelation that Israel tried to sell nuclear weapons to the white racist apartheid regime of South Africa in 1975. Polakow-Suransky details the relationship that began under the Peres-Rabin Labor government in Israel and deepened during the subsequent Likud government. His information is detailed and fairly nuanced; he does not suggest that in the end South Africa purchased the nukes. Of course Israel is denying these reports.

But something needs to be said that seems forgotten these days. At the height of apartheid in the 1970s and 1980s, South Africa had two main allies and defenders, and they were the State of Israel...and the United States of America.

I found this 1986 column from Carl Rowan: "The more President Reagan talks about South Africa, the clearer it becomes that his heart and mind are with the white minority that is holding power through brutal oppressions. During his Tuesday press conference in Chicago, it became obvious that Mr. Reagan could not have been a blinder ally of the Afrikaners if he had been a puppet with Pretoria's President Pier Botha pulling the strings. There was Both Tuesday afternoon telling the congress of his ruling National Party that communism is at the root of all the evils and woes of South Africa. Then came Mr. Reagan that same evening asserting that the Communist Party of South Africa 'joined with and just moved into, the African National Congress...And right now...the ones we're hearing from and that are making the statements, are the members of the African Communist Party." President Reagan tried to veto sanctions against apartheid South Africa; basically called Nelson Mandela a terrorist, and spent millions backing South Africa's proxy wars against Cuban/Soviet backed governments in Mozambique and Angola. Meanwhile South Africa became the star client of Israel's armaments industry, purchasing billions of dollars worth of hightech weapons and fighter jets. In return South Africa supplied uranium to Israel's nuclear power plant.

The United States sacrificed the black majority in South Africa to its cold-war strategy. Ironic, of course, since apartheid was US-style Jim Crow segregationism taken to dramatic new levels. All the separation laws of the American south and its defacto deprivation of rights for black people were made government policy in South Africa. It was racial separation writ large and legal. Eventually the South African regime set up puppet black microstates in tribal areas as showcases of plausible deniability that everything they did was motivated by racism. The truth is that the spirit of Apartheid is kept alive today in one place and that place is Israel. The Arabs in the so-called occupied territories are subject to separation and deprivation of rights...and once again, despite its occasional protestations, the main backer of the new apartheid regime is the USA.

Anti-American Art: Forget Darfur, Remember Vietnam

Set of stamps issued by Cuba in 1966 to note "US Genocide in Vietnam." The depiction of bombs falling, gas warfare, and poisoned water buffalos are brilliant miniature examples of mid-1960s Cuban graphic art. The flag of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (the Vietcong) makes up the background to each horrifying vignette.

Stop U.S. Threats Against Iran, redux

I've said this before, and I am saddened to have to say it again: Nuclear weapons are evil. So are warplanes, machine guns, artillery, missiles, grenade launchers, mines. But as long as Israel and the United States have nuclear weapons pointed against Iran, as long as American naval and air forces encircle that country, as long as American politicians (yesterday it was Bush and Condi Rice, today it is Obama and Hillary Clinton) threaten Iran, Iran has as much a right to these machines of war as the U.S. does.

I don't like the Iranian government; the Islamic Revolution hijacked and derailed the real revolution against the Shah back in 1979. But dealing with the Iranian government is the work of the Iranian people. I don't like nuclear power, either; but until irrational capitalism with its profit motive gives way to more rational systems that can explore safer technologies like solar power, Iran has as much right to nuclear power as anyone else.

The saber ratting against Iran needs to stop. And the media need to be reminded that it's not Iran starting a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, it's Iran responding defensively to the one that the Israelis have long already begun.

Anti-American Art: Higher Math

Another modern North Korean poster: Uncle Sam's decidely effeminate hand whips out the tools of mass destruction, measuring how, exactly, to target Korea with a giant bomb labelled "USA."