https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oh-XRzQXcpA&feature
Thursday, August 13, 2020
US CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY AT HOME AND ABROAD
https://popularresistance.org/us-crimes-against-humanity-at-home-and-abroad/
By Bill Hackwell and Alicia Jrapko, Resumen English.
August 10, 2020
| EDUCATE!
Above photo: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony & Peace Message Lantern Floating Ceremony.
This month marks the second year since former President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, announced to the world a campaign promoted by a group of Latin American writers and academics to declare August 9 as International Day of US Crimes against Humanity. Appropriately the day is to remember the second nuclear bomb dropped in 1945 on Nagasaki Japan that came just 3 days after the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Imagine how depraved and cold-blooded the then-Democratic President Truman could be to find that he had incinerated 150,000 people on one day and turned right around and did it again in Nagasaki instantly killing 65,000 more human beings. US historical accounts love to turn truth on its head by saying how many lives those nuclear bombs saved when Japan was already defeated before the bombs were dropped after 67 Japanese cities had been leveled to the ground by relentless US aerial fire bombings.
The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sacrificed as an exclamation point on a proclamation to the world announcing the arrival of the US as the world’s new pre-eminent superpower. It also served as an example that the US would commit any murderous crime of any proportion to maintain that imperial position of dominance and they have demonstrated that to be true time and time again. Even now in decline, the US has never apologized for this unnecessary crime because that could convey a sign of weakness and a step back from a policy of nuclear blackmail held over the nations of the world. Obama had the chance to do that in the final year of his presidency when he had nothing to lose in a 2016 visit to Hiroshima. Instead of apologizing to the people of Japan or easing tensions in the world Obama, in eloquent fluffy double talk, said, “Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering. But we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.”
The responsibility for the majority of suffering in the world was then and continues to be, on an imperialist policy and its inherent neo-liberal engine that violently throttles the ability of countries to develop in a way that would bring health and prosperity for the benefit of their majorities. In the end it is an unsustainable system that only benefits a sliver of privileged society.
The US crimes against humanity did not begin or end with the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Japan. As militant civil rights leader Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown) pointed out years ago, “Violence is as American as cherry pie.” Since its inception, the US has been ingrained with a motor force of violent oppression against everyone and every country that stood in its way of its expansion for control of resources and its entitlement to a limitless accumulation of vast wealth for a few.
The original thirteen colonies that rebelled against England were not motivated solely by being taxed without representation but more for the restrictions that King George had placed on the unbridled greed of the white settlers to expand and steal the lands of the indigenous nations and communities and to establish a system of slavery which was the main source of capitalist accumulation, especially for the southern colonies. At the time of the revolution close to 20% of the population consisted of Black slaves. Slavery actually ran contrary to British Common Law so the only way the emerging class of landowners in the colonies could flourish was to secede from the British Empire. In doing so it established a pivotal component of the original DNA of the United States; structural racism as a means to justify any level of discrimination and oppression with a deeply embedded belief in the inferiority of any race not white and Christian. The cries of Black Lives Matter in the streets today of all the major cities and towns of the US are a resounding echo of resistance that comes from the plantations and the slave ships that came from Africa.
The genocide of indigenous people in the US was its initial crime wave against humanity as it expanded westward destined by God to exercise their Manifest Destiny. The early history of this country is littered with hundreds of massacres of the original caretakers of the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And that crime continues to this day with Native Americans suffering from the highest infection rates of Covid-19 in the country as a direct result of government neglect and broken treaties that keeps the reservations in grinding poverty including in many areas where there is not even running water.
On July 21 Congress passed a $740 billion military appropriations bill, the biggest ever and $2 billion more than last year. The United States spends more on national defense than the next 11 largest militaries combined. A well-intended but feeble attempt by sections of the Democratic Party to cut 10% of the budget to go to health and human services failed because ultimately funding the 800 US military installations that occupy territory in more than 70 countries around the world takes precedence over something so basic and human as subsidized food programs. Meanwhile approximately 20% of the families in this country are struggling to obtain nutritious food every day just as one example of the growing social and health needs.
Wars and occupations are expensive and that money goes right down the drain. It does not recycle through the economy rather it is equipment and operations meant to destroy and terrorize and the only part of it that is re used is the militarization of police forces in the US who are geared out in advanced equipment for the wars at home not even normally seen in theaters of war abroad.
