Mn-prog-events Mailing List: Progressive Calendar 02.08.08

[David Shove (shove001]

             P R O G R E S S I V E   C A L E N D A R    02.08.08

1. Palestine vigil  2.08 4:15pm
2. Ashley/play      2.08 7:30pm
3. Afghanistan/film 2.08
4. William Blum - Killing Hope: introduction to the new edition
5. ed           - bumpersticker

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From: Charles Underwood <charleyunderwood [at] hotmail.com>
Subject: Palestine vigil 2.08 4:15pm

Friday, 2/8, 4:15 to 5:30 pm, vigil to end US military/political support
of the Israeli occupation of Palestine, corner Summit and Snelling, St
Paul.


--------2 of 5--------

From: Lydia Howell <lhowell [at] visi.com>
Subject: Ashley/play 2.08 7:30pm

20% Theatre Company Twin Cities
THE COMPANY: The 20% Theatre Company Twin Cities aims to produce new and
progressive work by female, transgender, and gender-queer theatre
artists, while also supporting the same gender minorities artistically
behind-the-scenes.

The regional premiere of After Ashley by Gina Gionfriddo, Directed
by Shannon C. Harman

February 8-23, 2008, All shows 7:30pm with matinee 2/10 at 2pm
Bedlam Theatre, 1501 S 6th Street, Minneapolis
Tickets: $15; $12 students/seniors/Fringe; Call (612) 338-9817 or


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From: Charles Underwood <charleyunderwood [at] hotmail.com>
Subject: Afghanistan/film 2.08

2/8 to 2/14, documentary film "Taxi to the Dark Side" exploring the
homicide under torture at the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, by the
director of "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," Lagoon Theater, 1320
Lagoon Ave, Mpls.  http://landmarktheaters.com


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INTRODUCTION TO THE
NEW EDITION
from the book
Killing Hope
by William Blum

In 1993, I came across a review of a book about people who deny that the
Nazi Holocaust actually occurred. I wrote to the author, a university
professor, telling her that her book made me wonder whether she knew that
an American holocaust had taken place, and that the denial of it put the
denial of the Nazi one to shame. So great and deep is the denial of the
American holocaust, I said, that the denyers are not even aware that the
claimers or their claim exist. Yet, a few million people have died in the
American holocaust and many more millions have been condemned to lives of
misery and torture as a result of US interventions extending from China
and Greece in the 1940s to Afghanistan and Iraq in the 1990s. I enclosed a
listing of these interventions, which is of course the subject of the
present book.

In my letter I also offered to exchange a copy of the earlier edition of
my book for a copy of hers, but she wrote back informing me that she was
not in a position to do so.  And that was all she said. She didn't ask to
see my book. She made no comment whatsoever about the remainder of my
letter - the part dealing with denying the American holocaust - not even
to acknowledge that I had raised the matter. The irony of a scholar on the
subject of denying the Nazi Holocaust engaging in such denial about the
American holocaust was classic indeed. I was puzzled why the good
professor had bothered to respond at all.

Clearly, if my thesis could receive such a non-response from such a
person, I and my thesis faced an extremely steep uphill struggle. In the
1930s, and again after the war in the 1940s and '50s, anti-communists of
various stripes in the United States tried their best to expose the crimes
of the Soviet Union, such as the purge trials and the mass murders. But a
strange thing happened. The truth did not seem to matter. American
Communists and fellow travelers continued to support the Kremlin. Even
allowing for the exaggeration and disinformation regularly disbursed by
the anti-communists which damaged their credibility, the continued
ignorance and/or denial by the American leftists is remarkable.

At the close of the Second World War, when the victorious Allies
discovered the German concentration camps, in some cases German citizens
from nearby towns were brought to the camp to come face-to-face with the
institution, the piles of corpses, and the still-living skeletal people;
some of the respectable burghers were even forced to bury the dead. What
might be the effect upon the American psyche if the true-believers and
denyers were compelled to witness the consequences of the past
half-century of US foreign policy close up? What if all the nice,
clean-cut, wholesome American boys who dropped an infinite tonnage of
bombs, on a dozen different countries, on people they knew nothing about
- characters in a video game - had to come down to earth and look upon
and smell the burning flesh?

