[Peace-discuss] Invitation to record AWARE ON THE AIR, noon Tuesday 12 August, at UPTV

[C. G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss]

Members and friends of AWARE are invited to sit in and participate (if you wish) in this week's recording of "AWARE on the Air" on Urbana Public Television.

We record the program on Tuesdays from noon to 1pm in the Urbana City Council Chambers, 400 S. Vine Street, Urbana.  

The program is unrehearsed, but here is the introduction planned for this week:

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Good evening & welcome to AWARE ON THE AIR. I’m Carl Estabrook.  

Our program is presented by members & friends of AWARE, the Anti-War Anti-Racism Effort of Champaign-Urbana, a local peace group, in the 33rd week of 2014. AWARE was formed a dozen years ago to oppose the wars conducted by the Bush and Obama administrations. 

Since the world wars of the last century, war has been the principal instrument of US foreign policy. Martin Luther King said almost 50 years ago that “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” was our “own government” - and that is still the case. In that 50 years, the American executive branch leaders have killed, wounded and made homeless well over 20 million human beings, mostly civilians.

This past week saw the anniversaries of the American atomic bomb attacks on Japan in 1945. At the Nuremberg and Tokyo Tribunals after the war, the victors condemned to death by hanging German and Japanese leaders who committed “the supreme international crime [i.e., worse than terrorism] - launching aggressive war."

The representative of India at the Tokyo Tribunal, Radhabinod Pal, said in his carefully argued (and largely ignored) dissenting opinion,

“[At the outset of the First World War, the German Kaiser wrote] ‘My soul is torn, but everything must be put to fire and sword; men, women and children and old men must be slaughtered and not a tree or house be left standing. With these methods of terrorism, which are alone capable of affecting a people as degenerate as the French, the war will be over in two months, whereas if I admit considerations of humanity it will be prolonged for years. In spite of my repugnance I have therefore been obliged to choose the former system.’ 

“[The Indian jurist continued, in 1945,] in the Pacific war under our consideration, if there was anything approaching what is indicated in the above letter of the German Emperor, it is the decision coming from the allied powers to use the atom bomb ... if any indiscriminate destruction of civilian life and property is still illegitimate in warfare, then, in the Pacific war, this decision to use the atom bomb is the only near approach to the directives of the German Emperor during the first World War and of the Nazi leaders during the second World War...”

It has been rightly said that if the standards of the Nuremberg Trials were applied, then every post-World War II American president would have been hanged as a war criminal, beginning with Truman, for the atom bombing of a prostrate Japan.

As for Eisenhower, whatever you think about the Korean War, and there is a pretty complicated story when you really look at it, the bombings in North Korea in 1951 and 1952 were outright war crimes. You can read in the Air Force history about how in the Eisenhower years they had nothing left to bomb, everything was flat, so they just bombed dams: they exult over how wonderful it was to see the water flooding down and killing people and wiping out the crops and so on. People were hanged for that, for less than that - they were hanged for opening dikes in Nuremberg. And then again we can proceed with what happened in Guatemala, Iran and elsewhere during the Eisenhower years.

Kennedy is not even worth discussing. The invasion of South Vietnam: Kennedy attacked South Vietnam, outright. In 1961-1962 he sent the US Air Force to bomb villages, and authorized napalm. He also laid the basis for the huge wave of repression that spread over Latin America with the installation of Neo-Nazi gangsters that were always supported directly by the United States. That went on and in fact picked up under Johnson.

In the Nixon years, for example, the bombing of inner Cambodia in 1973 was a monstrous crime. It was just massacring peasants in inner Cambodia. It isn't much reported here because nobody paid attention, but it was quite a part in helping create the basis for the Khmer Rouge. The CIA estimate is that 600,000 people were killed in the course of those US actions, either directed or actually carried out by the United States.

In the Carter years there were major crimes, for example the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, which happened to start under Ford and led to the nearest thing to genocide since the holocaust, maybe 1/3 or 1/4 of the population has been slaughtered. That was using 90% US arms. In the Carter years, when the Indonesians were actually running out of arms in their attack on this country, Carter actually increased the flow of arms in 1978, which was the worst peak of the slaughter. And Carter was backing Somoza and his national guard in Nicaragua, openly and with direct military and diplomatic support at a time when they had killed about 40,000 people in the terror of the last days of their regime. Again, that's a sample.

Going on to the Reagan years, its not even a question. In fact the US was condemned by the World Court during the Reagan years for its "unlawful use of force," meaning aggression in Nicaragua. In Central America alone, maybe 200,000 people or so were slaughtered in a very brutal fashion by US run programs. In southern Africa about 1.5 million people were killed and over $60 billion of damage were done according to the UN commission which reviewed it later from 1980 to 1988. That's from South African atrocities that the US was directly supporting. 

Bush I, the invasion of Panama for example was simply outright aggression. It was condemned internationally -- the US was able to veto the security counsel condemnations, but that doesn't change the fact that they were there.

When we move on to the Clinton years, one of his first acts within a few months was to send missiles to bomb Baghdad. He only killed about 8 people. But the pretext was so ludicrous, it's embarrassing to repeat it. The pretext was that this was self defense against armed attack, because two months earlier there had been a failed attempt by someone who might or might not have been Iraqi, no one knew at the time, to kill Bush I ... About half of military aid and training to Latin America under Clinton was going to Colombia, which has absolutely the worst human rights record in the hemisphere, killing thousands of people in a horrifying fashion. These are all crimes before his attack on Serbia, backed by outright lies that it was a humanitarian operation. I don't think it's hard to set up a bill of indictment...

And we’ve discussed frequently on this program the continuity of the Bush II and Obama administrations with what went before, in spite of the fact that Americans keep voting against foreign wars. The Congress however working for the One percent who profit form US economic hegemony in the world - while the rest of us pay for it - refuses to stop presidents from a policy of continual war crimes.  

We’ll consider some aspects of the current situation tonight with reports and comments from...

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