When Obama took over from Bush junior he vowed to end the war in Afghanistan and instead left office with the unique distinction of having had a war going everyday of his 8 years in office. He launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan and Trump came in and did not miss a beat and has carried the war of death, destruction and destabilization of Afghanistan into its twentieth year. The Pentagon knows that the days of outright winning a war are over and relies now on hybrid wars that are perhaps even more criminal. It is now wars of attrition with proxy and contract armies, aerial bombardment, sabotage of infrastructure that turns into endless wars that’s intent is to make sure that a country is imbalanced, exhausted and does not become independent or develop and use its resources for the benefit of its own people.
This of course is not the only type of criminal warfare in the Empire’s arsenal. Economic sanctions are just as much a crime against humanity as military attacks. No one should ever forget the 10 years of the US-orchestrated UN sanctions against Iraq in the 1990’s that were responsible for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children. Primarily through executive order Trump has put some sort of sanctions on around one-third of the countries of the world ranging in severity starting with the 60-year-old unilateral blockade of Cuba for the crime of insisting on its sovereignty just 90 miles away, to the sanctioning of medicines and food to Venezuela causing the deaths of 40,000 people, the outright stealing of billions of dollars of their assets out of banks and organizing coup plots against the democratically elected President, Nicolas Maduro.
Now the chickens have come to roost with Trump sending shadowy military units of federal agents into cities like Portland, Seattle and other cities like it was a military invasion of some poor country, barging in uninvited not to bring order and peace but to brutalize, escalate and provoke people in the streets who for months now have been demanding real justice and equality. The combination of the failure of the Trump Administration to confront the pandemic with any sort of will or a national science-based plan, the existing economic crisis with its glaring separation of wealth and the endless murdering of people of color as normal police policy has exposed the system like never before. The growing consciousness of a majority of the US population that now seem to be getting that there has to be fundamental change will be the catalyst for real change to happen. It will not come from a government that does not reflect their interests but only through a unity of struggle will we be pointed in a direction that will push US crimes against humanity, at home and abroad, to become a thing of the past.
| EDUCATE!
Above photo: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony & Peace Message Lantern Floating Ceremony.
This month marks the second year since former President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, announced to the world a campaign promoted by a group of Latin American writers and academics to declare August 9 as International Day of US Crimes against Humanity. Appropriately the day is to remember the second nuclear bomb dropped in 1945 on Nagasaki Japan that came just 3 days after the first nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Imagine how depraved and cold-blooded the then-Democratic President Truman could be to find that he had incinerated 150,000 people on one day and turned right around and did it again in Nagasaki instantly killing 65,000 more human beings. US historical accounts love to turn truth on its head by saying how many lives those nuclear bombs saved when Japan was already defeated before the bombs were dropped after 67 Japanese cities had been leveled to the ground by relentless US aerial fire bombings.
The people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sacrificed as an exclamation point on a proclamation to the world announcing the arrival of the US as the world’s new pre-eminent superpower. It also served as an example that the US would commit any murderous crime of any proportion to maintain that imperial position of dominance and they have demonstrated that to be true time and time again. Even now in decline, the US has never apologized for this unnecessary crime because that could convey a sign of weakness and a step back from a policy of nuclear blackmail held over the nations of the world. Obama had the chance to do that in the final year of his presidency when he had nothing to lose in a 2016 visit to Hiroshima. Instead of apologizing to the people of Japan or easing tensions in the world Obama, in eloquent fluffy double talk, said, “Mere words cannot give voice to such suffering. But we have a shared responsibility to look directly into the eye of history and ask what we must do differently to curb such suffering again.”
The responsibility for the majority of suffering in the world was then and continues to be, on an imperialist policy and its inherent neo-liberal engine that violently throttles the ability of countries to develop in a way that would bring health and prosperity for the benefit of their majorities. In the end it is an unsustainable system that only benefits a sliver of privileged society.
The US crimes against humanity did not begin or end with the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Japan. As militant civil rights leader Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown) pointed out years ago, “Violence is as American as cherry pie.” Since its inception, the US has been ingrained with a motor force of violent oppression against everyone and every country that stood in its way of its expansion for control of resources and its entitlement to a limitless accumulation of vast wealth for a few.