Our leaders understand how this works. They make it a point to keep our
American eyes away from our foreign victims as much as possible, even on
television. Before our boys were sent to Somalia, they were given
psychological briefings from military psychiatrists to prepare them for
the sights of starvation and misery. Our leaders are men not entirely
insensitive. And it is because the American people see and hear their
leaders expressing the right concern at the right time, with just the
right catch in their throats to convey "I care!", they see them laughing
and telling jokes, see them with their families, hear them speak of God
and love, of peace and law, of democracy and freedom - it is because of
such things that the idea that our government has done to the world's
huddled masses what it did to the Seminoles has so difficult a time
penetrating the American consciousness. It's like America has an evil
twin.

George Bernard Shaw used three concepts to describe the positions of
individuals in Nazi Germany: intelligence, decency, and Naziism. He argued
that if a person was intelligent, and a Nazi, he was not decent. If he was
decent and a Nazi, he was not intelligent. And if he was decent and
intelligent, he was not a Nazi.


If, as we're told, the cold war is over and the United States won, it's
proper to ask: What do we have to show for this victory? In human terms,
that is. In terms of people's lives.

The trillions of dollars spent on the American military machine instead of
on the cities, the infrastructure, housing, schools, health care, etc.,
etc., did little to improve the quality of life for the average person in
the United States, though it did wonders for the folks of the
military-industrial-intelligence complex. The M-I-I-C and their supporters
in Congress successfully fought off the menace of a "peace dividend", and
they show little sign of releasing their death grip on the society. Many
years ago they insisted upon, and they got, a permanent war economy. There
are, after all, always new enemies out there who threaten us - America,
the perpetually aggrieved innocent in a treacherous world. In 1994,
defense contractors began pitching the need for new advanced aircraft
because so many countries of the world were now equipped with advanced
fighters - sold to them by the United States - and "what if one of those
... countries turns against us?" asked the man from Lockheed.{1} When
Lockheed announced a proposed $10 billion mega-merger with fellow defense
giant Martin Marietta, it put to rest any lingering doubts about whether
"defense conversion" had a future, collapsing decisively the bull market
in high-tech plowshares.

In the same year, we learned for the first time of the almost-completed
construction of new headquarters for the super secret National
Reconnaissance Office. This espionage-mentality throwback to the 1950s dug
into taxpayers' pockets for more than $300 million, but there's a whole
planet out there to fly over and spy on, and ten thousand file cabinets,
million-megabyte hard disks, and billion-megabyte CD-ROMs waiting to be
filled with photos and maps and other vital information that hardly anyone
will ever look at, and which will do nothing for people's lives. A little
earlier, the Defense Department was not at all embarrassed to announce
that it needed funding sufficient to enable it to fight two regional wars
at the same time. In 1978 they were trying to be prepared to fight only "1
? wars at once".{2} Is this just inflation, or is Dr. Strangelove alive
and well at the Pentagon? After the "two-wars" declaration came the
completely manufactured scare about North Korean nuclear weapons. And so
it goes. Our rulers do their best to make sure that we shall never be at
peace.

Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either
on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a
threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. ... we
must account sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial
nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking to
overturn the established political and economic order. ... we must
maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even
aspiring to a larger regional or global role.

So reads the Pentagon's Planning Guidance for the Fiscal Years
1994-1999.{3} Since the United States dispatched its breathtaking killing
machine to the Persian Gulf in 1990, the American people have been treated
to this world view on a number of occasions, along with chest-beating
bragging by high-ranking military and civilian officials about the US
being the world's only superpower, and assertions like that of former
Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Armitage that "the United States
alone possesses sufficient moral, economic, political and military
horsepower to jump-start and drive international efforts to curb
international lawlessness"{4} - a manifesto, politically and poetically,
on a par with "The defense of proletarian internationalism is a sacred
duty of each communist and workers' party and of every Marxist-Leninist."

Why do Washington policy-makers trumpet their strategies, their victories,
and their power so? Is it because the demise of the communist enemy has
left the M-I-I-C thrashing about for a new mission, a new raison d'tre? At
those moments when their defense mechanisms are stilled, the more honest
among them know that they've been cut off at the knees. And for this do
they trumpet and cry: "Look! We do have a purpose! With a grand design!"
Why else does the Pentagon make it all so public? Such policy planning
used to be classified top-secret for 30 years.


The people of Utah and Nevada who lived downwind from the nuclear test
sites don't have too much to show from the cold war except clusters of
cancer; after 87 open-air tests more fallout had settled on St. George in
Utah than on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ... and the hapless islanders of
Micronesia who were terribly deceived about the H-test fallout; the
Interior Department told the people of Bikini that they could return to
their homes -- provided they ate no home-grown food until the late 21st
century ... and the soldiers who were forced to watch the tests from too
close; and the uranium miners whose lungs inhaled radon gas; and the
people who lived too close to the wrong nuclear reactors, Chernobyl in
slow motion; and the unknowing guinea pigs of all the radiation
experiments, injected with plutonium, uranium, radium, and other nice
things ... and the folks whose brains were washed with LSD, "truth
serums", and other nice things; and the people of Florida and New York and
San Francisco who were secretly dusted and sprayed and chemicalized and
biologicalized by the CIA and the Army, just to see what the (bad) effects
would be ... and always, in each case, there were men in Washington who
knew very well about the dangers of the fallout and the radiation and the
germs, but said nothing;  they knew about the accidents and the leaks, but
said nothing; they knew about it early on, at least as early as 1947: "It
is desired that no document be released which refers to experiments with
humans and might have adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal
suits. Documents covering such work field should be classified secret."
... and kindly old Ike who told the Atomic Energy Commission to keep the
public "confused" with its explanations about fallout that had caused
cancer concern in Utah ... and those that said anything were ignored, or
fired.{5}

It was all called national security. The American republic had been
replaced after World War II by a national security state, answerable to no
one, an extra-constitutional government, secret from the American people,
exempt from congressional oversight, above the law.

As to what the rest of world, primarily the Third World, derived from the
cold war, the reader is referred to the pages that follow. It is not a
pretty picture.

The end of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has meant
great tribulation for the large majority of the citizens, who had better
and more secure lives before the great blind leap into the raging cold
waters of capitalism. Perhaps the reason Americans have been so eager to
help them - sending in a small army of industrial, financial and
technical experts, and assorted cheerleaders, along with all the material
goodies - is their almost childlike desire to be like us: they rush to
copy our political system, our economic system, to wear our jeans, drink
our Pepsi, drive our cars, listen to our music, read our novels, publish
our novels, become "entrepreneurs"; they condemn communism, sing paeans to
the market, and believe sincerely that there's no option other than the
one or the other unadulterated; they confess their sins, abolish the
Warsaw Pact, and plead to join NATO and the European Union. And our media
eat it all up; we squeal with delight at each new sign of "democracy";
even the Russians making their first "horror" film is a newsworthy
occasion in the West, like our baby is taking his first steps;  our
precocious babies we call "pro-democracy", the ugly little infants who
still don't get it we call "hard-line"; we pooh-pooh our babies' setbacks,
they're only growing pains, they have to learn how to live with freedom
... and it all makes us feel like we actually won something in the cold
war; a validation of sorts. It ain't much, but it may be all there is.

At least that's how it was the first couple of years or so of reform. Now,
the thought may be slowly penetrating that our baby is not growing
normally, he's developing our worst habits, including huge gaps in wealth
and all kinds of criminal rackets he never even knew existed; at times he
even yearns for the good ol' days ...

A series of graffiti scrawled on a Warsaw building: "Bring back
communism!" "We never had communism!" "Then bring back what we had!"{6}

Is this malaise in the genes, or in the system? But there's no turning
back, we insist - they haven't privatized enough yet, the shock therapy
wasn't shocking enough.  The quality of individual lives matters little,
so long as the overall numbers and the graphs drawn up by the boys from
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Harvard and
Washington think-tanks look good. It doesn't bother a ruling elite very
much, noted Eduardo Galeano, "that politics be democratic so long as the
economy is not."

The Stalinists in the Soviet Union used to denounce international
financial organizations like the World Bank and the IMF as agencies by
which the rich imperialist nations kept the poor countries in servitude.
Now that Russia and its former fellow republics have thrown themselves on
the mercy of these institutions, the born-again capitalists may decide
that the Stalinists were right after all.