The original thirteen colonies that rebelled against England were not motivated solely by being taxed without representation but more for the restrictions that King George had placed on the unbridled greed of the white settlers to expand and steal the lands of the indigenous nations and communities and to establish a system of slavery which was the main source of capitalist accumulation, especially for the southern colonies. At the time of the revolution close to 20% of the population consisted of Black slaves. Slavery actually ran contrary to British Common Law so the only way the emerging class of landowners in the colonies could flourish was to secede from the British Empire. In doing so it established a pivotal component of the original DNA of the United States; structural racism as a means to justify any level of discrimination and oppression with a deeply embedded belief in the inferiority of any race not white and Christian. The cries of Black Lives Matter in the streets today of all the major cities and towns of the US are a resounding echo of resistance that comes from the plantations and the slave ships that came from Africa.
The genocide of indigenous people in the US was its initial crime wave against humanity as it expanded westward destined by God to exercise their Manifest Destiny. The early history of this country is littered with hundreds of massacres of the original caretakers of the land from the Atlantic to the Pacific. And that crime continues to this day with Native Americans suffering from the highest infection rates of Covid-19 in the country as a direct result of government neglect and broken treaties that keeps the reservations in grinding poverty including in many areas where there is not even running water.
On July 21 Congress passed a $740 billion military appropriations bill, the biggest ever and $2 billion more than last year. The United States spends more on national defense than the next 11 largest militaries combined. A well-intended but feeble attempt by sections of the Democratic Party to cut 10% of the budget to go to health and human services failed because ultimately funding the 800 US military installations that occupy territory in more than 70 countries around the world takes precedence over something so basic and human as subsidized food programs. Meanwhile approximately 20% of the families in this country are struggling to obtain nutritious food every day just as one example of the growing social and health needs.
Wars and occupations are expensive and that money goes right down the drain. It does not recycle through the economy rather it is equipment and operations meant to destroy and terrorize and the only part of it that is re used is the militarization of police forces in the US who are geared out in advanced equipment for the wars at home not even normally seen in theaters of war abroad.
When Obama took over from Bush junior he vowed to end the war in Afghanistan and instead left office with the unique distinction of having had a war going everyday of his 8 years in office. He launched airstrikes or military raids in at least seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan and Trump came in and did not miss a beat and has carried the war of death, destruction and destabilization of Afghanistan into its twentieth year. The Pentagon knows that the days of outright winning a war are over and relies now on hybrid wars that are perhaps even more criminal. It is now wars of attrition with proxy and contract armies, aerial bombardment, sabotage of infrastructure that turns into endless wars that’s intent is to make sure that a country is imbalanced, exhausted and does not become independent or develop and use its resources for the benefit of its own people.
This of course is not the only type of criminal warfare in the Empire’s arsenal. Economic sanctions are just as much a crime against humanity as military attacks. No one should ever forget the 10 years of the US-orchestrated UN sanctions against Iraq in the 1990’s that were responsible for the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children. Primarily through executive order Trump has put some sort of sanctions on around one-third of the countries of the world ranging in severity starting with the 60-year-old unilateral blockade of Cuba for the crime of insisting on its sovereignty just 90 miles away, to the sanctioning of medicines and food to Venezuela causing the deaths of 40,000 people, the outright stealing of billions of dollars of their assets out of banks and organizing coup plots against the democratically elected President, Nicolas Maduro.
Now the chickens have come to roost with Trump sending shadowy military units of federal agents into cities like Portland, Seattle and other cities like it was a military invasion of some poor country, barging in uninvited not to bring order and peace but to brutalize, escalate and provoke people in the streets who for months now have been demanding real justice and equality. The combination of the failure of the Trump Administration to confront the pandemic with any sort of will or a national science-based plan, the existing economic crisis with its glaring separation of wealth and the endless murdering of people of color as normal police policy has exposed the system like never before. The growing consciousness of a majority of the US population that now seem to be getting that there has to be fundamental change will be the catalyst for real change to happen. It will not come from a government that does not reflect their interests but only through a unity of struggle will we be pointed in a direction that will push US crimes against humanity, at home and abroad, to become a thing of the past.
THE NEOLIBERAL VIRUS
https://popularresistance.org/the-neoliberal-virus/
By Ben Debney, Counterpunch.August 10, 2020
| EDUCATE!
To date, and to the extent that alleged political leaders have even tried to come to terms with the origins of the COVID-19 crisis at all, they have sought to do so in xenophobic terms; though not the only perpetrator on that count, Donald Trump has been most prominent in looking to characterize COVID-19 as a ‘Wuhan virus.’ Describing COVID-19 in these terms suggests that the pandemic has an ethnic origin, that it is the result of some racial deficit on the part of the Chinese that the world is now subject to the pandemic.