We've also been told that it was the relentlessly tough anti-communist
policies of the Reagan Administration with its heated-up arms race that
led to the collapse and reformation of the Soviet Union and its
satellites. American history books may have already begun to chisel this
thesis into marble. The Tories in Great Britain say that Margaret Thatcher
and her unflinching policies contributed to the miracle as well. The East
Germans were believers too.  When Ronald Reagan visited East Berlin, the
people there cheered him and thanked him "for his role in liberating the
East". Even some leftist analysts, particularly those of a conspiracy
bent, are believers. But this view is not universally held. Long the
leading Soviet expert on the United States, Georgi Arbatov, head of the
Moscow-based Institute for the Study of the U.S.A. and Canada, wrote his
memoirs in 1992. A Los Angeles Times book review by Robert Scheer summed
up a portion of it:

Arbatov understood all too well the failings of Soviet totalitarianism in
comparison to the economy and politics of the West. It is clear from this
candid and nuanced memoir that the movement for change had been developing
steadily inside the highest corridors of power ever since the death of
Stalin. Arbatov not only provides considerable evidence for the
controversial notion that this change would have come about without
foreign pressure, he insists that the U.S. military buildup during the
Reagan years actually impeded this development.{7}

George F. Kennan agrees. The former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, and
father of the theory of "containment" of the same country, asserts that
"the suggestion that any United States administration had the power to
influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic political
upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is simply
childish." He contends that the extreme militarization of American policy
strengthened hard-liners in the Soviet Union. "Thus the general effect of
Cold War extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that
overtook the Soviet Union."{8}

Though the arms-race spending undoubtedly damaged the fabric of the Soviet
civilian economy and society even more than it did in the United States,
this had been going on for 40 years by the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to
power without the slightest hint of impending doom. Gorbachev's close
adviser, Aleksandr Yakovlev, when asked whether the Reagan
administration's higher military spending, combined with its "Evil Empire"
rhetoric, forced the Soviet Union into a more conciliatory position,
responded:

It played no role. None. I can tell you that with the fullest
responsibility. Gorbachev and I were ready for changes in our policy
regardless of whether the American president was Reagan, or Kennedy, or
someone even more liberal. It was clear that our military spending was
enormous and we had to reduce it.{9}

Understandably, some Russians might be reluctant to admit that they were
forced to make revolutionary changes by their arch enemy, to admit that
they lost the cold war. However, on this question we don't have to rely on
the opinion of any individual, Russian or American. We merely have to look
at the historical facts.

>From the late 1940s to around the mid-1960s, it was an American policy
objective to instigate the downfall of the Soviet government as well as
several Eastern European regimes. Many hundreds of Russian exiles were
organized, trained and equipped by the CIA, then sneaked back into their
homeland to set up espionage rings, to stir up armed political struggle,
and to carry out acts of assassination and sabotage, such as derailing
trains, wrecking bridges, damaging arms factories and power plants, and so
on. The Soviet government, which captured many of these men, was of course
fully aware of who was behind all this.

Compared to this policy, that of the Reagan administration could be
categorized as one of virtual capitulation. Yet what were the fruits of
this ultra-tough anti-communist policy? Repeated serious confrontations
between the United States and the Soviet Union in Berlin, Cuba and
elsewhere, the Soviet interventions into Hungary and Czechoslovakia,
creation of the Warsaw Pact (in direct reaction to NATO), no glasnost, no
perestroika, only pervasive suspicion, cynicism and hostility on both
sides. It turned out that the Russians were human after all - they
responded to toughness with toughness. And the corollary - there was for
many years a close correlation between the amicability of US-Soviet
relations and the number of Jews allowed to emigrate from the Soviet
Union.{10} Softness produced softness.

If there's anyone to attribute the changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern
Europe to, both the beneficial ones and those questionable, it is of
course Mikhail Gorbachev and the activists he inspired. It should be
remembered that Reagan was in office for over four years before Gorbachev
came to power (and Thatcher for six years), but in that period of time
nothing of any significance in the way of Soviet reform took place despite
Reagan's unremitting malice toward the communist state.

The argument is frequently advanced that it's easy in hindsight to
disparage the American cold-war mania for a national security state, with
all its advanced paranoia and absurdities, its NATO-supra-state-military
juggernaut, its early-warning systems and air-raid drills, its nuclear
silos and U-2s, but that after the War in Europe the Soviets did indeed
appear to be a ten-foot-tall world-wide monster threat.

This argument breaks up on the rocks of a single question, which was all
one had to ask back then: Why would the Soviets want to invade Western
Europe or bomb the United States? They clearly had nothing to gain by such
actions except the almost certain destruction of their country, which they
were painstakingly rebuilding once again after the devastation of the war.

By the 1980s, the question that still dared not be asked had given birth
to a $300 billion budget and Star Wars.

There are available, in fact, numerous internal documents from the State
Department, the Defense Department, and the CIA from the postwar period,
wherein one political analyst after another makes clear his serious
skepticism of "The Soviet Threat" - revealing the Russians' critical
military weaknesses and/or questioning their alleged aggressive intentions
- while high officials, including the president, were publicly presenting
a message explicitly the opposite.{11}

Historian Roger Morris, former member of the National Security Council
under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, described this phenomenon:

Architects of U.S. policy would have to make their case "clearer than the
truth," and "bludgeon the mass mind of top government," as Secretary of
State Dean Acheson ... puts it. They do. The new Central Intelligence
Agency begins a systematic overstatement of Soviet military expenditures.
Magically, the sclerotic Soviet economy is made to hum and climb on U.S.
government charts. To Stalin's horse-drawn army - complete with shoddy
equipment, war-torn roads and spurious morale - the Pentagon adds phantom
divisions, then attributes invasion scenarios to the new forces for good
measure. U.S. officials "exaggerated Soviet capabilities and intentions to
such an extent," says a subsequent study of the archives, "that it is
surprising anyone took them seriously." Fed by somber government claims
and reverberating public fear, the U.S.  press and people have no
trouble.{12}

Nonetheless, the argument insists, the fact remains that there were many
officials in high positions who simply and sincerely misunderstood the
Soviet signals. The Soviet Union was, after all, a highly oppressive and
secretive society, particularly before Stalin died in 1953. Apropos of
this, former conservative member of the British Parliament Enoch Powell
observed in 1983:

International misunderstanding is almost wholly voluntary: it is that
contradiction in terms, intentional misunderstanding - a contradiction,
because in order to misunderstand deliberately, you must at least suspect
if not actually understand what you intend to misunderstand. ... [The US
misunderstanding of the USSR has] the function of sustaining a myth - the
myth of the United States as "the last, best hope of mankind." St. George
and the Dragon is a poor show without a real dragon, the bigger and
scalier the better, ideally with flames coming out of its mouth. The
misunderstanding of Soviet Russia has become indispensable to the
self-esteem of the American nation: he will not be regarded with
benevolence who seeks, however ineffectually, to deprive them of it.{13}

It can be argued as well that the belief of the Nazis in the great danger
posed by the "International Jewish Conspiracy" must be considered before
condemning the perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Both the Americans and the Germans believed their own propaganda, or
pretended to. If one reads Mein Kampf, one is struck by the fact that a
significant part of what Hitler wrote about Jews reads very much like an
American anti-communist writing about communists:  He starts with the
premise that the Jews (communists) are evil and want to dominate the
world; then, any behavior which appears to contradict this is regarded as
simply a ploy to fool people and further their evil ends; this behavior is
always part of a conspiracy and many people are taken in. He ascribes to
the Jews great, almost mystical, power to manipulate societies and
economies. He blames Jews for the ills arising from the industrial
revolution, e.g., class divisions and hatred. He decries the Jews'
internationalism and lack of national patriotism.

There were of course those cold warriors whose take on the Kremlin was
that its master plan for world domination was nothing so gross as an
invasion of Western Europe or dropping bombs on the United States. The
ever more subtle -- one could say fiendishly-clever -- plan was for
subversion ... from the inside ... country by country ... throughout the
Third World ... eventually surrounding and strangling the First World ...
verily an International Communist Conspiracy, "a conspiracy," said Senator
McCarthy, "on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in
the history of man."

This is the primary focus of this book: how the United States intervened
all over the world to combat this subversion by the ICC, wherever and
whenever it reared its ugly head.

Did this International Communist Conspiracy actually exist?