Suffice to say that these claims are completely unevidenced. They are also consistent with other attempts by Trump and those who slavishly follow his example to demonize groups who, for whatever reason, the trigger to their fragile megalomania—the Mexicans Trump, with no sense of shame or irony, slanders as rapists being but one example of many. As yet another incarnation of the politics of scapegoating on this count, the ‘Wuhan Virus’ line is nothing new.
On the contrary, it reflects a continuation of the kind of nativism and xenophobia that has been deployed against various victims of European colonialism for a good 400 years—not to mention more historically recent incarnations of hate propaganda, such as that directed against the Chinese during the 19th century. The particularly notorious example of the Mongolian Octopus reflects the crucial value of virulent racism to the settler-colonial project in Australia, a product of scaremongering by those with the power to engineer consent over the so-called ‘Yellow Peril.’
In the Australian case, the Chinese became a convenient punching bag for political frustrations denied more constructive outlets following the suppression of the Eureka Rebellion by police riot in 1854. Such developments reflected broader social tendencies with an ancient vintage; as one variation on the politics of scapegoating, that kind of nativism and xenophobia served as what historian Frank Van Nuys calls a ‘national safety valve’—a means of diverting class tensions onto victims suited to victimisation by virtue of their numerical marginality, and consequent inability to defend themselves.
This was true 100 years ago and it remains true to this day. What the ‘Wuhan Virus’ xenophobisms perpetrated by Donald Trump and others like him cannot account for, more than anything else is the role of neoliberal ideology in bringing the COVID-19 crisis about. Neoliberalism can be characterized, amongst other things, by a doctrinaire preoccupation with market deregulation and accompanying mythology, with all the supporting evidence of children’s fairy tales, that market mechanisms left to themselves can best guarantee social happiness and prosperity.
In reality, neoliberals fear checks on the absolute power of capital. Not making a distinction between being criticized and being attacked, and habitually conflating their own grotesque class privileges with individual freedoms, the transnational corporate capitalist class who sponsor this ideology and defend its hegemony portray regulation as threats to freedom—even as the deregulation of wet (wild animal) markets in China brings us up to 700,000 people dead globally, and millions more suffering. To this interpretation, only the freedoms of the One Percenters count; the rest belong to unpersons.
The fact of the matter is that it was neoliberal ideology, manifest in the encouragement of deregulated wet markets by the Chinese government as a means of spurring economic growth at any cost, and the deforestation that put infected animals within reach of wet marketeers, that is the root cause of the current pandemic.
The crucial difference between these facts and the ‘Wuhan Virus’ mythology, the interpretation of choice for those who benefit the most in the globalised neoliberal economy (or better yet, who are the only ones who benefit at all) is the adoption by the Chinese Communist Party of extreme free-market capitalism (which then becomes the particularly thorny question for the left of how state communist movements come to embody all they claim to oppose). Proponents of the ‘Wuhan Virus’ mythology have no more to say about this than they do the demonstrable origins of COVID-19, and their broader ideological, social and historical context.
If all of the above follows, then, it makes far more sense to characterise COVID-19 as a ‘Neoliberal Virus’; it was the conditions wrought by the global dominance of neoliberal ideology that drove the emergence of wet markets, along with the deforestation that brought infected wildlife within reach of wet marketeers, as noted. While Wuhan might have been the place where the Neoliberal Virus first appeared, it was also the social relations characteristic of neoliberalism that made that possible, and those are by no means limited to Wuhan—much less to say China.
As the ‘Wuhan Virus’ mythology demonstrates, it is no more in the nature of current socio-political arrangements to honestly and diligently address root cases of social problems in the present than in earlier stages of historical development. Then, as now, scapegoating or ‘Othering’ discourses look to manage crises in the interests of defending an ever-more unstable status quo. If the underlying instability associated with class tensions and class struggle of a century ago wrought anti-Chinese nativism at the national level, its use internationally today only serves to demonstrate how much more deeply entrenched the dynamics driving the root causes a century ago have become in the intervening period.
The inevitable result of this systematic and pervasive negligence, militant ignorance, and preferencing of the path of least resistance over the path of responsibility is that the world only becomes ever more chaotic. If the scapegoating of a century ago sought to manage social crisis in the name of, to borrow from James Madison, defending ‘the minority of the opulent from the majority, its continued use is testament to the continued value for transnational corporate imperialists of divide and conquer strategies for vassal states, populations and classes. The only innovation is in constructing environmental racisms to address the ecological crisis the moneyed elites of a century ago bequeathed to the world of today.
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