If it actually existed, why did the cold warriors of the CIA and other
government agencies have to go to such extraordinary lengths of
exaggeration? If they really and truly believed in the existence of a
diabolic, monolithic International Communist Conspiracy, why did they have
to invent so much about it to convince the American people, the Congress,
and the rest of the world of its evil existence? Why did they have to
stage manage, entrap, plant evidence, plant stories? The following pages
are packed with double-density double-sided anti-commiespeak examples of
US-government and media inventions about "the Soviet threat", "the Chinese
threat", and "the Cuban threat". And all the while, at the same time, we
were being flailed with scare stories: in the 1950s, there was "the Bomber
Gap" between the US and the Soviet Union.  Then came "the Missile Gap".
Followed by "the Anti-ballistic missile (ABM) Gap". In the 1980s, it was
"the Spending Gap". Finally, "the Laser Gap". And they were all lies.{14}

We now know that the CIA of Ronald Reagan and William Casey regularly
"politicized intelligence assessments" to support the anti-Soviet bias of
the administration, and suppressed reports, even those from its own
analysts, which contradicted the bias. We now know that the CIA and the
Pentagon, partly from the pressure of the conservative establishment,
regularly overestimated the economic and military strength of the Soviet
Union, and exaggerated the scale of Soviet nuclear tests and the number of
"violations" of existing test-ban treaties, which Washington then accused
the Russians of.{15} All to create a larger and meaner enemy, a bigger
M-I-I-C budget, and give security and meaning to the cold warriors' own
jobs.

Post-cold war, New-World-Order time, it looks good for the M-I-I-C and
their global partners in crime, the World Bank and the IMF. They've got
their NAFTA and their GATT World Trade Organization. They're dictating
economic, political and social development all over the Third World and
Eastern Europe. Moscow's reaction to events anywhere is no longer a
restraining consideration. The UN's Code of Conduct on Transnational
Corporations, 15 years in the making, is dead. Everything in sight is
being deregulated and privatized. Capital prowls the globe with a ravenous
freedom it hasn't enjoyed since before World War I, operating free of
friction, free of gravity. The world has been made safe for the
transnational corporation.{16}

Will this mean any better life for the multitudes than the cold war
brought? Any more regard for the common folk than there's been since they
fell off the cosmic agenda centuries ago? "By all means," says Capital,
offering another warmed-up version of the "trickle down" theory, the
principle that the poor, who must subsist on table scraps dropped by the
rich, can best be served by giving the rich bigger meals.

The boys of Capital, they also chortle in their martinis about the death
of socialism. The word has been banned from polite conversation. And they
hope that no one will notice that every socialist experiment of any
significance in the twentieth century -- without exception -- has either
been crushed, overthrown, or invaded, or corrupted, perverted, subverted,
or destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the
United States. Not one socialist government or movement -- from the
Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China
to the FMLN in Salvador -- not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on
its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against
the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home.

It's as if the Wright brothers' first experiments with flying machines all
failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And
then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon this, took
notice of the consequences, nodded their collective heads wisely, and
intoned solemnly: Man shall never fly.

Winning the cold war means never having to say you're sorry. The Germans
have apologized to the Jews and the Poles. The Russians have apologized to
the Poles as well, and to the Japanese for abuse of prisoners; the Soviet
Communist Party has even apologized for foreign policy errors that
"heightened tension with the West".{17} An East German TV newscaster
apologized to viewers for years of dishonest reporting.{18} The Japanese
have apologized to the Chinese and the Koreans; they've also apologized
for failing to break off diplomatic relations with the US before attacking
Pearl Harbor. When will the United States apologize to Japan for the
atomizing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, carried out after the Japanese were
ready to surrender?{19} When will we apologize to the Russians and the
Vietnamese, the Laotians and the Cambodians, the Chileans, the
Guatemalans, and the Salvadoreans ... see the Table of Contents herein.
And when will the FBI and CIA be brought to public account, as the Soviet
KGB and the East German Stasi have, for their domestic crimes?

NOTES

1. David Evans, "Catch F-22", In These Times (Chicago biweekly
newsmagazine), 11-24 July 1994, pp. 14-18.

2. 1 ? wars: San Francisco Chronicle, 27 January 1978; 2 wars: New York
Times, 10 December 1993, p. 1.

3. New York Times, 8 March 1992, p. 14.

4. Cited by Michael Klare in The Nation, 15 October 1990.

5. St. George: The Guardian (London), 6 March 1984; Bikini: ibid., 29
November 1983; CIA/Army: see China chapter herein; 1947: letter from Col.
O. G. Haywood, AEC, to Dr. Fidler, AEC, Oak Ridge, Tenn., 17 April 1947
(cited in Covert Action Quarterly [Washington, DC] Summer 1994, No. 49, p.
28); Ike: San Francisco Chronicle, 20 April 1979.

6. Mark F. Brzezinski (son of former national security adviser Zbigniew
Brzezinski), Los Angeles Times, 2 September 1994, op-ed column.

7. Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times Book Review, 27 September 1992, review
of Georgi Arbatov, The System: An Insider's Life in Soviet Politics (Times
Books, New York, 1992)

8. International Herald Tribune, 29 October 1992, p. 4.

9. The New Yorker, 2 November 1992, p. 6.

10. Los Angeles Times, 2 December 1988: emigration of Soviet Jews peaked
at 51,330 in 1979 and fell to about 1,000 a year in the mid-1980s during
the Reagan administration (1981-89); in 1988 it was at 16,572.

11. a) Frank Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A
Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation (St. Martin's Press, New York,
1993), passim, particularly Appendix A; the book is replete with portions
of such documents written by diplomatic, intelligence and military
analysts in the 1940s; the war scare was undertaken to push through the
administration's foreign policy program, inaugurate a huge military
buildup, and bail out the near-bankrupt aircraft industry. b) Declassified
Documents Reference System: indexes, abstracts, and documents on
microfiche, annual series, arranged by particular government agencies and
year of declassification. c) Foreign Relations of the United States
(Department of State), annual series, internal documents published about
25 to 35 years after the fact.

12. Los Angeles Times, 29 December 1991, p. M1.

13. The Guardian (London), 10 October 1983, p. 9.

14. Ruth Leger Sivard, World Military and Social Expenditures 1986 (Ann
Arbor, Mich. 1986)

15. a) Anne H. Cahn, "How We Got Oversold on Overkill", Los Angeles Times,
23 July 1993, based on testimony before Congress, 10 June 1993, of Eleanor
Chelimsky, Assistant Comptroller-General of the General Accounting Office,
about a GAO study. b) Los Angeles Times, 15 September 1991, p. 1; 26
October 1991. c) The Guardian (London), 4 March 1983; 20 January 1984; 3
April 1986. d) Arthur Macy Cox, "Why the U.S., Since 1977, Has Been
Misperceiving Soviet Military Strength", New York Times, 20 October 1980,
p. 19; Cox was formerly an official with the State Department and the CIA.

16. For further discussion of these points, see: a) Walden Bello, Dark
Victory: The United States, Structural Adjustment and Global Poverty
(Institute for Food and Development Policy, Oakland, CA, 1994), passim. b)
Multinational Monitor (Washington), July/August 1994, special issue on The
World Bank. c) Doug Henwood, "The U.S. Economy: The Enemy Within", Covert
Action Quarterly (Washington, DC), Summer 1992, No. 41, pp. 45-9. d) Joel
Bleifuss, "The Death of Nations", In These Times (Chicago) 27 June - 10
July 1994, p. 12 (UN Code).

17. Los Angeles Times, 26 June 1988, p. 8.

18. Newsbroadcast on American radio, 3 November 1989.

19. During the spring and summer of 1945, the Japanese made it very clear
through third parties and through internal messages that they were ready
to surrender. But the United States, which had broken the Japanese code
and thus was fully aware of these communications, did not respond. The
only condition specified by the Japanese was the retention of the emperor
system, and, as matters eventually turned out, the emperor system was
maintained anyway. See: Stewart Udall, The Myths of August (Pantheon
Books, NY, 1994), chapters 4 and 5; Hearings Before the Committee on Armed
Services and the Committee on Foreign Relations, US Senate, 25 June 1951,
pp. 3113-4, re the Japanese offer in July via the Soviet Union; New York
Times, 11 August 1993, p. 9

Taken from Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World
War II; by William Blum email:bblum6 [at] aol.com


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